{"id":21876,"date":"2026-04-27T16:31:13","date_gmt":"2026-04-27T16:31:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/2026\/04\/27\/the-missing-step-between-hype-and-profit\/"},"modified":"2026-04-27T16:31:13","modified_gmt":"2026-04-27T16:31:13","slug":"the-missing-step-between-hype-and-profit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/2026\/04\/27\/the-missing-step-between-hype-and-profit\/","title":{"rendered":"The missing step between hype and profit"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first,\u00a0<\/em>sign up here<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

In February, I picked up a flyer at an anti-AI march in London<\/a>. I can\u2019t say for sure whether or not its writers meant to riff on South Park\u2019s underpants gnomes. But if they did, they nailed it: \u201cStep 1: Grow a digital super mind,\u201d it read. \u201cStep 2: ? Step 3: ?\u201d<\/p>\n

Produced by Pause AI, an international activist group that co-organized the protest, it ended with this plea to the reader: \u201cPause AI until we know what the hell Step 2 is.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the South Park<\/em> episode \u201cGnomes,\u201d which first aired in 1998, Kenny, Kyle, Cartman, and Stan discover a community of gnomes that sneak out at night to steal underpants from dressers. Why? The gnomes present their pitch deck. \u201cPhase 1: Collect underpants. Phase 2: ? Phase 3: Profit.\u201d<\/p>\n

The gnomes\u2019 business plan has since become one of the greats among internet memes<\/a>, used to satirize everything from startup strategies to policy proposals. Memelord in chief Elon Musk once invoked it in a talk<\/a> about how he planned to fund a mission to Mars. Right now, it captures the state of AI. Companies have built the tech (Step 1) and promised transformation (Step 3). How they get there is still a big question mark.<\/p>\n

As far as Pause AI is concerned, Step 2 must involve some kind of regulation. But exactly what it will call for and who will enforce it are up for debate.<\/p>\n

AI boosters, on the other hand, are convinced that Step 3 is salvation and tend to glaze over the middle bit. They see us racing toward sunny uplands on the back of an \u201ceconomically transformative technology,\u201d as OpenAI\u2019s chief scientist, Jakub Pachocki, put it to me a few weeks ago. They know where they want to go\u2014more or less: It\u2019s hazy up there and still some way off. But everyone\u2019s taking a different route. Will they all make it? Will anyone?<\/p>\n

For every big claim about the future, there is a more sober assessment of how the rubber meets the road\u2014one that quells the hype. Consider two recent studies. One, from Anthropic, predicted what types of jobs are going to be most affected by LLMs<\/a>. (A takeaway: Managers, architects, and people in the media should prepare for change; groundskeepers, construction workers, and those in hospitality, not so much.) But their predictions are really just guesses, based on what kinds of tasks LLMs seem to be good at rather than how they really perform in the workplace.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Another study, put out in February by researchers at Mercor, an AI hiring startup, tested several AI agents powered by top-tier models<\/a> from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind on 480 workplace tasks frequently carried out by human bankers, consultants, and lawyers. Every agent they tested failed to complete most of its duties.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Why is there such wide disagreement? There are a number of factors. For a start, it\u2019s crucial to consider who is making the claims (and why). Anthropic has skin in the game. What\u2019s more, most of the people telling us that something big is about to happen have reached that conclusion largely on the basis of how fast AI coding tools are getting. But not all tasks can be hacked with coding. Other studies have found that LLMs are bad at making strategic judgment calls, for example.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s more, when they\u2019re deployed, the tools aren\u2019t just dropped into a cleanroom. They need to work in places contaminated with people and existing workflows. And sometimes adding AI will make things worse. Sure, maybe those workflows need to be torn up and refashioned around the new technology for it to achieve transformative status, but that will take time (and guts).\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

That big hole? It\u2019s right where Step 2 should be. The lack of agreement on exactly what\u2019s about to happen\u2014and how\u2014creates an information vacuum that gets filled by the latest wild claim of the week, evidence be damned. We\u2019re so unmoored from any real understanding of what\u2019s coming and how it will be deployed that a single social media post can (and does) shake markets.<\/p>\n

We need fewer guesses and more evidence. But that\u2019s going to require transparency from the model makers, coordination between researchers and businesses, and new ways to evaluate this technology<\/a> that tell us what really happens when it\u2019s rolled out in the real world.<\/p>\n

The tech industry (and with it the world\u2019s economy) rests on the held-out promise that AI really will be transformative. But that is not yet a sure bet. Next time you hear bold claims about the future, remember that most businesses are still figuring out what to do with their underpants.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[226],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21876","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21876","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21876"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21876\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}