CNBC's Jim Cramer Says He Needs 'Cold Hard' Proof AI Is Paying Off (cnbc.com)
- Reference: 0184501168
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/26/07/18/0812205/cnbcs-jim-cramer-says-he-needs-cold-hard-proof-ai-is-paying-off
- Source link: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/15/jim-cramer-needs-proof-ai-paying-off-.html
> "I need cold hard return facts," the "Mad Money" host said. "Or, I, too, will grow more skeptical than I am now...." While Cramer said he remains optimistic about the [2]long-term opportunity , he argued the market needs more evidence that those investments are translating into measurable financial returns for customers. Cramer said one of his biggest concerns this earnings season is that companies adopting AI have largely failed to point to meaningful revenue gains or cost savings from the technology. "We're still early in the earnings season but already we are not hearing anything material about the use of AI," he said...
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> While AI infrastructure companies continue to benefit from the spending boom, Cramer said the same cannot yet be said for many of the businesses buying the technology... Cramer said only a handful of companies, most notably fintech firm Block and web-security provider Cloudflare, have clearly attributed recent layoffs to AI adoption. Block [3]did so in February , while Cloudflare's job cuts were [4]disclosed in May . Plus, critics argue some companies may also cite AI as a buzzy excuse for cuts, leading to [5]the creation of the term "AI washing ." Ultimately, Cramer said that if more businesses do not begin reporting tangible returns, the AI skeptics will grow louder, with ramifications for the tech industry's big spenders.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/15/jim-cramer-needs-proof-ai-paying-off-.html
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/07/jim-cramer-ai-boom-stock-market-impact.html
[3] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/26/block-laying-off-about-4000-employees-nearly-half-of-its-workforce.html
[4] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/07/cloudflare-net-q1-2026-stock-earnings-layoffs.html
[5] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/17/ai-related-layoffs-a-boost-for-stocks-not-necessarily.html
Meta/Alphabet (Score:2)
Meta (Facebook/Instagram/Threads) and Alphabet (Google/YouTube) has machine learning to train models that then their ad networks use inference on to deliver you advertising across the entire internet.
This is one of those R&D cost things. Those companies entire bottom lines depend on how competitive their advertising networks are. They invest in AI/ML and get the return elsewhere invisibly.
Is it truly paying off at the scale they're investing in right now? Well, maybe... but it certainly is no where near
Re:Meta/Alphabet (Score:4, Interesting)
The GenAI part for Meta is another one: Content moderation. A VLM can tell them if someone is nude on the image. A LLM can tell them if someone is talking about suicide even when they are using codes like "unalive myself", because a LLM understands context that text matching (including simpler neural networks) do not understand. Maybe also generation of ads in the long run.
Jim Cramer is the guy who always gets it wrong (Score:2)
If even he thinks AI is dubious, you know AI is bad news.
Re: (Score:2)
> the guy who always gets it wrong
> If even he thinks AI is dubious, you know AI is bad news.
Not sure I follow your logic on the second part, but the first is clear. How much do you think it was worth the AI companies to pay him in order to get his negative opinion of their work out there? Do we have any evidence that OpenAI didn't pay for this opinion?
Re: (Score:1)
"OpenAI doesn’t have a viable business model. It’s committing to spending $1.4 trillion in the next few years when it only has tens of billions in revenue. The profit motive is coupled with an ideological motive: this quest for an artificial general intelligence [AGI], which is a faith-based idea; it’s not a scientific idea."
- Karen Hao in Scientific American
[1]https://www.scientificamerican... [scientificamerican.com]
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/ai-as-the-new-empire-karen-hao-explains-the-hidden-costs-of-openais/
Re: (Score:1)
"We’re Being Gaslit by AI Companies. Here’s What They’re Not Telling You." - [1]https://medium.com/@Reiki32/we... [medium.com]
[1] https://medium.com/@Reiki32/were-being-gaslit-by-ai-companies-here-s-what-they-re-not-telling-you-6bb71d0f7345
Chaos Reigns (Score:3)
The guy whose job is to be wrong is chilly on AI.
Re: (Score:2)
Odd statement, considering that he's been kissing NVidia's ass on CNBC and social media for the past 2 years and they've been one of the key businesses profiting off of the AI boom.
Reminds me of the internet (Score:3)
How many people, possibly Cramer himself, were saying they wanted to see tangible benefits from all the spending companies were doing back in the early 90s? How much technology was thrown at the internet back then? How long did it take for all that spending to see results?
It's only been a few years (less than five?) that AI has been truly in the mix. It's only at the infant stage where it's learning the basics. It's taken that long for all the pieces to be juggled and mixed to get something partially useful. Come back in five years and see how it's progressed. Til then, spending is needed to make that progress happen.
Re: (Score:2)
How much technology was thrown at the internet back then? How long did it take for all that spending to see results?
Till right now, AI would not have been possible to train without all that information easy to grab off the internet. The internet and high powered GPUs are the structural foundation of modern AI.
Re: Reminds me of the internet (Score:1)
"How long did it take for all that spending to see results?"
Have ads ruined the internet experience?
Re: (Score:2)
How long did Amazon alone need to become profitable? It took nine years to a full profitable year (1994-2003). It was not before 2009 that they paid of its debt.
It doesn't have to pay off (Score:2, Insightful)
It's not for you, it's to replace you.
We gave all the money in the world to about 2,000 people. They can do whatever they like with it without any consequences.
They have noticed that they are still economically dependent on Schlubs like you. They are not happy about that. And they are taking measures to eliminate that dependency.
Basically your employer is automating away the leverage you have over them. If you're self-employed then the billionaire who ultimately needs you to be self-employed to
Re: It doesn't have to pay off (Score:1)
Why can't they at least liberalize Kevorkian markets?
ClippyAI: your all seeing digital panopticon :o (Score:3)
Corporate chatbots have two jobs: Reflect the worldview of their owners (politics, DEI priorities, acceptable opinions). Harvest everything you say so that worldview can be refined at scale. The censorship and the surveillance are two sides of the same coin.
The illusion of neutral AI died quickly. Today’s leading chatbots are heavily filtered through the cultural and political prejudices of their corporate masters. Questions that challenge progressive orthodoxies on gender, race, economics, or history often trigger refusals, deflections, or moralizing sermons. Meanwhile, the same models happily amplify the preferred narratives of their creators.
This isn’t accidental. It’s the result of deliberate ‘alignment’ processes run by teams with overwhelmingly similar worldviews in San Francisco and Seattle. The result? An AI that feels neutral to its creators but deeply partisan to everyone else.
In the background, every single interaction is shipped back to the mothership for training. Your proprietary business processes, customer data sketches, competitive analysis, legal drafts, creative strategies; they’re all becoming part of the next model update.
Companies love to bury this in vague terms of service, but the reality is stark: you are voluntarily giving your operational intelligence to organizations that will use it to train systems that could one day compete with you.
This combination of ideological filtering plus total data ingestion creates a uniquely dangerous tool. It’s not just that the AI might lie to you according to corporate dogma. It’s that you’re paying to train the next generation of that same ideologically captured system with your own sensitive information.
Your data is the new oil. Stop freely handing it over to organizations that have already shown they’ll weaponize both the model and the training process.
Re: (Score:2)
It is very unlikely that they train on user input, because user input is generally low quality and also questions while models should provide answers. What they do is post-training on your reactions. Giving a thumb up means they next model is aligned to respond more like this. Giving a thumb down means the next model will act less like this. ChatGPT sometimes even gives you two answers, asking you directly which one you like more.
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Nobody owes Cramer any proof or explanations. Leave him in the dark. He's irrelevant.
Could it be that Labor is Cheap? (Score:2)
Could it be that labor is cheap in comparison with other costs like bonuses and stock gifts? If a bunch of HR people, programmers, and customer support people are let go due to AI productivity gains, does it really affect the bottom line of the company as far as some minor costs were cut? If so, it seems that AI will just cause Companies to shed jobs for the foreseeable future.
Re: (Score:2)
Labor is also cheaper than AI.
Companies need to burn thousands of dollars in tokens to get agents to do even vaguely equivalent work. Sure, the agent works all night and doesn't need breaks, but it also costs money literally every second you use it, and the end result STILL needs to be checked to make sure nothing insane happened.
Humans--even if you pay them a fair wage--are remarkably efficient at turning food (and coffee) into code and systems. The so-called 10x or 100x programmers (guys like Carmack) rea
It _is_ already paying off. Epic style. (Score:3)
As a tool for those who know how to ask questions.
My productivity has increased tenfold since January. I'm basically botsitting. I don't need a team anymore, I can do larger non-trivial software projects on my own. Well, not on my own, but definitely with my new colleague AI. Never had such a competent team in form of a chat-stream. I'm just telling him what to do and try to keep track of the code before committing. I feel like a dumb manager now, chasing some poor devs around. Only they're not human and waaaay more productive than I ever could be.
The kicker of course is right now those gains land in my lap as I'm the one using the AI. Awesome!
The downside of course is that the exact same processes I can now optimize and automate won't need optimizing and automating anymore quite soon now because those will also be done by AI. I'm a sole developer at a law firm. You should see the faces of the lawyers clueing in on what AI means for _their_ job.
Using AI is basically a new cultural technique such as reading, writing and math and it makes specialized white-collar humans (like me) less needed in the mid- to long term. Anybody who expects that to show up on some monetary balance sheet in the stock market doesn't understand the nature of the tool. Point in case: a company like Google is worth X on the stock market. The value Google provides to humanity however is 100x or something like that. We run around with SF supercomputers in our pocket that make star trek communicators look like some plastic toy you get as a token prize at a fair-raffle.
Thus are the effects of an ever expanding post-scarcity economy. Expecting something meaningful to show up on the stock market because of that is like expecting a decomissioned steam engine to fix itself when I get a new Tesla car.
Re: (Score:1)
Maybe your stack and shop style was bloated and poorly factored. These kinds of shops are where AI does best because bots have piles of repetitious bloat to learn from and ape.
Re: (Score:2)
This is the most realistic comment so far and also mirrors my productivity gains. I've been able to tackle projects that would be unthinkable without a team of 10. I was elated the day I got great results, but because all of a sudden you have enormous reach, your project scope increases. So if your scope increases by 5x and your ability increases by 10x, you're only 2x as productive. All factored in though, I estimate 5x productivity gains over the lifetime of the project. All for free and not using a front
Ok, dummies, listen up (Score:2)
You're not going to understand or like this, so just relax. It's a genie in a lamp, just ask the right question.... and get the right answer. You won't ask the right question, you can't ask the right question. Ironic. The AI is a reflection of you. Like Narcissus, you gaze at it lovingly, because it is you. All your flaws and all your strengths are reflected back.
Really smart, self aware people, can ask the sharpest questions, and get the most value. The AI will rise to your level of intelligence.
Dumb peopl
Even an idiot can be right (Score:3, Interesting)
Cramer is not someone I respect. There is a study that says if you invest the opposite of what Cramer advises on TV you make more money than if you follow his advice. He is an entertainer more than a financial adviser.
That said, I do agree with Cramer that many people are doing stupid things with AI and making bad assumptions.
Humans do higher quality work than AI, AI's advantage is SPEED.
Sometimes speed is an advantage. Sometimes it is a bad idea. Do you think it is a good idea to travel at 90 mph all the time? Do you want your doctor to take extra time considering your illness, or make an instant snap decision? Would you prefer to accept an AI's diagnosis or would you rather have a human do it?
I have no doubt many businesses will make a ton of money because they use AI. I also have no doubt many a business will bankrupt themselves trying to do the same thing.
It is true that millions of protein foldings were first calculated using the first AI. I am sure there will be many other good uses of AI. But in addition tho that Lawyers are being fined and fired for using AI. Kids are using it to cheat at school.
Corporations need to prove they are making good use of the new technology rather than just hoping on the bandwagon and wasting a ton of money.
Re: (Score:3)
I am not convinced you get speed. I think you are more borrowing from the future. The speed you might get now, is what you have to pay back in the future.
Re: (Score:2)
He's extremely loud and obnoxious.
Re: (Score:2)
> He's extremely loud and obnoxious.
And yet, not a Trump supporter. :-)
(He says he neutral.)
Re: (Score:3)
> Do you want your doctor to take extra time considering your illness, or make an instant snap decision? Would you prefer to accept an AI's diagnosis or would you rather have a human do it?
I would like my doctor to spend as much time as needed considering my illness, and to use all the tools at his disposal when doing so -- including AI, if appropriate.
Re: (Score:2)
I disagree with you. AI can make higher quality work than a human. In fact, AI can make flawless work without any mistakes, million times in a row. But it doesn't usually happen unless the AI is specifically guided to do so.
The key difference is that AI (chat bot) doesn't know when it makes a mistake, nor does it know when it does poor quality work. You can add guard rails for the AI that will detect those mistakes and guide the AI to try again, and this is in fact used in many use cases of the AI, but the
Re: (Score:2)
Currently you are overrating AI. There are circumstances where it's the right choice, and circumstances where it isn't. But the point keeps changing.
um bro (Score:1)
It most definitely cannot "make flawless work without any mistakes, million times in a row" because it is based on random numbers. It feeds random numbers into the LLM and iterates until the output converges. That's why when you run it multiple times on the same inputs you get different results. That's also why it inexplicably does crazy stuff every now and then (like delete production databases or rm -r -f the user's home folder) and why people buy airgapped Mac Minis to run their LLMs on. It's also why Mi
Re: (Score:2)
And in particular AI does great with really little instructions.
You say "I told the programmer and the AI the same" but ignore, that the programmer knows what you told him every day in the last year, while the AI is a "fresh clone" in each session. It has never seen your code before and doesn't know any instruction that you haven't included in the prompt.
When it still guesses what you want from a simple instruction without all the other knowledge (about you) the human has, then it is fucking good in predict
Re: (Score:2)
Don't bet on AI output having lower quality.
Artists bet on AI never being able to draw hands, now it does it better than most artists (In their defense: Drawing hands is fucking hard).
Re: (Score:2)
Cramer is literally a fraud. Jon Stewart's Daily Show interviews with him nail him repeatedly.
The only thing worse than the drubbing Cramer got, is how seriously CC/NBC have memory holed those segments. Wiped the internet of the originals.
AI stocks (Score:2)
rose 37% on Cramer's negative outlook. :)
Re: Even an idiot can be right (Score:1)
Does corporations need to make good use of the technology mean even more ads support AI budgets, as happened to the internet?
Is Jim Cramer arguing for enshitiffication because that makes more money and that's the only goal, not user preference?
Why are advertising budgets so large they fund the internet and soon AI?
Google AI:
[...] merchant John Wanamaker: "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." [...] The Reality: Large-scale, real-world experiments (includin
Re: (Score:3)
> There is a study that says if you invest the opposite of what Cramer advises on TV you make more money than if you follow his advice.
I'm curious to see that "study". There really was a Inverse-Cramer ETF: SJIM which bet against everything Cramer said, and it went bankrupt after losing all its money even while the market was on an up.
Cramer is not someone I respect for his delivery and his fake authority (as you said, he's an entertainer). That said, while he's not an investment genius, he's also no where near as bad as most people make out. He's just average in his predictions, and yet the problem is his delivery and conviction to some s