4 ms·

But please accept that you are in a small subset of people that it is very useful to. Every time I hear someone championing AI, it is a coder. AI is basically

But please accept that you are in a small subset of people that it is very useful to. Every time I hear someone championing AI, it is a coder. AI is basically useless to me, it is just a convoluted expensive google search.

tossandthrow 2y ago
I use ai to care for my plants, to give me recipes for pan pancakes, to help me fix my coffee machine. LLMs as a popularized thing is just about 2 years old. It is still mainly early adopters. For smartphones it might have taken 10 to 15 years to gain widespread traction. I think it is safe to say that we are only scratching the surface.
- giraffe_lady 2y ago
  These are not categories that needed this change or benefit from it. Specific plant care is one of the easiest things to find information about. And are you serious you couldn't find a pancake recipe? The coffee machine idk it depends on what you did. But the other two are like a parody of AI use cases. "We made it slightly more convenient, but it might be wrong now and also burns down a tree every time you use it."
  - qup 2y ago
    > "We made it slightly more convenient, but it might be wrong now and also burns down a tree every time you use it." Sounds like early criticisms of the internet. I assume you mean he should be doing those things with a search engine, but maybe we shouldn't allow that either. Force him to use a book! It may be slightly less convenient, and could still be wrong, but...
    - tossandthrow 2y ago
      I ought to ask my dead grandma to save a kg of co2.
    - giraffe_lady 2y ago
      Before crypto and AI computing in general and the internet in particular were always an incredible deal in terms of how much societal value we get out of it for the electricity consumed.
- Loughla 2y ago
  >It is still mainly early adopters. I just disagree with this. Every b2b or saas is marketing itself as using hallucination free AI. We're waaaaayyyyyy past the early adoption stage, and the product hasn't meaningfully improved.
- coffeebeqn 2y ago
  I also use it for plant care tips. What should I feed this plant and what kind of soil to use and all the questions I never bothered to Google and crawl through some long blog article on
davidmurdoch 2y ago
Do you not use it to try learning new things? I use it to help get familiar with new software (recently for FreeCAD), or new concepts (passive speaker crossover design).
josh2600 2y ago
Wow, this is a wild opinion. I wonder how many people you’ve talked to about this? I know tons of people in my social groups that love AI and use it every day in it’s current form.
herval 2y ago
it's _extremely_ useful for lawyers, arguably even more so than for coders, given how much faster they can do stuff. They're also extremely useful for anyone who writes text and wants a reviewer. Also capable to execute most daily activities of some roles, such as TPMs. It's still useful to a small subset of all those professions - the early adopters. Same way computers were useful to many professionals before the UI (but only a small fraction of them had the skillset to use terminals)
- singleshot_ 2y ago
  > it's _extremely_ useful for lawyers, How so? How are you using LLMs to practice law? Genuinely curious.
  - herval 2y ago
    multiple lawyer friends I know are using chatgpt (and custom gptees) for contract reviews. They upload some guidelines as knowledge, then upload any new contract for validation. Allegedly replaces hours of reading. This is a large portion of the work, in some cases. Some of them also use it to debate a contract, to see if there's anything they overlooked or to find loopholes. LLMs are extremely good at that kind of constrained creativity mode where they _have_ to produce something (they suck at saying "I dont know" or "no"), so I guess it works as sort of a "second brain" of sorts, for those too. There's even reported cases of entire legislations being written with LLMs already [1]. I'm sure there's thousands more we haven't heard about - the same way researchers are writing papers w/ LLMs w/o disclosing it [1] https://olhardigital.com.br/2023/12/05/pro/lei-escrita-pelo-chatgpt-no-rs-gera-repercussao-internacional-qual-e-o-limite/ https://olhardigital.com.br/2023/12/05/pro/lei-escrita-pelo-...
    - rsynnott 2y ago
      Five years later, when the contract turns out to be defective, I doubt the clients are going to be _thrilled_ with “well, no, I didn’t read it, but I did feed it to a magic robot”. Like, this is malpractice, surely?
y1n0 2y ago
My wife uses it almost as much as me which isn’t quite daily. She is not a coder whatsoever. I’ll ask her what her use cases are and reply here later if I don’t forget.
- y1n0 2y ago
  She uses gpt as an editor for her emails and web content. she’ll just say "improve this," she gets options for how she might say something in a different way. When preparing for a summit, she gave it a list of broad topics she wanted to cover. Gpt generated a list of specific titles and descriptions for her talks. This in turn gave her specific ideas to write talks about instead of just the broad topic. When she wasn’t sure about the sequence of her talks, she asked GPT for advice on the order. GPT suggested an arrangement that created a logical flow and the reasoning for that flow, which ended up being pretty good. She often uses gpt as a sounding board for ideas. She said she likes having an always-available colleague to bounce thoughts off of.
School-Cotton 2y ago
Walk into any random coffee shop in America where people are working on their laptops and you will see some subset of them on ChatGPT. It’s definitely not just coders who are finding it useful.
Ukv 2y ago
Particularly given the article's target is "systems based on large neural networks" and not specifically LLMs, I'd claim there are a vast number of uncontroversially beneficial applications: language translation, video transcription, material/product defect detection, weather forecasting/early warning systems, OCR, spam filtering, protein folding, tumor segmentation, drug discovery and interaction prediction, etc.
stickfigure 2y ago
> convoluted expensive google search I'd call it a working google search, unlike, you know, google these days. Actually google's LLM-based search results have been getting better, so maybe this isn't the end of the line for them. But for sophisticated questions (on noncoding topics!) I still always go to chatgpt or claude.
- coliveira 2y ago
  > google's LLM-based search results have been getting better don't worry, Google WILL change this because they don't make money when people find the answer right away. They want people to see multiple ads before leaving the site.
FrustratedMonky 2y ago
It's being used in drive through windows. In movies, in graphic design, pod casts, music, etc... 'entertainment' industry. And HN, it isn't just a few odd balls on HN championing it. I wish there was way to get a sentiment analysis of HN, it seems there are lot more people using it than not using it. And, what about the silent majority, the programmers that don't hang out on HN? I hear colleagues talk about it all the time. The impact is here, whether they are self directed or not, or whether there are still a few people not using it.
sebastiansm 2y ago
Yesterday ChatGPT helped me to elaborate a skincare routine for my wife with multiple serums and creams that she received for Christmas. She and I had no idea when to apply, how to combine or when to avoid combination of some of those products. I could have google it myself in the evenings and had the answer in a few days of research, but with o1 in a 15min session my wife had had a solid weekly routine, the reasoning about those choices and academic papers with research about those products. (Obviously she knows a lot about skincare in general, so she had the capacity to recognize any wrong recommendation). Nothing game changer, but is great to save lots of time in this kind of tasks.
- exe34 2y ago
  Mention bleach and motor oil and see if it manages to exclude those!
  - diego_sandoval 2y ago
    If you think it won't exclude them 100% of the time, then you haven't used o1.
- irunmyownemail 2y ago
  It's 2 days after Christmas, too early to know the impact of the purchases made based on what AI recommended, either positive or negative. If you're relying on AI to replace a human doctor trained in skin care or alternatively, your Google skills; please consider consulting an actual doctor. If she "knows a lot about skincare in general, so she had the capacity to recognize any wrong recommendation", then what did AI actually accomplish in the end.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago
    >> It's 2 days after Christmas, too early to know the impact of the purchases made based on what AI recommended, either positive or negative. No worries, I can tell you what to expect: nothing. No effect. Zilch. Nada. Zero. Those beauty creams are just a total scam and that's obvious from the fact they're targetted just as well to women who don't need them (young, good skin) as to ones who do (older, bad skin). About the only thing the beauty industry has figured out really works in the last five or six decades is Tretinoin, but you can use that on its own. Yet it's sold as one component in creams with a dozen others, that do nothing. Except make you spend money.
drooby 2y ago
> convoluted expensive google search Interesting, I'm the opposite now. Why would I click a couple links to read a couple (verbose) blog posts when I can read a succinct LLM response. If I have low confidence in the quality of the response then I supplement with Google search. I feel near certain that I am saving time with this method. And the output is much more tuned to the context and framing of my question. Hah, take for example my last query in ChatGPT: > Are there any ancient technologies that when discovered furthered modern understanding of its field? ChatGPT gave some great responses, super fast. Google also provides some great results (though some miss the mark), but I would need to parse at least three different articles and condense the results. To be fair, ChatGPT gives some bad responses too.. But both an LLM and Google search should be used in conjunction to perform a search at the same time. Use LLMs as breadth-first search, and Google as depth-first search.
paulcole 2y ago
> Every time I hear someone championing AI, it is a coder The argument I make is why aren’t more people finding ways to code with AI? I work in a leadership role at a marketing agency and am a passable coder for scripts using Python and/or Google Apps Scripts. In the past year, I’ve built more useful and valuable tools with the help of AI than I had in the 3 or so years before. We’re automating more boring stuff than ever before. It boggles my mind that everybody isn’t doing this. In the past, I was limited by technical ability because my knowledge of our business and processes was very high. Now I’m finding that technical ability isn’t my limitation, it’s how well I can explain our processes to AI.
mbesto 2y ago
Not a coder here (although I can code). I use LLMs 15+ time a day.
tiahura 2y ago
I’m a lawyer and AI has become deeply integrated into my work.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
AnotherGoodName 2y ago
I'd argue that's just because coders are first to line up for this. There was a different thread on this site i read where a journalist used the wrong units of measurement (kilowatts instead of killowatt-hours for energy storage). You could paste the entire article into chatGPT with a prompt "spot mistakes in the following; [text]" and get an appropriate correction for this and similar mistakes the author made. As in there's journalists right now posting articles with clear mistakes that could have been proof read more accurately than they were if they were willing to use AI. The only excuse i could think of is resistance to change. A lot of professions right now could do their job better if they leant on the current generation of AI.
oytis 2y ago
In my bubble coders find LLMs least useful. After all we already have all kinds of fancy autocomplete that works deterministically and doesn't hallucinate - and still not everyone uses it. When I use LLMs, I use it exactly as Google search on steroids. It's great for providing a summary on some unknown topic. It doesn't matter if it gets it wrong - the main value is in keywords and project names, and one can use the real Google search from there. And it isn't expensive if you are using the free version
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

tossandthrow 2y ago

I use ai to care for my plants, to give me recipes for pan pancakes, to help me fix my coffee machine. LLMs as a popularized thing is just about 2 years old. It is still mainly early adopters. For smartphones it might have taken 10 to 15 years to gain widespread traction. I think it is safe to say that we are only scratching the surface.

giraffe_lady 2y ago
These are not categories that needed this change or benefit from it. Specific plant care is one of the easiest things to find information about. And are you serious you couldn't find a pancake recipe? The coffee machine idk it depends on what you did. But the other two are like a parody of AI use cases. "We made it slightly more convenient, but it might be wrong now and also burns down a tree every time you use it."
- qup 2y ago
  > "We made it slightly more convenient, but it might be wrong now and also burns down a tree every time you use it." Sounds like early criticisms of the internet. I assume you mean he should be doing those things with a search engine, but maybe we shouldn't allow that either. Force him to use a book! It may be slightly less convenient, and could still be wrong, but...
  - tossandthrow 2y ago
    I ought to ask my dead grandma to save a kg of co2.
  - giraffe_lady 2y ago
    Before crypto and AI computing in general and the internet in particular were always an incredible deal in terms of how much societal value we get out of it for the electricity consumed.
Loughla 2y ago
>It is still mainly early adopters. I just disagree with this. Every b2b or saas is marketing itself as using hallucination free AI. We're waaaaayyyyyy past the early adoption stage, and the product hasn't meaningfully improved.
coffeebeqn 2y ago
I also use it for plant care tips. What should I feed this plant and what kind of soil to use and all the questions I never bothered to Google and crawl through some long blog article on

davidmurdoch 2y ago

Do you not use it to try learning new things? I use it to help get familiar with new software (recently for FreeCAD), or new concepts (passive speaker crossover design).

josh2600 2y ago

Wow, this is a wild opinion. I wonder how many people you’ve talked to about this? I know tons of people in my social groups that love AI and use it every day in it’s current form.

herval 2y ago

it's _extremely_ useful for lawyers, arguably even more so than for coders, given how much faster they can do stuff. They're also extremely useful for anyone who writes text and wants a reviewer. Also capable to execute most daily activities of some roles, such as TPMs. It's still useful to a small subset of all those professions - the early adopters. Same way computers were useful to many professionals before the UI (but only a small fraction of them had the skillset to use terminals)

singleshot_ 2y ago
> it's _extremely_ useful for lawyers, How so? How are you using LLMs to practice law? Genuinely curious.
- herval 2y ago
  multiple lawyer friends I know are using chatgpt (and custom gptees) for contract reviews. They upload some guidelines as knowledge, then upload any new contract for validation. Allegedly replaces hours of reading. This is a large portion of the work, in some cases. Some of them also use it to debate a contract, to see if there's anything they overlooked or to find loopholes. LLMs are extremely good at that kind of constrained creativity mode where they _have_ to produce something (they suck at saying "I dont know" or "no"), so I guess it works as sort of a "second brain" of sorts, for those too. There's even reported cases of entire legislations being written with LLMs already [1]. I'm sure there's thousands more we haven't heard about - the same way researchers are writing papers w/ LLMs w/o disclosing it [1] https://olhardigital.com.br/2023/12/05/pro/lei-escrita-pelo-chatgpt-no-rs-gera-repercussao-internacional-qual-e-o-limite/ https://olhardigital.com.br/2023/12/05/pro/lei-escrita-pelo-...
  - rsynnott 2y ago
    Five years later, when the contract turns out to be defective, I doubt the clients are going to be _thrilled_ with “well, no, I didn’t read it, but I did feed it to a magic robot”. Like, this is malpractice, surely?

y1n0 2y ago

My wife uses it almost as much as me which isn’t quite daily. She is not a coder whatsoever. I’ll ask her what her use cases are and reply here later if I don’t forget.

y1n0 2y ago
She uses gpt as an editor for her emails and web content. she’ll just say "improve this," she gets options for how she might say something in a different way. When preparing for a summit, she gave it a list of broad topics she wanted to cover. Gpt generated a list of specific titles and descriptions for her talks. This in turn gave her specific ideas to write talks about instead of just the broad topic. When she wasn’t sure about the sequence of her talks, she asked GPT for advice on the order. GPT suggested an arrangement that created a logical flow and the reasoning for that flow, which ended up being pretty good. She often uses gpt as a sounding board for ideas. She said she likes having an always-available colleague to bounce thoughts off of.

School-Cotton 2y ago

Walk into any random coffee shop in America where people are working on their laptops and you will see some subset of them on ChatGPT. It’s definitely not just coders who are finding it useful.

Ukv 2y ago

Particularly given the article's target is "systems based on large neural networks" and not specifically LLMs, I'd claim there are a vast number of uncontroversially beneficial applications: language translation, video transcription, material/product defect detection, weather forecasting/early warning systems, OCR, spam filtering, protein folding, tumor segmentation, drug discovery and interaction prediction, etc.

stickfigure 2y ago

> convoluted expensive google search I'd call it a working google search, unlike, you know, google these days. Actually google's LLM-based search results have been getting better, so maybe this isn't the end of the line for them. But for sophisticated questions (on noncoding topics!) I still always go to chatgpt or claude.

coliveira 2y ago
> google's LLM-based search results have been getting better don't worry, Google WILL change this because they don't make money when people find the answer right away. They want people to see multiple ads before leaving the site.

FrustratedMonky 2y ago

It's being used in drive through windows. In movies, in graphic design, pod casts, music, etc... 'entertainment' industry. And HN, it isn't just a few odd balls on HN championing it. I wish there was way to get a sentiment analysis of HN, it seems there are lot more people using it than not using it. And, what about the silent majority, the programmers that don't hang out on HN? I hear colleagues talk about it all the time. The impact is here, whether they are self directed or not, or whether there are still a few people not using it.

sebastiansm 2y ago

Yesterday ChatGPT helped me to elaborate a skincare routine for my wife with multiple serums and creams that she received for Christmas. She and I had no idea when to apply, how to combine or when to avoid combination of some of those products. I could have google it myself in the evenings and had the answer in a few days of research, but with o1 in a 15min session my wife had had a solid weekly routine, the reasoning about those choices and academic papers with research about those products. (Obviously she knows a lot about skincare in general, so she had the capacity to recognize any wrong recommendation). Nothing game changer, but is great to save lots of time in this kind of tasks.

exe34 2y ago
Mention bleach and motor oil and see if it manages to exclude those!
- diego_sandoval 2y ago
  If you think it won't exclude them 100% of the time, then you haven't used o1.
irunmyownemail 2y ago
It's 2 days after Christmas, too early to know the impact of the purchases made based on what AI recommended, either positive or negative. If you're relying on AI to replace a human doctor trained in skin care or alternatively, your Google skills; please consider consulting an actual doctor. If she "knows a lot about skincare in general, so she had the capacity to recognize any wrong recommendation", then what did AI actually accomplish in the end.
- YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago
  >> It's 2 days after Christmas, too early to know the impact of the purchases made based on what AI recommended, either positive or negative. No worries, I can tell you what to expect: nothing. No effect. Zilch. Nada. Zero. Those beauty creams are just a total scam and that's obvious from the fact they're targetted just as well to women who don't need them (young, good skin) as to ones who do (older, bad skin). About the only thing the beauty industry has figured out really works in the last five or six decades is Tretinoin, but you can use that on its own. Yet it's sold as one component in creams with a dozen others, that do nothing. Except make you spend money.

drooby 2y ago

> convoluted expensive google search Interesting, I'm the opposite now. Why would I click a couple links to read a couple (verbose) blog posts when I can read a succinct LLM response. If I have low confidence in the quality of the response then I supplement with Google search. I feel near certain that I am saving time with this method. And the output is much more tuned to the context and framing of my question. Hah, take for example my last query in ChatGPT: > Are there any ancient technologies that when discovered furthered modern understanding of its field? ChatGPT gave some great responses, super fast. Google also provides some great results (though some miss the mark), but I would need to parse at least three different articles and condense the results. To be fair, ChatGPT gives some bad responses too.. But both an LLM and Google search should be used in conjunction to perform a search at the same time. Use LLMs as breadth-first search, and Google as depth-first search.

paulcole 2y ago

> Every time I hear someone championing AI, it is a coder The argument I make is why aren’t more people finding ways to code with AI? I work in a leadership role at a marketing agency and am a passable coder for scripts using Python and/or Google Apps Scripts. In the past year, I’ve built more useful and valuable tools with the help of AI than I had in the 3 or so years before. We’re automating more boring stuff than ever before. It boggles my mind that everybody isn’t doing this. In the past, I was limited by technical ability because my knowledge of our business and processes was very high. Now I’m finding that technical ability isn’t my limitation, it’s how well I can explain our processes to AI.

mbesto 2y ago

Not a coder here (although I can code). I use LLMs 15+ time a day.

tiahura 2y ago

I’m a lawyer and AI has become deeply integrated into my work.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

AnotherGoodName 2y ago

I'd argue that's just because coders are first to line up for this. There was a different thread on this site i read where a journalist used the wrong units of measurement (kilowatts instead of killowatt-hours for energy storage). You could paste the entire article into chatGPT with a prompt "spot mistakes in the following; [text]" and get an appropriate correction for this and similar mistakes the author made. As in there's journalists right now posting articles with clear mistakes that could have been proof read more accurately than they were if they were willing to use AI. The only excuse i could think of is resistance to change. A lot of professions right now could do their job better if they leant on the current generation of AI.

oytis 2y ago

In my bubble coders find LLMs least useful. After all we already have all kinds of fancy autocomplete that works deterministically and doesn't hallucinate - and still not everyone uses it. When I use LLMs, I use it exactly as Google search on steroids. It's great for providing a summary on some unknown topic. It doesn't matter if it gets it wrong - the main value is in keywords and project names, and one can use the real Google search from there. And it isn't expensive if you are using the free version

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]