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I think the HN crowd widely overestimates how many people are even passingly familiar with the LLM landscape much less use any of the tools regularly.

by ghaff 2y ago

amelius 2y ago
Well, they said it is a $10B industry. Not sure how they measure it, but it counts for something, I suppose.
kcatskcolbdi 2y ago
I think you may be underestimating it. At this point in college, LLMs are everywhere. It's completely dominating history/english/mass comm fields with respect to writing papers. Anecdotally all of my working non-tech friends use chatgpt daily.
- ghaff 2y ago
  It does anecdotally seem to be very common in education which presumably will carry over to professional workplaces over time. I see it a lot less in non-tech and even tech/adjacent adults today.
datavirtue 2y ago
My wife, the farthest you can get from the HN crowd, literally goes to tears when faced with Excel or producing a Word doc and she is a regular user of copilot and absolutely raves about it. Very unusual for her to take up new tech like this and put it to use but she uses it for everything now. Horse is out of the barn.
- UncleEntity 2y ago
  > My wife, the farthest you can get from the HN crowd... She is literally married into the HN crowd. I think the real AI breakthrough is how to monetize the high usage users.
- moshegramovsky 2y ago
  My Dad is elderly and he enjoys writing. Uses Google Gemini a few times a week. I always warn him that it can hallucinate and he seems to get it. It's changed his entire view of computing.
  - ylee 2y ago
    My father says "I feel like I hired an able assistant" regarding LLMs.
    - moshegramovsky 2y ago
      It's so great! I keep reminding him that it can hallucinate...
rubyfan 2y ago
Sadly it’s become common for many mediocre employees in corporate environments to defer to ChatGPT, receive erroneous output and accept it as truth. There are now commonly corporate goon squads whose job is to drive AI adoption without care for actual impact to results. Usage of AI is the KR.
- pyuser583 2y ago
  I don’t understand why this is happening. Why is everyone buying into this hype so strongly? It’s a bit like how DEI was the big thing for a couple years, and now everyone is abandoning it. Do corporate leaders just constantly chase hype?
  - rubyfan 2y ago
    Yes corporate leaders do chase hype and they also believe in magic. I think companies implement DEI initiatives for different reasons than hype though. Many are now abandoning DEI ostensibly out of fear due to the change in U.S. regime.
    - pyuser583 2y ago
      A case can be made for diversity, but the fact that all the big companies were adopting DEI at the same time made it hype. I personally know an engineering manager who would scoff at MLK Day, but in 2020 starting screaming about how it wasn’t enough and we needed Juneteenth too. AI isn’t hype at Nvidia, and DEI isn’t hype at Patagonia. But tech industry-wide, they’re both hype.
      - rubyfan 2y ago
        I think many were rightly adopting DEI initiatives in an environment post me-too and post George Floyd. I don’t think it was driven by hype but more a reaction to the environment which heightened awareness of societal injustices. Awareness led to all sorts of things - conversation, compassion, attempts to do better in society and the workplace, and probably law suits. You can question how motivated corporations were to adopt DEI initiatives but I think it’d be wrong to say it was driven by hype.
mistrial9 2y ago
every ordinary college and university in the USA is filled with AI now AFAIK
backWurdz 2y ago
[dead]
johannes1234321 2y ago
Aside from university mentioned by sibling comments, there is major uptake of AI in journalism (summarize long press statements, create first draft of the teaser, or even full articles ...) and many people in my social groups use it regularly for having something explained, finding something ... it's wide spread
famouswaffles 2y ago
Last Month, Google, Youtube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter (very close to this one, likely passes it this month) were the only sites with more visits than chatgpt. Couple that with the 400M+ weekly active users (according to open ai in February) and i seriously doubt that. https://x.com/Similarweb/status/1909544985629721070 https://x.com/Similarweb/status/1909544985629721070 https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/openais-weekly-active-users-surpass-400-million-2025-02-20/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/o...
- matthewdgreen 2y ago
  Weekly active users is a pretty strange metric. Essential tools and even social networking apps report DAUs, and they do that because essential things get used daily. How many times did you use Google in the past day? How many times did you visit (insert some social media site you prefer) in the last day? If you’re only using something once per week, it probably isn’t that important to you.
  - famouswaffles 2y ago
    Mostly only social media/messaging sites report daily active users regularly. Everything else usually reports monthly active users at best. >in the last day? If you’re only using something once per week, it probably isn’t that important to you. No, something I use on a weekly basis (which is not necessarily just once a week) is pretty important to me and spinning it otherwise is bizarre. Google is the frontend to the web for the vast majority of internet users so yeah it gets a lot of daily use. Social media sites are social media sites and are in a league of their own. I don't think i need to explain why they would get a disproportionate amount of daily users.
    - matthewdgreen 2y ago
      I am entirely confused by this. ChatGPT is absolutely unimportant to me. I don't use it for any serious work, I don't use it for search, I find its output to still be mostly a novelty. Even coding questions I mostly solve using StackExchange searches because I've been burned using it a couple of times in esoteric areas. In the few areas where I actually did want some solid LLM output, I used Claude. If ChatGPT disappeared off the Internet tomorrow, I would suffer not at all. And yet I probably duck into ChatGPT at least once a month or more (I see a bunch of trivial uses in 2024) mostly as a novelty. Last week I used it a bunch because my wife wanted a logo for a new website. But I could have easily made that logo with another service. ChatGPT serves the same role to me as dozens of other replaceable Internet services that I probably duck into on a weekly basis (e.g., random finance websites, meme generators) but have no essential need for whatsoever. And if I did have an essential need for it, there are at least four well-funded competitors with all the same capabilities, and modestly weaker open weight models. It is really your view that "any service you use at least once a week must be really important to you?" I bet if you sat down and looked at your web history, you'd find dozens that aren't. (PS in the course of writing this post I was horrified to find out that I'd started a subscription to the damn thing in 2024 on a different Google account just to fool around with it, and forgot to cancel it, which I just did.)
ikiris 2y ago
I think you're in fact wildly out of touch with the general populace and how much they use AI tools to make their work easier.

I think the HN crowd widely overestimates how many people are even passingly familiar with the LLM landscape much less use any of the tools regularly.

by ghaff 2y ago

I think the HN crowd widely overestimates how many people are even passingly familiar with the LLM landscape much less use any of the tools regularly.

amelius 2y ago

Well, they said it is a $10B industry. Not sure how they measure it, but it counts for something, I suppose.

kcatskcolbdi 2y ago

I think you may be underestimating it. At this point in college, LLMs are everywhere. It's completely dominating history/english/mass comm fields with respect to writing papers. Anecdotally all of my working non-tech friends use chatgpt daily.

ghaff 2y ago
It does anecdotally seem to be very common in education which presumably will carry over to professional workplaces over time. I see it a lot less in non-tech and even tech/adjacent adults today.

datavirtue 2y ago

My wife, the farthest you can get from the HN crowd, literally goes to tears when faced with Excel or producing a Word doc and she is a regular user of copilot and absolutely raves about it. Very unusual for her to take up new tech like this and put it to use but she uses it for everything now. Horse is out of the barn.

UncleEntity 2y ago
> My wife, the farthest you can get from the HN crowd... She is literally married into the HN crowd. I think the real AI breakthrough is how to monetize the high usage users.
moshegramovsky 2y ago
My Dad is elderly and he enjoys writing. Uses Google Gemini a few times a week. I always warn him that it can hallucinate and he seems to get it. It's changed his entire view of computing.
- ylee 2y ago
  My father says "I feel like I hired an able assistant" regarding LLMs.
  - moshegramovsky 2y ago
    It's so great! I keep reminding him that it can hallucinate...

rubyfan 2y ago

Sadly it’s become common for many mediocre employees in corporate environments to defer to ChatGPT, receive erroneous output and accept it as truth. There are now commonly corporate goon squads whose job is to drive AI adoption without care for actual impact to results. Usage of AI is the KR.

pyuser583 2y ago
I don’t understand why this is happening. Why is everyone buying into this hype so strongly? It’s a bit like how DEI was the big thing for a couple years, and now everyone is abandoning it. Do corporate leaders just constantly chase hype?
- rubyfan 2y ago
  Yes corporate leaders do chase hype and they also believe in magic. I think companies implement DEI initiatives for different reasons than hype though. Many are now abandoning DEI ostensibly out of fear due to the change in U.S. regime.
  - pyuser583 2y ago
    A case can be made for diversity, but the fact that all the big companies were adopting DEI at the same time made it hype. I personally know an engineering manager who would scoff at MLK Day, but in 2020 starting screaming about how it wasn’t enough and we needed Juneteenth too. AI isn’t hype at Nvidia, and DEI isn’t hype at Patagonia. But tech industry-wide, they’re both hype.
    - rubyfan 2y ago
      I think many were rightly adopting DEI initiatives in an environment post me-too and post George Floyd. I don’t think it was driven by hype but more a reaction to the environment which heightened awareness of societal injustices. Awareness led to all sorts of things - conversation, compassion, attempts to do better in society and the workplace, and probably law suits. You can question how motivated corporations were to adopt DEI initiatives but I think it’d be wrong to say it was driven by hype.

mistrial9 2y ago

every ordinary college and university in the USA is filled with AI now AFAIK

backWurdz 2y ago

[dead]

johannes1234321 2y ago

Aside from university mentioned by sibling comments, there is major uptake of AI in journalism (summarize long press statements, create first draft of the teaser, or even full articles ...) and many people in my social groups use it regularly for having something explained, finding something ... it's wide spread

famouswaffles 2y ago

Last Month, Google, Youtube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter (very close to this one, likely passes it this month) were the only sites with more visits than chatgpt. Couple that with the 400M+ weekly active users (according to open ai in February) and i seriously doubt that. https://x.com/Similarweb/status/1909544985629721070 https://x.com/Similarweb/status/1909544985629721070 https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/openais-weekly-active-users-surpass-400-million-2025-02-20/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/o...

matthewdgreen 2y ago
Weekly active users is a pretty strange metric. Essential tools and even social networking apps report DAUs, and they do that because essential things get used daily. How many times did you use Google in the past day? How many times did you visit (insert some social media site you prefer) in the last day? If you’re only using something once per week, it probably isn’t that important to you.
- famouswaffles 2y ago
  Mostly only social media/messaging sites report daily active users regularly. Everything else usually reports monthly active users at best. >in the last day? If you’re only using something once per week, it probably isn’t that important to you. No, something I use on a weekly basis (which is not necessarily just once a week) is pretty important to me and spinning it otherwise is bizarre. Google is the frontend to the web for the vast majority of internet users so yeah it gets a lot of daily use. Social media sites are social media sites and are in a league of their own. I don't think i need to explain why they would get a disproportionate amount of daily users.
  - matthewdgreen 2y ago
    I am entirely confused by this. ChatGPT is absolutely unimportant to me. I don't use it for any serious work, I don't use it for search, I find its output to still be mostly a novelty. Even coding questions I mostly solve using StackExchange searches because I've been burned using it a couple of times in esoteric areas. In the few areas where I actually did want some solid LLM output, I used Claude. If ChatGPT disappeared off the Internet tomorrow, I would suffer not at all. And yet I probably duck into ChatGPT at least once a month or more (I see a bunch of trivial uses in 2024) mostly as a novelty. Last week I used it a bunch because my wife wanted a logo for a new website. But I could have easily made that logo with another service. ChatGPT serves the same role to me as dozens of other replaceable Internet services that I probably duck into on a weekly basis (e.g., random finance websites, meme generators) but have no essential need for whatsoever. And if I did have an essential need for it, there are at least four well-funded competitors with all the same capabilities, and modestly weaker open weight models. It is really your view that "any service you use at least once a week must be really important to you?" I bet if you sat down and looked at your web history, you'd find dozens that aren't. (PS in the course of writing this post I was horrified to find out that I'd started a subscription to the damn thing in 2024 on a different Google account just to fool around with it, and forgot to cancel it, which I just did.)

ikiris 2y ago

I think you're in fact wildly out of touch with the general populace and how much they use AI tools to make their work easier.