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In articles like this I’m always surprised that author did not take 5 minutes to think that well, maybe I’m living in a bubble and there’s lots of people that a
by azan_ 2y ago
In articles like this I’m always surprised that author did not take 5 minutes to think that well, maybe I’m living in a bubble and there’s lots of people that are actually excited about AI.
- tayo42 2y agoWhat are people excited about right now?
- johnfn 2y agoI'm pretty excited about Cursor.
- vntok 2y agoHaving a smart-but-no-smartass intern by my side, that is always eager to help, that is at the very least superficially knowledgeable about most things, that autonomously gets better at absolutely everything non-physical (yet), that is loyal yet immediately replaceable should I get bored with it or should a better intern pop up overnight (literally happened yesterday with qwen3), that never tires or gets annoyed at me.... well that's pretty exciting.
- SrslyJosh 2y agoIn other words, a slave. =)
- vntok 2y agoWhat a weird and deshumanizing thing to say. Slaves are definitely people, a machine definitely isn't. Moreover, slaves aren't productive over the medium/long term. You don't get useful and lengthy performance from raw coercion, the same way you don't get truthful and actionable intelligence from torturing prisoners. So no, an LLM has very little in common with a slave.
- saidinesh5 2y agoGoogle Gemini for what used to be Amazon Alexa tasks, chatgpt image filters (that Studio Ghibli one?), YouTube AI channels putting out content like If Danny Devito was the little mermaid, if Linkin park sang song X... Etc..
- cruzcampo 2y agoAll of those feel like gimmicks imo. Fun, sure. But exciting? Revolutionary?
- justlikereddit 2y agoI like to to use LLMs for rude poetry. No one is going to get a billion dollar investment due to that. It's why all the corporate speak and marketing is harping on about productivity, robot takeover and deus ex machina in corporate language. Normal people will use it for creative writing aid, scrapbooking and other extremely unprofitable non-technical stuff.
- saidinesh5 2y agoI mean those were the items my non technical friends shared with me so far... Personally - i was able to get mockups of interior designs based on the photo of a building under construction using chatgpt - this would've cost me both time and money if i went to a real designer. Gemini has been summarising meetings i could not attend (scheduling conflicts etc...) and saving me from hours of watching meeting recordings. I was really skeptical of things because of the horrible results I've had 2 years ago with copilot and chatgpt, but things have improved drastically. To the point that it's already empowering certain people/jobs while having the opposite effect on others. Is it perfect? Nope. The mockups did have weird glitches. But they were 75% there and good enough for the task I wanted. The meeting notes were as good as a real human. So it's definitely eroding more of these kinds of jobs and so we are
- SrslyJosh 2y agoNone of those things seem useful, and I'm including the Alexa tasks.
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- EA-3167 2y agoThey probably looked at the biggest player in the game, OpenAI, losing money hand-over-fist and concluded that a lack of demand must play a role. And they're right. They cited consumer research to show the ambivalence of consumers towards these products as well.
- nritchie 2y agoI wonder the complete opposite. On Hacker News, people are excited about AI. Outside this bubble, in the real world, less so.
- johnfn 2y agoHN is a highly technical audience, and AI is showing the most benefit on highly technical tasks, so it seems logical to me that HN would be more excited than "the real world". (What is the real world, btw? Do people on HN not exist in the real world?)
- bigstrat2003 2y ago> AI is showing the most benefit on highly technical tasks It must be truly abysmal everywhere else then, because it doesn't show much value on highly technical tasks when I try.
- johnfn 1y agoIs it really unthinkable that you could be using it in domains different than those that provide value to other people?
- Conscat 2y agoMy sister, who is a pretty technical kinesiology PhD student, does not know how to input Alt+F4 and insists that is esoteric knowledge. There's a litmus test for how out of touch HN users may be with the way normal people use computers.
- falcor84 2y agoExactly, and of course there's a relevant xkcd (Average Familiarity) https://xkcd.com/2501/ https://xkcd.com/2501/
- paulkrush 2y agoI meet a non-technical woman using it all day long to help manage a landscaping business. This was a data point for me.
- SrslyJosh 2y agoAmazing. Presented with a study that found that the general public isn't excited about AI-enshittifying everything around them, you ask "What if people who aren't excited about AI are in a bubble?"
- azan_ 2y agoI think you should read the study before jumping to this conslucsion. The fact that people are not excited about incorporating AI in shitty way into some apps does not imply that people are not excited about AI.
- ksec 2y agoExactly. People are actually paying to use ChartGPT. 10 Millions subscribers and 1 million in Business and Enterprise. Number 1 in Productivity Download on App Store. My 10 years old nephew are using ChartGPT to do all sort of things, and she told me her whole class are using it. I have heard a few real life conversation about ChartGPT being what Google ( as in search engine ) should have been all along. And these people dont know a thing about C, Java, CPU or RAM. They are not tech people. Over the decades the moment I hear real life conversation from non tech people in public talking about certain tech and being somewhat enthusiastic about it, is the moment that piece of tech has reached escape velocity. And it will go mainstream. And somewhat strangely enough, I only started using more ChartGPT because every non-tech people are starting to use it. And they use it much more than I do. Just like people laughed about "Smartphone" as in iPhone era. Lots of tech people including i believe MKBHD only got their first Smartphone with iPhone 4, most consumer are even later. While I have watched the introduction of iPhone Keynote a dozen times before the thing was even shipped. The adoption curve of any tech will never be linear. The example pointed out at the start of the article is somewhat bizarre. AWS is only pausing Colo. Apple Intelligence has more to blame with Apple themselves rather than AI. Intel ( or PC ) not selling AI enhanced chip is because consumer dont buy AI hardware, they buy AI functions. And so far nothing on Windows OS seems to be AI enhanced and specifically requires the AI Intel CPU. And I am not even Pro AI or AI Optimist to see all that.
- awkward 2y agoAI excitement is all supply side. Lots of people are excited to automate their own labor and smooth out production. Very few people want to accept raw AI generated slop. That isn't pure doomerism - there's plenty of room for AI assist, and people like using AI experiences themselves. AI as a product is here to stay, but the second order of products openly using AI is showing it's limits.
- rsynnott 2y agoThe data kind of hints that it is the opposite: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2025/04/03/how-the-us-public-and-ai-experts-view-artificial-intelligence/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2025/04/03/how-the-us-p... The general public do not appear to be great fans; it is arguably the _industry_ which is the bubble.