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Have those billions of dollars produced a single viable product?

threecheese 1y ago
I spend less time on web search, I suppose. But in trade I need to pay for it, while still providing my behavior data to the surveillance capitalism platforms. It’s also improved my ability to analyze data, generating graphs and insights. But I still need to run that last mile myself, because I can’t fully trust its output. Same for web search actually, when I have a need to be comprehensive.
- bandrami 1y ago
  But has that resulted in you making a commercially viable product? That's the step that still seems to be missing
  - threecheese 1y ago
    If AI companies can save $2 to pocket $.01 - across the entire market of human effort - then we have choice and no stake. We arent the customer, we’re the tangible good.
    - bandrami 1y ago
      Why would we need "AI companies"? Isn't this supposed to supercharge individual developers? But all I see people making with it is tooling for AI systems. Literally nobody's made a text editor or MIDI sequencer with it and just put the result on Github?
NitpickLawyer 1y ago
Is this in jest? Chatgpt in itself is a viable product (based on how many active paying users they have). And then there's code w/ the myriad of implementations. Unless you've been hiding under a rock since 2023, we went from "cute toy, look it even looks like python" to "well, this agent-built, zero intervention, scribbled notes prompt to full-stack application probably has some security bugs, so be careful" real quick.
- bandrami 1y ago
  OK, so where are these applications it has built? What’s a good case study I can look at?
- crowbahr 1y ago
  ChatGPT loses money on every single subscriber, even the $200/mo ones. That's not a viable business - that's still a VC funded growth mode startup.
calebkaiser 1y ago
The number of software engineers using IDEs like Cursor is staggering. Among knowledge workers in general, ChatGPT is used widely for basically any task that requires writing or researching. This is obviously not going to be true for every single knowledge worker in every single role, and it seems that you don't find it particularly useful, but the volume of paying users is hard to dismiss out of hand.
- bandrami 1y ago
  I don't doubt it's widely used, what I don't see is any productivity increase among knowledge workers since its adoption. Are you aware of any signs of that?

I spend less time on web search, I suppose. But in trade I need to pay for it, while still providing my behavior data to the surveillance capitalism platforms. It’s also improved my ability to analyze data, generating graphs and insights. But I still need to run that last mile myself, because I can’t fully trust its output. Same for web search actually, when I have a need to be comprehensive.

bandrami 1y ago
But has that resulted in you making a commercially viable product? That's the step that still seems to be missing
- threecheese 1y ago
  If AI companies can save $2 to pocket $.01 - across the entire market of human effort - then we have choice and no stake. We arent the customer, we’re the tangible good.
  - bandrami 1y ago
    Why would we need "AI companies"? Isn't this supposed to supercharge individual developers? But all I see people making with it is tooling for AI systems. Literally nobody's made a text editor or MIDI sequencer with it and just put the result on Github?

NitpickLawyer 1y ago

Is this in jest? Chatgpt in itself is a viable product (based on how many active paying users they have). And then there's code w/ the myriad of implementations. Unless you've been hiding under a rock since 2023, we went from "cute toy, look it even looks like python" to "well, this agent-built, zero intervention, scribbled notes prompt to full-stack application probably has some security bugs, so be careful" real quick.

bandrami 1y ago
OK, so where are these applications it has built? What’s a good case study I can look at?
crowbahr 1y ago
ChatGPT loses money on every single subscriber, even the $200/mo ones. That's not a viable business - that's still a VC funded growth mode startup.

calebkaiser 1y ago

The number of software engineers using IDEs like Cursor is staggering. Among knowledge workers in general, ChatGPT is used widely for basically any task that requires writing or researching. This is obviously not going to be true for every single knowledge worker in every single role, and it seems that you don't find it particularly useful, but the volume of paying users is hard to dismiss out of hand.

bandrami 1y ago
I don't doubt it's widely used, what I don't see is any productivity increase among knowledge workers since its adoption. Are you aware of any signs of that?