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> This was one of the most successful product launches of all time. They signed up 100 million new user accounts in a week! They had a single hour where they si
by adrian17 1y ago
> This was one of the most successful product launches of all time. They signed up 100 million new user accounts in a week! They had a single hour where they signed up a million new accounts, as this thing kept on going viral again and again and again.
Awkwardly, I never heard of it until now. I was aware that at some point they added ability to generate images to the app, but I never realized it was a major thing (plus I already had an offline stable diffusion app on my phone, so it felt less of an upgrade to me personally). With so much AI news each week, feels like unless you're really invested in the space, it's almost impossible to not accidentally miss or dismiss some big release.
- azinman2 1y agoExcept this went very mainstream. Lots of turn myself into a muppet, what is the human equivalent for my dog, etc. TikTok is all over this. It really is incredible.
- thierrydamiba 1y agoThe big trend was around the ghiblification of images. Those images were everywhere for a period of time.
- Jedd 1y agoYeah, but so were the bored ape NFTs - none of these ephemeral fads are any indication of quality, longevity, legitimacy, or interest.
- mrkurt 1y agoIf we try really hard, I think we can make an exhaustive list of what viral fads on the internet are not. You made a small start. none of these ephemeral fads are any indication of quality, longevity, legitimacy, interest, substance, endurance, prestige, relevance, credibility, allure, staying-power, refinement, or depth.
- Aurornis 1y ago100 million people didn’t sign up to make that one image meme and then never use it again. That many signups is impressive no matter what. The attempts to downplay every aspect of LLM popularity are getting really tiresome.
- jodrellblank 1y agoI think it sounds far more likely that 100M people signed up to poke at the latest viral novelty and create one meme, than that 100M people suddenly discovered they had a pressing long-term need for AI images all on the same day. Doesn’t it?
- gretch 1y agoIt's neither of these options in this false dichotomy. 100M people signed up and did at least 1 task. Then, most likely some % of them discovered it was a useful thing (if for nothing else than just to make more memes), and converted into a MAU. If I had to use my intuition, I would say it's 5% - 10%, which represents a larger product launch than most developers will ever participate in, in the context of a single day. Of course the ongoing stickiness of the MAU also depends on the ability of this particular tool to stay on top amongst increasing competition.
- oblio 1y agoApparently OpenAI is losing money like crazy on this and their conversion rates to paid are abysmal, even for the cheaper licenses. And not even their top subscription covers its cost. Uber at a 10x scale. I should add that compared to the hype, at a global level Uber is a failure. Yes, it's still a big company, yes, it's profitable now, but I think it was launched 10+ years ago and it's barely becoming net profitabile over it's existence now and shows no signs of taking over the world. Sure, it's big in the US and a few specific markets. But elsewhere it's either banned for undermining labor practices or has stiff local competition or it's just not cost competitive and it won't enter the market because without the whole "gig economy" scam it's just a regular taxi company with a better app.
- baq 1y agoIt’s hard to think of a worse analogy TBH. My wife is using ChatGPT to change photos (still is to this day), she didn’t use it or any other LLM until that feature hit. It is a fad, but it’s also a very useful tool. Ape NFTs are… ape NFTs. Useless. Pointless. Negative value for most people.
- senthil_rajasek 1y ago"My wife is using ChatGPT to change photos (still is to this day), she didn’t use it or any other LLM until that feature hit." This is deja vu, except instead of ChatGPT to edit photos it was instagram a decade ago.
- jauntywundrkind 1y agoApplying some filters and adding some overlay text is something some folks did, but there's such a massive creative world that's opened up, where all we have to do is ask.
- baq 1y agoYou either haven’t tried it or are just trolling.
- djhn 1y agoI tried it and I don’t get it. What and where are the legal usecases? What can you do with these low-resolution images?
- senthil_rajasek 1y agoI am contrasting how instagram filters gave users some control and increased user base and how today editing photos with LLMs is doing the same and pulling in a wider user base.
- Jedd 1y agoI would note that I was replying to a comment about the 'big trend of ghiblification' of images. Reproducing a certain style of image has been a regular fad since profile pictures became a thing sometime last century. I was not meaning to suggest that large language & diffusion models are fads. (I do think their capabilities are poorly understood and/or over-estimated by non-technical and some technical people alike, but that invites a more nuanced discussion.) While I'm sure your wife is getting good value out of the system, whether it's a better fit for purpose, produces a better quality, or provides a more satisfying workflow -- than say a decent free photo editor -- or whether other tools were tried but determined to be too limited or difficult, etc -- only you or her could say. It does feel like a small sample set, though.
- micromacrofoot 1y agothey're not but I'm already seeing ai generated images on billboards for local businesses, they're in production workflows now and they aren't going anywhere
- sandspar 1y agoI just don't understand how people can see "100 million signups in a week" and immediately dismiss it. We're not talking about fidget spinners. I don't get why this sentiment is so common here on HackerNews. It's become a running joke in other online spaces, "HackerNews commenters keep saying that AI is a nothingburger." It's just a groupthink thing I guess, a kneejerk response.
- pintxo 1y agoI assume, when people dismiss it, they are not looking at it through the business lens and the 100m user signups KPI, but they are dismissing it on technical grounds, as an LLM is just a very big statistical database which seems incapable of solving problems beyond (impressive looking) text/image/video generation.
- sandspar 1y agoMakes sense. Although I think that's an error. TikTok is "just" a video sharing site. Joe Rogan is "just" a podcaster. Dumb things that affect lots of people are important.
- otabdeveloper4 1y ago> We're not talking about fidget spinners. We're talking about Hitler memes instead? I don't understand your feigned outrage. The actual valid commercial use case for generative images hasn't been found yet. (No, making blog spam prettier is not a good use case.)
- stavros 1y agoYou're right, nothing has value unless someone figures out how to make money with it. Except OpenAI, apparently, because the fact that people buy ChatGPT to make images doesn't seem to count as a commercial use case.
- otabdeveloper4 1y agoOpenAI is not profitable and we don't know if it ever will be.
- herval 1y agoThey still are. Instagram is full of accounts posting gpt-generated cartoons (and now veo3 videos). I’ve been tracking the image generation space from day one, and it never stuck like this before
- simonw 1y agoAnecdotally, I've had several conversations with people way outside the hyper-online demographic who have been really enjoying the new ChatGPT image generation - using it for cartoon photos of their kids, to create custom birthday cards etc. I think it's broken out into mainstream adoption and is going to stay there. It reminds me a little of Napster. The Napster UI was terrible, but it let people do something they had never been able to do before: listen to any piece of music ever released, on-demand. As a result people with almost no interest in technology at all were learning how to use it. Most people have never had the ability to turn a photo of their kids into a cute cartoon before, and it turns out that's something they really want to be able to do.
- herval 1y agoDefinitely. It’s not just online either - half the billboards I see now are AI. The posters at school. The “we’re hiring!” ad at the local McDonalds. It’s 100x cheaper and faster than any alternative (stock images, hiring an editor or illustrator, etc), and most non technical people can get exactly what they want in a single shot, these days.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- pinoy420 1y ago[dead]
- haiku2077 1y agoCongratulations, you are almost fully unplugged from social media. This product launch was a huge mainstream event; for a few days GPT generated images completely dominated mainstream social media.
- derwiki 1y agoNot sure if this is sarcasm or sincere, but I will take it as sincere haha. I came back to work from parental leave and everyone had that same Studio Ghiblized image as their Slack photo, and I had no idea why. It turns out you really can unplug from social media and not miss anything of value: if it’s a big enough deal you will find out from another channel.
- dgfitz 1y agoI missed it until this thread. I think I’m proud of myself.
- stavros 1y agoWhy does everyone keep calling news "social media"? Have I missed a trend? Knowing what my friend Steve is up to is social media, knowing what AI is up to is news.
- haiku2077 1y agoYou did miss a trend: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/09/17/more-americans-regularly-get-news-on-tiktok-especially-young-adults/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/09/17/more-amer...
- bufferoverflow 1y agoHave you missed how everyone was Ghiblifying everything?
- adrian17 1y agoI saw that, I just didn't connect it with newly added multimodal image generation. I knew variations of style transfer (or LoRA for SD) were possible for years, so I assumed it exploded in popularity purely as a meme, not due to OpenAI making it much more accessible. Again, I was aware that they added image generation, just not how much of a deal it turned out to be. Think of it like me occasionally noticing merchandise and TV trailers for a new movie without realizing it became the new worldwide box office #1.
- andrepd 1y agoOh you mean the trend of the day on the social media monoculture? I don't take that as an indicator of any significance.
- MattRix 1y agoTo be clear: they already had image generation in ChatGPT, but this was a MUCH better one than what they had previously. Even for you with your stable diffusion app, it would be a significant upgrade. Not just because of image quality, but because it can actually generate coherent images and follow instructions.
- MIC132 1y agoAs impressive as it is, for some uses it still is worse than a local SD model. It will refuse to generate named anime characters (because of copyright, or because it just doesn't know them, even not particularly obscure ones) for example. Or obviously anything even remotely spicy. As someone who mostly uses image generation to amuse myself (and not to post it, where copyright might matter) it's honestly somewhat disappointing. But I don't expect any of the major AI companies to release anything without excessive guardrails.