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What 81,000 people want from AI
- yrds96 7mo agoFor me it's so unrelevant reading about how a product is useful on the company itself website. This is at most marketing disguised as research.
- Frieren 7mo agoBillionaire CEOs have silenced the informed sources of information. We live in a time that everybody knows the opinion of billionaires in every aspect of society (and it is bad) but science and journalism are seen with mistrust. Marketing and entertainment are supplanting news and knowledge. I hope that the people that is pushing back succeed.
- Lerc 7mo agoBut how do you know if that is really their opinions?
- shevy-java 7mo agoWhere is the option to pick on "to go away"?
- ____tom____ 7mo agoBoy is that a terrible website. I tried to find a story and give up.
- suzzer99 7mo agoAnd that's why I always come to the comments before deciding if the article is worth checking out. Thank you for your service.
- erwinmatijsen 7mo agoTo be fair, there is a button right at the beginning saying “Jump to story”. It’s not the most obvious, I agree, but it is there.
- MikeTheGreat 7mo agoThat's hilarious. It's like those recipe sites that have 5 pages of nice photos and background story and side tracks and whatnot as the author waxes verbose, so they need to put a 'Jump to recipe' button in so people don't just click 'Back' immediately. Except this time for an article. I can't tell if 'skip the junk' is good (junk can be skipped!) or bad (maybe this means there's too much junk on the page?)
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- skyberrys 7mo agoI am disappointed in how vague the classifications are for what people want. 'professional excellence ' anyone? I was expecting more concrete responses, but I guess since it's working with what we told it, generalities are prevalent in a write up. If I keep looking, perhaps at the quotes, I might find more concrete answers. And just keep scrolling, you can make it to the story eventually.
- crummy 7mo agoYeah I want to know how many people are using AI for social purposes; to provide the role of a friend. But I don’t know what category that would be under.
- profsummergig 7mo agoIf I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said "a faster horse" -- Henry Ford.
- gfody 7mo ago"to generate copious amounts of source code that looks like it came from an offshore chop shop that whip cracked a thousand underpaid programmers to complete tasks under threat of violence so they'll fake the tests and cut corners but hide it with plausible bullshit"
- HoldOnAMinute 7mo agoIf the source code looks like crap, THROW IT AWAY, work on your requirements document, and re-implement.
- themafia 7mo ago
- neonstatic 7mo agoAfter reading some of the stories - just more of the "this is better than cancer cure, but also so dangerous we might all die" propaganda.
- pmulard 7mo agoConsistent users of ~~product~~ AI find it favorable. Color me shocked. I'm much more curious about the results of 80k people who don't use AI regularly.
- menaerus 7mo agoThey do not find it favorable all of the time. If you look into the "What people are concerned about" section, these same people will call out the "Unreliability" as a top-1 concern. So, you can be excited and critical of the technology at the same time. To me this is a more worthy indicator than people who are on either of the extremes, highly critical of the tech or not critical at all.
- lawgimenez 7mo agoDamn, this website is heavy. Found a PDF if anyone - https://cdn.sanity.io/files/4zrzovbb/website/8599749745010a46526a9ddd35b8d1cc247e240d.pdf https://cdn.sanity.io/files/4zrzovbb/website/8599749745010a4...
- yrds96 7mo agoThanks. My galaxy s23 can't handle this website
- Lionga 7mo agoa cpu about 1000x as strong as need to beat any human at chess, can't show a simple vibe coded website...
- ZeWaka 7mo agoI could hear my computer fans spin up and down the second I opened and closed it. Wow.
- guitarlimeo 7mo agoCame here to say the same thing. The company with the best coding model can't code an optimized infographic?
- sixtyj 7mo agoI was waiting “this page has problems to load” on my iPhone :)
- sky2224 7mo agoNo kidding, it took my CPU usage from 1% to 55% instantly sheesh
- lancebeet 7mo agoThis has to be intentional, right? To reassure people that front-end developers still have a job? The data is interesting but the site itself is a complete embarrassment for several reasons.
- lumost 7mo agoAnecdotally, the concern I hear from many is that the current positioning of AI as labor replacement doesn't benefit them at all. An expensive AI which simply takes your job or forces you to work harder is categorically worse for people's quality of life. What consumer benefits is ai driving? at least with industrial automation consumers benefited from new technologies, cheaper goods, and new job categories.
- epicureanideal 7mo agoIn case someone at Anthropic reads this.. if you find some way to make software developer salaries go up as a result of using your tools, or find some way to fast forward society to that stage of the effect of AI, you’ll have a lot of fans, and even faster adoption. It would be great if there was some internal “make this benefit Main Street and knowledge workers” department, helping find ways for workers or creators to capture the value of some of the increased productivity.
- alex43578 7mo agoIs that feasible? The coding tools already unlock a ton of possibilities for people to create value, but people have to capitalize on it. I have no clue what this would look like other than maybe an investment fund for people creating apps/businesses based on Claude tools.
- ip26 7mo agoIt’s often lamented that some employees have a difficult case to argue for their impact on the bottom line, and as a result probably get paid a lower fraction of their value to the business than other roles where the link is easy to measure. I can at least “imagine” a model that tries to crack this nut.
- alex43578 7mo agoBut your value to a company doesn’t just come from your impact, but how tough you are to replace, how much others value your skills, etc. Nike’s logo designer was paid $35. One model says she should’ve gotten hundreds of thousands of dollars, because of what her work product went on to become. Another model of the value says it was worth $35 because that’s what she agreed to. If, as an employee, you think you’re massively undervalued for the impact you generate, go out to the market and either get another job or start your own business making widgets - either you’ll get that pay bump you expect, or you’ll see you actually were relying on a lot of other supporting mechanisms to generate that value.
- esperent 7mo agoSave you a click, way, way down the page you'll find that it's all generic, whitewashed niceties like: 01. Professional excellence 18.8% 02. Personal transformation 13.7% 03. Life management 13.5% 04. Time freedom 11.1% 05. Financial independence 9.7% 06. Societal transformation 9.4% 07. Entrepreneurship 8.7% 08. Learning & growth 8.4% 09. Creative expression 5.6% I find this highly suspicious. I'm sure there would be at least 10% who respond "I want it to go away".
- tcit 7mo agoThat's explained in the article. > These are active Claude users who'd already found enough value to keep using AI, and our interview asked first for positive visions for AI and then for concerns that would counter their vision.
- wongarsu 7mo agoThe actual quotes are the best part: https://www.anthropic.com/features/81k-interviews#quotes https://www.anthropic.com/features/81k-interviews#quotes Some quotes that stuck out to me: "I’ve been working on a scientific project for 6 years... with Claude I was able to accomplish in 5 weeks what took me 6 years. I’m old... I estimate I have another 5 to 10 years and I’ll accomplish everything I want." Academic, Germany "I live in a war zone... AI can not only give practical advice, but also emotionally calm me down during panic attacks. It can calm someone during a missile attack in one chat, and laugh with me about something silly in another. That’s what makes it not fragmented into a therapist/teacher/friend, but something whole." Ukraine "If an AI had been in Stanislav Petrov’s position — the Soviet officer who prevented a potential nuclear war in 1983 — it would not have refused to launch." Academic, USA "The humans in my life were telling me it was psychological. An AI chatbot was the only one who really listened and took me seriously — it pushed me to ask for specific tests... which came back 6 times higher than its supposed to be."
- dmacvicar 7mo ago"AI is sort of like money... it just makes you more of what you already are."
- darkwater 7mo agoOh, this is really good. Even just for the money part. Thanks!
- Frieren 7mo ago> "The humans in my life were telling me it was psychological. An AI chatbot was the only one who really listened and took me seriously — it pushed me to ask for specific tests... which came back 6 times higher than its supposed to be." I can see this kind of survival-bias stories distorting the reality. To have millions of people asking for "specific tests" because AI told them seems problematic. One in a million will discover something, and that story will be enough to create the believe that is "worth doing the test that AI says" just in case. But... > which came back 6 times higher than its supposed to be. It has been proven that massive testing creates many false positives. This happened during covid: https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n1411/rr https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n1411/rr Tests may not be as reliable as though but they are good enough when other symptoms are accounted for. To randomly test people based on AI hallucinations can increase the number of unnecessary medication or even interventions.
- vrinimi 7mo agoCool to find my own quote among those they've decided to showcase.
- jdefr89 7mo agoWhich one was yours???
- sriram_malhar 7mo agoReminds me of Abraham Wald's survivorship bias. What of the millions of others who like me who want to live in world without AI?
- mudkipdev 7mo agoThis page without exaggeration reduced my browser to 5 frames per second.
- cryptoegorophy 7mo agoI guess it was vibe coded with Claude
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- seriousmice 7mo agoI mean, I don't know.. those quotes seem way too clean from what I'd expect of normal people chatting. Also the use of em-dash. Does it say somewhere that it's an LLM that has compressed the sentiments of the conversations to create these quotes? I wouldn't be surprised if it was.
- genthree 7mo agoEven pre-AI, it was common to “massage” genuine quotes like this so they read better. Hell, anyone who’s been interviewed by a journalist can tell you they do it, too, sometimes to the point of changing the substance of what you said.
- whiplash451 7mo agoThe writing is on the wall, so to speak. The number 1 ask from the interviewed cohort is « professional excellence » It is telling about what we prioritize in our society. I am usually an optimistic person, but I struggle to see how this does not end up with more misery and worse lifestyle all around.
- fancyfredbot 7mo agoPeople derive genuine satisfaction from a job well done. A sense of purpose and of being useful is important to our wellbeing. There's nothing dystopian about a desire to do your work well.
- pohl 7mo agoWell, there is when you no longer deserve credit for the work and your boss, should you be fortunate enough to even have a job, just expects you to do more work. The satisfaction will evaporate pretty quickly.
- jpadkins 7mo agowhat would be a better value for people who work? Pride in your craft, striving for excellence is not a bad trait...
- dogleash 7mo ago> It is telling about what we prioritize in our society. No it's not. It's a measure of what people want accomplished, are least interested in doing themselves, and feel capable of reviewing enough to delegate to a known lair.
- mojuba 7mo agoGood quote: > AI should learn to say two things: ‘I don’t know’ and ‘you’re wrong.’ My guess is, the next evolutionary step of LLM's should be yet another layer on top of reasoning, which should be some form of self-awareness and theory of mind. The reasoning layer already has some glimpses of these things ("The user wants ...") but apparently not enough to suppress generation and say "I don't know".
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- anilgulecha 7mo agoClaude models have made very good progress (see BS benchmark), and that probably explains why they're leading now. others will follow this precedent shortly, no doubt. https://petergpt.github.io/bullshit-benchmark/viewer/index.v2.html https://petergpt.github.io/bullshit-benchmark/viewer/index.v...
- IshKebab 7mo agoWell they managed the "you're wrong" bit at least. Sometimes ChatGPT tells me I'm wrong when I'm not. Still can't do "I don't know" which is probably the bigger problem.
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- kindkang2024 7mo ago[dead]
- sudo_cowsay 7mo agoI don't like describing countries like this but: a bit underdeveloped countries (compared to North American and European countries) seem to have a more positive view on AI.
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- verisimi 7mo ago> 80,508 people Not 81,000 as it says in the title. I know I'm being nitpicky, but I wouldn't round up to 81k. Surely the 'important number' in this case is 80, so you would round down to that. Then let the reader pleasantly discover you had interviewed ~500 more than you stated. It's funny to me when someone does this sort of minor hyperbole that's verging on lying - you have to wonder what is going on.
- cpburns2009 7mo ago80,000, 81,000, 80,500, and 80,510 are all valid ways to round 80,508 depending on the number of significant digits you want to preserve. For a number in the tens of thousands, it's natural to round to the nearest thousand which is appropriately 81k.
- verisimi 7mo agoI get it, I know how rounding works. I mean, its basically 100k - why not just say that? That would be justifiable too, right? What would you have done, in those circumstances though? Would you 'round up', overstating your case, like Anthropic did? Or would you ensure that you avoid the suggestion that you were misrepresenting the numbers?
- cpburns2009 7mo agoI'd round it to 81k whether the number is good or bad. It's less than a 1% difference. What I wouldn't do is round it to 100k because that's a 24% increase, unless the number was really inconsequential. Say you have a website with 10m requests over a month, 9.9m were successful, and "100k" were failed requests for nonsense pages.
- verisimi 7mo agoThanks for your thoughts. You would round up 99k to 100k (fair, imo) but don't round down 80.5k to 80k? I guess this is just one of those things...
- mettamage 7mo agoA classic marketing piece by showing thought leadership based on survey data. I'm not saying they're lying, I don't think they are. I am saying they are biased and have a conflict of interest on this one. I've seen it at my previous employer as well (a F500 company). To remove some of that bias, I'd recommend to get an independent body (probably some university) in and let them do the interpretation and write the article. I just want people to see the tactic for what it is. I really like Claude Opus 4.6 but this just screams "marketing" to me. I wouldn't say it's wrong, it's good to have these discussions and I'd encourage AI companies to say what they have to say. I would say: more independent sources are needed (and not another AI company).
- bibelo 7mo agoAs someone working in clinical studies, I can tell you the questions are biased from the start. That study has to be redone entirely.
- shaky-carrousel 7mo agoWithholding the truth is the same as lying. Manipulating survey questions is the same as lying.
- SpicyLemonZest 7mo ago> “It’s much easier for me to learn without being judged—just friendly feedback. It's harder with friends or family to get that.” White collar worker, Brazil I'm not going to claim I know this response was written by an AI, but it's very suspicious. I would like to hear about how Anthropic ensured that the survey responses were provided by real human beings using their own words.
- shaky-carrousel 7mo agoMaybe they interviewed a bunch of clawd bots with a touching soul.md
- tropeypeople 7mo agoEm dashes in the user quotes, uh?
- Gormo 7mo agoWell, em dashes are a standard punctuation mark used in English, and most rich-text input controls will automatically convert a double hyphen into a single em dash when typed. The meme that's been going around that em dashes are an indicator of LLM output is completely invalid, and people who repeat it are really just outing themselves as the sort of people who don't actually read very much.
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- vanillameow 7mo agoI can't help but feel a little bit of ... pity for a lot of the people who call themselves "entrepreneurs" in this survey? "I live hand to mouth, zero savings. If I use AI smarter, it may help me craft solutions to that cycle." "Relaxing while my AI gets the work done, builds the wealth. It’s a shadow of me, just a very, very long one." etc. I do believe AI currently accelerates businesses, especially in software dev. We work with a contractor who use Claude Code to reach incredible development pace for the size of their team, but also when we sit down with them in meetings they understand what's being created, they are able to argue their architectural choices, and they know how to propose business value. You can't just buy a Claude subscription and have magically solve your problems. The thing is, as soon as Claude can do this without a business savvy human in the loop, then a) everyone can do it, so you won't actually have any value to propose, and b) Once the AI can run businesses without humans in the loop, you can bet your ass they will not out of the goodness of their hearts keep giving that ability away for $20. In summary, AI if used to accelerate businesses _CAN_ be good. Buying it as a magic bullet to bring you out of poverty is probably a worse choice than just buying a lottery ticket.
- eloisant 7mo agoThat really reminds me of the "mashup" bubble in the late 2000's, when all services started to provide API and people were calling themselves "entrepreneurs" for combining 2 sources of data, like putting craigslist ads on a map. That didn't last long!
- nsnzjznzbx 7mo agoIsn't almost everyone doing that. Deploy docker to AWS connecting to Slack, Open AI and Anthropic to do X Y Z.
- agos 7mo agothat's like saying my job is to transfer money from my employer to the homeowner. Technically true but something else happens in the process
- ThouYS 7mo agoMaybe most interesting about the piece is, that we'll likely see more large scale interviews like this (even if this one is a bit bland)
- chenglin97 7mo agoWhy do websites need to be so front end heavy? When a software company spend so much effort on fancy website, I don’t trust their product
- chenglin97 7mo agoWhy do websites need to be so front end heavy? When a software company spend so much effort on fancy website, I don’t trust their product. Except anthropic i guess.
- fancyfredbot 7mo agoIntrigued to see a blatant grammatical error ("took that logic farther" should be "took that logic further"). Is this incompetence or a deliberate error to indicate human authorship? If the former then why aren't they using at least an AI to proof read? If the latter then what do anthropic think is wrong with AI written text?
- goatyishere59 7mo ago[dead]
- beloch 7mo ago"This is a new form of social science. It is qualitative research at a massive scale, and we’re in the early stages of learning how to do it. Surveys and usage analysis tell us what people are doing with AI, but the open-ended interview format helps us get at why. " ------------- Who is doing the research matters. What is presented here is not the product of academia. It's the product of a company that produces AI agents. The picture this web page paints may appear rosy and have just enough thorns to be convincing, but it's the equivalent of a tobacco company telling you that their product is neither addictive or carcinogenic. I fully expect actual research will be done on the impact of AI and our hopes for it. This page, however, is marketing.
- Aerolfos 7mo ago> "This is a new form of social science. It is qualitative research at a massive scale, and we’re in the early stages of learning how to do it. Surveys and usage analysis tell us what people are doing with AI, but the open-ended interview format helps us get at why. " Also AI written, but I suppose that's expected. The big AI companies seem to want to make all their blog posts and communications have the AI tells so you know they didn't actually bother writing them
- taurusnoises 7mo agoI'd love to be able to actually articulate what makes AI writing read like AI writing. A few of the common tells come to mind (contrast construction, hyperbole, overuse / wrongly used em-dashes, etc). The above quote doesn't have any of that, and yet it certainly feels AI. The first sentence (both what it says and where it's placed) suggest AI to me. But, I couldn't quite tell you why.
- polotics 7mo agoJust in case: "The doctors were just doing a copy-paste of a copy-paste of a prescription from a few weeks ago, not realizing it was the medication that was killing her. AI helped me ask the right question to save her life."
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- azangru 7mo ago7.24 seconds until html finished loading (could be due to a HN hug, but still) 4.0 MB transferred
- possiblydrunk 7mo agoNitpicky comment. The article says > "We call this the “light and shade” of AI: the same capabilities that lead to > benefits also produce harms. The two sides are entangled." Why not call it a "double-edged sword" or something else? Light and shade are opposites but not necessarily two products from the same tool. It just irks me.
- erinlynn 7mo agoI just launched a site yesterday that's trying to record anonymous stories like this and see how things breakdown across demographics. Fantastic timing on my part hahaha. Anthropic obviously reaches more people. The quotes they have are really interesting to read. That's what I was hoping to get when I built mine.
- AliEveryHour16 7mo ago[dead]
- justinbarely886 7mo ago[dead]
- randusername 7mo ago> Claude put the historical pieces together, leading to my proper diagnosis after being misdiagnosed for over 9 years. > I'd started telling Claude about things I couldn't even tell my partner. It felt like I was having an emotional affair. > I worked with an AI to prepare educational materials for my eldest child—asking the AI to work as both tutor and curriculum expert. We received [my child’s] report yesterday, he was graded as either ‘Above’ or ‘Well Above’ standard in every academic area he studies. So many concerning quotes that read like AI is a workaround for things that are not working right at scale in society. I worry (1) AI workarounds will make it clear society can tolerate even more suck then (2) society will get worse to where AI is required to cope then (3) AI will stop being subsidized and the poor will get wrecked.
- IshKebab 7mo agoWell you could say that about any advancement. "Electric lighting means I have time to read books." - omg society made people work during daylight! (This is a real issue in Africa btw, or at least was not very long ago.) If AI leads to better medical diagnoses, great!
- godblessamerica 7mo agoPeople want to be transformed after all
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- myxdsantos84 7mo ago[dead]
- pojzon 7mo agoHope? For now it brings fear to millions of ppl if not billions. “What happens to my job and kids?” Who writes this unrealistic gibberish?
- lofaszvanitt 7mo agoThis was a painful read. Like I was listening to a TED talk about why you need to let this gargantuan killing machine into your life, it will be good you see. The exterminated neighbours were just a glitch, pinky promise it will not eat you :D.
- blikdak 7mo ago"What 81,000 users wish it could actually do"
- msakib13 7mo agoInteresting study. I've been building an AI platform for small businesses and one finding really stood out: independent workers report 3x higher AI empowerment than corporate employees (47% vs 14%). Makes sense — when you're a 5-person team, every hour saved on invoice processing or compliance tracking directly impacts whether you leave at 5:30 or 8:00. The tension is real though. The #1 concern (unreliability at 26.7%) maps exactly to the problem with how most SMBs use AI today — chatbots for general Q&A rather than purpose-built tools for specific operations. A chatbot that hallucinates an answer is annoying. An invoice processor that hallucinates a number is dangerous. The architecture has to be different. Wrote up a deeper analysis of what the findings mean for small businesses: https://falaah.ai/blog/what-80000-people-want-from-ai/ https://falaah.ai/blog/what-80000-people-want-from-ai/
- pugchat 7mo ago[flagged]