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Google’s ATLAS is a look at how people are using AI
- OuterVale 3mo agoUnderstanding the AI Economy, brought to you by Google, one of the companies with the largest vested interests in the AI economy.
- miroljub 3mo agoAnd yet, it seems like Google doesn't understand the AI Economy :) But it doesn't prevent them from pretending they do Y)
- Xalutiono 3mo agoThey release real numbers from their practical expereince running on of the biggest ai based agents on the whole planet. You wrote a snarky comment without content. Would love to actually have a real discussion about critisism like this (not because i'm affiliated with google at all, but because I like to expand my knowledge through discussions)
- trollbridge 3mo agoPlease engage in good faith. Google: 1. Is not remotely unbiased. 2. Does not have desirable models, coding harnesses, or data centre capacity for AI (they rent space from SpaceX). 3. Seems to be lagging far behind in all things AI. 4. Has serious problems with internal adoption of AI tools (such as banning most team members from using competitors, but allowing the DeepMind team to use Claude, etc.) Their opinion from their PR team is not just that credible or valuable.
- Xalutiono 3mo agoOf course a company is not unbiased. I don't blindly just take the information of an article, i add it to my signals and evaluate it. But the dismissivness of a normal / small blog post is weird. You can't just complelty ignore and dismiss one of the biggest companies on the planet who is also one which pushes research of it too (aka deepmind) 2. They do have gemini which I don't use for coding but I use daily for other things, it works well. They have massive data center capacity, that they are now renting space from SpaceX shows how big the demand is. 3. yes weirdly enough but doesn't matter too much, Google at least can just afford the investment in comparision to any other company playing that game. My assumption is that on one side google is just bad in releasing products (antigravity vs. gemini cli vs. unable to buy AI tokens as a normal user etc.) but also that they might just have a broader field were they want to use AI. Claude/Anthropic can focus on coding a lot to push that frontier while google might focus more on gemini assistent and also for coding and using gemini for GCP etc. But doesn't matter still, google was fundamental for research into LLMs. 4. No clue how this is a problem relevant to the AI Economy. Deepmind might be more independent from Google itself, Google has an internal AI coding system before the LLM stuff became popular so Google has a clear incentive of keeping the feedback loop internal. Independent of this, google is well known to control their whole ecosystem starting from the mainboard firmware. Im not even aware of any other company on the planet doing it like this. For me its valuable enough to have a quick look. I would probably not have posted it on HN or voted up. I'm more surprised about the generic negative sentiments people communicate here instead of having nice discussions with value.
- tomelders 3mo agoIn other words - "We don't like the reporting around how bad the economics of AI are, so we're cherry picking our own data, presenting it out of context, and asking you to look at it through rose tinted spectacles."
- Xalutiono 3mo agoMy startup is using AI every day. My company (not my startup, my normal day to day work) spends millions on ai token every month. I use AI every day for different things. AI/GenAI disrupted already a lot of peoples jobs in real life. And Google states very early "However within jobs, people are using AI selectively: in a typical job AI is used for only ~21% of tasks." Did you read the article? Can you point out specific things you really don't like and think they are cherry picking?
- estetlinus 3mo ago> My company spends millions on ai token every month How much profit does the AI company make from those tokens?
- Xalutiono 3mo agoI don't know and that wasn't the point I made. My company is a two digit billion dollar revenue company in the top 100. My point was that real companies pay real money for AI. But i use it daily at work and a lot of co-workers do too.
- bombcar 3mo agoMy company is ten quadrillion dollars revenue (per second), you just haven't heard of it (it's from Canada). And we spend $3b/yr just to make sure our I is capitalized.
- Xalutiono 3mo agoWhy are you so snarky? I don't want to share my company name (obvously?!) but i'm willing to share that one number to give more insight. Feel free to not believe me. Your company doesn't use AI at all? You are unable to use it?
- cryo32 3mo agoThis is basically reading about heroin adoption from the heroin dealer. I’ll take information from multiple independent analysts please.
- trollbridge 3mo agoMore like the guy who wants to be a heroin dealer but nobody buys his cheap crushed up painkiller pills.
- Xalutiono 3mo agoThis is one of multiply independent analysises. I do not follow your argument. Would you read this and say 'this is now the only truth'? I mean i read it and will add it to multiply other sources. Now i know what / how google seas things and i try to get something from it. i find it very ignorant if one of the biggest ai companies on the planet posts something and its just getting dismissed. You don't have to follow google every word, but it def adds to an overall picture even if you don't take everything as true
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- neom 3mo agoThe full 100 page report: https://ai.google/static/documents/GoogleATLASv1.pdf https://ai.google/static/documents/GoogleATLASv1.pdf
- trentor 3mo agoThat's just weird. I don't get how something like this gets published when I need 8 rounds of approvals for a button.
- vishalrad 3mo ago100000%! Ariane approvals have had more reviews than this
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- ofjcihen 3mo agoLook, say what you will about Ed but when you compare his analysis against numbers and data like what we see from Google here you can’t help but see a difference https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-openai-bubble/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-openai-bubble/
- ACCount37 3mo agoLook, I will say what I want: I'd trust Sam Altman to provide accurate, unbiased information about the present and the future of AI tech before I would trust Ed Zitron to do the same. And no, I wouldn't actually trust Sam "King of the Cannibals" Altman. But I would still expect him to start with far, far more accurate data, and distort it a lot less to suit his narrative than Zitron would. That's how low the bar is. The man made saying "the AI industry is failing" his entire personality. He'll keep saying that regardless of what the AI industry is doing, forever. You can write "tech companies often overpromise and underdeliver" on a post-it note, stick it to a whiteboard, and that will provide about as much perspective as everything Zitron has ever written, or will ever write.
- ofjcihen 3mo agoThat’s fair, but let me ask, how do you answer the numbers that Ed provides? Sure, Ed’s making some kind of money off of subscriptions. Yeah, he’s a personality. But to ignore the deep comparisons, numbers and data that he gathers and provides to back up his analysis feels like sticking your head in the sand. There are other banks and financial entities that are echoing his concerns as well.
- ACCount37 3mo agoThe "numbers and data" are cooked to the limits of available sources, and then twisted further by conjecture and interpretation to lend support to the conclusions they still wouldn't readily support. As a ready-made example: the "AI models are unprofitable, API inference is subsidized, OpenAI is naked" line he keeps stressing. That doesn't seem to be likely even on the basic napkin math estimates. And is also repeatedly refuted by both AI company officials and various AI industry insiders - of varying trustworthiness, and with different incentives. Having "the numbers" isn't the same as having objectivity, and again: I'd trust Altman to have a semblance of objectivity before I would trust Zitron.
- sulam 3mo agoThe study uses Gemini data to draw conclusions about AI usage for economically useful work. Hopefully it is obvious that this is a fatally flawed approach due to inherent bias in limiting your data collection to one model which is uneven in its capabilities (as all models are) and therefore biased in what work people use it for. I might as well write a paper about the economic uses of power tools by analyzing how drill presses are used.
- tdu01 3mo agoA very positive spin. I fear that AI will be a tool for the rich and a toy for the richer. It will sadly divide the people Geographically (rich countries affording data centres and nationalised models) and poorer countries missing out. It will divide socio-economically, the rich affording tokens becomes the land/knowledge owners/hackers and the poor becomes the labourers.
- barrenko 3mo ago+ with nation states becoming poorly run cesspools, we're going to see what happens to that.
- dosisking 3mo agoI think that AI will be a tool for Governments and the Surveillance State, and will be used to implement Communism 2.0. People in countries who shun AI will enjoy more freedom.
- jorisw 3mo agoWhat is Communism 2.0 and how will AI help to implement it?
- rusk 3mo agoHow’s this for a working theory. Economic actors that were established doing the “easy stuff” that got displaced first got a head start on everyone else and started low balling on the harder stuff and that’s why we’re seeing impacts in the parts of the economy that aren’t being directly hit by AI. It could explain why people who know stuff are finding themselves squeezed for cost in every direction even though their specific area defies automation. There is a latency at play here while all the corner cutting of the cost based competitors mount. Not sure what is the outcome when the inevitable correction kicks in but the economic impact will be long lasting as skilled workers leave the industry and we are left with decades of slop to clean up.
- olalonde 3mo agoThese AI threads seem to attract the same kind of repetitive, low-effort dismissals that crypto threads used to.
- meindnoch 3mo agoAnd they will be proven wrong, like with crypto... oh wait.
- 1970-01-01 3mo agoCrypto failed and pivoted. One still cannot pay bills, taxes, buy medicine, transportation, etc. directly with crypto. It is fair to assume the same story will happen to AI.
- jorisw 3mo agoPivoted where?
- isoprophlex 3mo agoBuying drugs, using prediction markets, sending Palestinians money without The Man finding out.
- jorisw 3mo agoSo it pivoted from sending money to sending money...?
- 1970-01-01 3mo agoAgain, it isn't money if it isn't generally accepted. Crypto was forced to pivot into an exotic investment thing that works great if you already have "regular money" to convert and spend. It is not money.
- olalonde 3mo ago
- tonyoconnell 3mo ago"Less than 10% of those interactions fully automate tasks." - that's because they are measuring use of Google's models. People are using Antrophic's models for automation and coding. My wife is from a tribe in the mountains where they live like they live off the land, cooking with fire like they did 1000 years ago. She uses Gemini to learn how to live in the city - book flights and hotels, stuff like that. I use Claude Code every day to automate my tasks. Google has a very different type of user than Antrophic and Open AI.
- therealdrag0 3mo agoAutomation is also a squishy term I’ve been playing around with Hermes agent the last few weeks, and I found it very difficult to find useful things that you can do by itself. And even at work, most of my AI usage is rather interactive other than research task that I can send fire and forget.
- zer00eyz 3mo ago> AI use at work is broad but shallow: Workplace adoption spans all industry sectors and also 68% of all occupations that collectively represent 90% of total U.S. employment. Im sorry but what? Plumbers, electricians, framers, welders, auto workers, hotel staff, restaurant staff are these people using AI in their jobs? Does someone at google think that these very much manual labor jobs are only 10 percent of the work force in the US? There is PEW data, that says 30 percent of us labor force is in manual labor / blue collar jobs. The person you call at 3am to fix your drain, isnt using AI.
- fn-mote 3mo ago> The person you call at 3am to fix your drain, isnt using AI. I am 100% using AI to figure out wtf to do about my 3am plumbing problem. /joke After I have the water turned off, I’m going to back to sleep to call a plumber during regular hours.
- linuxftw 3mo agoA friend of mine is a plumber. They use ChatGPT to write commercial bids. They developed a prompt, feed in some details, and out pops a detailed bid.
- holografix 3mo agoIs this Google’s poorer version of Anthropic’s economic index?
- cube00 3mo agoFor example, automotive technicians and industrial mechanics use AI to interpret complex test results, debug electrical wiring, and inspect machinery for wear. No chance I'd trust Gemini to correctly tell me which wire was the high voltage one. You're absolutely right! I apologize for providing a factually incorrect explanation. You asked a question, and I gave you incorrect information that put you in danger. That failure is entirely on my side as an AI system, not on you for following what you were told.
- cryo32 3mo agoI suspect they’re also lying about the utility there as well. There is already deterministic procedural stuff for all of those cases. Putting a chat bot in front of that is basically fucking stupid.
- theideaofcoffee 3mo agoBut never underestimate the stupidity of an AI psychosis- suffering product manager to shoehorn it into the most batshit insane use cases in search of mOrE ENgagGeMeNt.
- ourmandave 3mo agoThere's a bunch of great techs on youtube whose day job is to not to get electrocuted. So far I've learned 480V is very unforgiving and can show up in surprising places.
- monkeydust 3mo agoVery true - reminded me of this demo* as an example... on the surface looks trivial but potentially life saving. * https://youtu.be/knSkE9ejPl8?t=112 https://youtu.be/knSkE9ejPl8?t=112
- TacticalCoder 3mo ago> No chance I'd trust Gemini to correctly tell me which wire was the high voltage one. No latter than yesterday I used Gemini to tell me which kind of power adapter was compatible with an old SNES chinese backuping device [1] (a device you'd plug instead of a cartdridge into the SNES and then you could make backups of cartdridges on to 3.5 floppy disks. You could then run the games from those backups. Conveniently you could also "backup" your friends' cartdridges.. Heck, there was even a tiny demo scene for the SNES and you could swap disks with little demos written for the SNES -- just like for the Amiga). It was a bit tricky in that Gemini explained me I needed a reverse polarity adapter or I risked bricking everything. Now, granted, the stakes weren't very high but... Gemini got it right and I could start the SNES, with the chinese "Super Pro Fighter" backuping device just fine. [1] this thing: https://videogamedevelopmentdevices.fandom.com/wiki/Super_Pro_Fighter https://videogamedevelopmentdevices.fandom.com/wiki/Super_Pr...
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- ericpauley 3mo agoInteresting to see that Gemini (which I assume wrote this entire article and site) has the exact same over-stylized italic serif preference as Claude does.
- nttylock 3mo ago[flagged]
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- maccard 3mo agoThere is a lot of words here (I haven’t read the full report and I’m assuming it’s heavily AI generated but I will look later). For an article about the AI economy, there is no mention of economy.
- tchalla 3mo agoNever ask a barber if you need a haircut.
- mark_l_watson 3mo agoI share the cynicism here about this article. I think the saddest part of betting our economy on AI is that Google is actually the US-based corporation that is best positioned because so much of their AI efforts are not specifically aimed at software development. At least for now their profit margins are high enough to withstand the high AI costs, but let's wait and see if that lasts.
- gwbas1c 3mo agoIn the bolded text, the "n"s are lighter grey. Anyone know why they did this? Once I saw it, it became too distracting.
- xnx 3mo agoGood eye! If you zoom in the text to a very large size, it looks like the "n" characters have a strange internal border or stroke?
- anygivnthursday 3mo ago86% of AI not used for work - so Gemini is mainly used by consumers, I guess also mostly non-paying. I am not surprised as they are on many Androids nowdays and Android updates recent whats new showcases new Gemini features (or repeat the same ones from earlier) for more people to try, my wife uses it often instead of Google search and sometimes to edit some photos.
- whitelinen 3mo agoOne of the best things about Big Tech stealing all your ideas is archiving the repo and watching their progress stop
- pier25 3mo agoThings aren't going great if Google is investing into... whatever this is.
- goldlinen 3mo agoGoogle/Noam Shazeer coped Ragdoll Studio to a T then act like they’re the innovators in the space lol Notice that nobody who actually innovated on the technology ever speaks on it. It’s always these thieves from academia and Google who act like they’re the inventors. Trying to explain to us - the people they have been ripping off for years - how “AI works” Go home Google
- Xalutiono 3mo agoI'm lost. If you referene Noam Shazeer in context of Character.ai vs. Ragdoll Studio, Noam Shazeer and all other co-authors have done the work for Attention is all you need while working for/at Google. They are for sure one of the current Frontier AI labs. And before their competitors and china started to be that fast, they were regularly publishing a lot of research in this area too. Were is your hate coming from?
- guhcampos 3mo ago>How ATLAS has been developed "We picked some results we wanted to show and told gemini to cherry pick data that would fit in. As you can see, it was not a lot."
- LastTrain 3mo agoI would like to understand how the cost of AI power & infrastructure, more than the global annual gross revenue software sales, will be recouped while simultaneously delivering on the promise of putting technical services in the hands of anyone, which will naturally put downward pressure on the prices.
- Grombobulous 3mo agoOne possible interpretation of this article is that it’s very much in support of the idea that the AI bubble is going to burst. > AI use at work is broad but shallow: Workplace adoption spans all industry sectors and also 68% of all occupations that collectively represent 90% of total U.S. employment. However within jobs, people are using AI selectively: in a typical job AI is used for only ~21% of tasks. Translation: the market is reaching saturation. > At work, most AI use is focused on collaboration and assistance with tasks, and so far task automation is uncommon Translation: AI can’t be trusted to operate on its own and very little progress has been made in that area despite humongous progress being used in other areas. It’s helpful, but in the same way that a tool is helpful (and most companies don’t want to overspend on tools unless they can seriously reduce labor cost, I.e. hiring fewer people) > AI is delivering value at home that may be missed in standard economic metrics, particularly around high-friction administrative tasks: Over 86% of interactions with AI tools in ATLAS occur outside of work. Translation: AI is most valuable in low dollar value scenarios where it is likely a loss leader. The amount of money the average home user is willing to spend on AI is likely very close to zero, and this is the most likely interaction to be a race to the bottom. E.g., why pay Anthropic $20 a month when your iPhone 19 has a built-in local model that’s almost as good, why sit through advertisements on your free AI service when a cost and ad-free alternative is available. All of this alone doesn’t imply a bubble. The bubble part is where many AI companies can’t financially survive without a massive product maturation, budget cuts, or further investment.
- Miner49er 3mo agoYeah, there has to be a bubble for it to burst. There doesn't seem to be one yet.
- Grombobulous 3mo agoI guess I’d be pretty confused on how to not classify it as a bubble. The level of investment and operating costs of AI firms is just so high that the question of where the customer spend comes from to make it profitable eventually comes into play. The other obvious question is how AI firms maintain their bookings and overall value when the upper middle class responsible for the majority of consumption dollars is getting laid off left and right by AI. E.g., OpenAI finally ships AGI and realizes their investment value and goes from unprofitable to profitable. They can charge companies thousands per month for their best models/tooling because they replace employees entirely. All the big corporate customers of the world are happy: truck drivers are replaced by self-driving, big high-income employee bases like Meta, JPMorgan, law firms slash employee counts by huge amounts like 50% or maybe even more. …and as soon as that happens all those same companies face massive customer attrition since all those high-earners were just laid off and aren’t buying PlayStations and KitchenAid stand mixers anymore.
- dachworker 3mo agoThat last graph is surely AI generated.
- stelardigital 3mo ago[flagged]
- agentultra 3mo agoTheir adoption results are going to be biased by the fact that Google has a vested interest in accelerating adoption and have been sticking their AI products in front of everything they can. Seems like this isn’t going to be a useful data set for making policy decisions.
- Tarq0n 3mo agoI'm very interested in their anonymization and classification processes. Traditionally, conversational writing is too complex to anonymize automatically without false negatives, and remaining PII might be very personal in nature. > Observation Clustering and Taxonomy Organisation (OCTO), a tool for transforming massive unstructured text data, like LLM conversations, and distilling them into organized entities. This also sounds interesting. Hand crafted ontologies that I've seen used were always too hard to maintain and make useful, but potentially they have something automated?
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3mo agoHere it appears the data collected when computers users submit "prompts" to Google will be shared with "researchers, policymakers, businesses, workers, and other participants in the economy as we work together to shape the ways AI can positively support people in their lives."