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It seems a bit self-reinforcing. AI makes almost zero (positive) impact on my day to day life and isn't actually something I interact with directly and the same

It seems a bit self-reinforcing. AI makes almost zero (positive) impact on my day to day life and isn't actually something I interact with directly and the same holds true for most people I talk to. There's a few of my friends in tech for whom AI has obviously massively changed how they work, but again not in a clear positive direction. To me there seems to be a push to heavily prompte LLMs, even thought the benefits aren't all that clear yet. Some people are seeing massive improvements in how they work and it's understandable that they, like with blockchains or Kubernetes previously want to share their optimism. I just question if maybe these people are being to louder and have to much influence. There's a large silent majority for whom all the AI stuff is almost completely pointless. It does need to take up more space on HN, compared to your normal media, because the technology needs to find it's way into applications and appliances. The hype will die down, especially once we start to see the actual costs, e.g. ChatGPT doesn't actually provide enough value for the average user to warrant a subscription, hence the ads. For now, it seems that AI is heavily pushed by industry and a group of fans, the amount of news and articles just doesn't line up with the actual daily use.

jrflo 1mo ago
I don't think that AI has to influence every single person's daily life to make a huge impact. I think for probably 90% of people it's pretty useless out side of being a better search engine. But that doesn't mean it won't have a huge impact on science and technology at large. There are a lot of snake oil salesmen trying to stick it into everyone's face, but I don't think that should be conflated with the real progress that's being made.
- mattmaroon 1mo ago
  I would say 90% of people do not yet realize how useful it is. It is not useless to them, they just don’t understand yet what it can do. And there were a few years there where a lot of BS AI hype turned them off to it. So a lot of people rightly dismissed it and don’t realize the inflection point it hit in the last few years. ChatGPT work is basically a personal assistant for $20/month
  - xigoi 1mo ago
    > ChatGPT work is basically a personal assistant for $20/month A personal assistant that will happily tell you that you’re the world’s largest supergenius who invented perpetual motion. I wouldn’t want that if they paid me $20/month to use it.
    - polnoner 1mo ago
      Current Opus and Fable simply don't do this. You post is stupid.
      - JSR_FDED 1mo ago
        There’s more than 2 LLMs in the world. Now whose post is stupid?
    - mattmaroon 1mo ago
      It’s never told me that, but it does help me fix problems. For instance the other day I noticed that my state unemployment insurance rate had increased from 0.75% to 12.75%. I absolutely could have spent hours of my time scouring the website, trying to call and waiting on hold, talking around the issues with a poorly trained state agent. Instead, I asked ChatGPT what happened. It did a dive and figured out that I was being assessed a penalty rate because I had switched to a new payroll provider that does not file wage reports in my one quarter (seasonal business) where I have no wages. Without a wage report, you are considered delinquent. You have to love the government, it is the only place where you can be delinquent on a payment you do not owe. ChatGPT filed the correct wage report, navigated to the Support site requested a retroactive rewrite, which was granted and saved me many thousands of dollars. Would I have done this myself eventually? Probably. But I work a lot in season. Something more important would have been neglected. It would have taken me an amount of hours that I would happily buy back for an entire year of ChatGPT business. It didn’t even hit my 5 hour usage limit to do it. So maybe instead of asking it how it feels about you, ask it to do useful things. It’s my employee, not my girlfriend.
anthonypasq 1mo ago
i just gotta say that i find it hard to believe that this comment is true for you but you hang out on hackernews. almost everyone here is a software engineer or works in tech, they all use ai all day to do their entire jobs. > even thought the benefits aren't all that clear yet it isnt 2023 anymore. wtf are you talking about. >he hype will die down, especially once we start to see the actual costs, e.g. ChatGPT doesn't actually provide enough value for the average user to warrant a subscription, again, it isnt 2023 anymore. none of this is true.
- mrweasel 1mo ago
  > they all use ai all day to do their entire jobs I assure you they do not, many truly do not care and don't want to. That's just what the hype and the article and the stories tell you. The HN bubble tells you that's true, but 90% of my co-workers don't even want to touch Claude, despite being given a license. And again, if e.g. ChatGPT is providing so much value, why aren't people buying?
  - deleted 1mo ago
    [deleted]
  - falcor84 1mo ago
    > why aren't people buying? They have "more than 50 million consumer subscribers" and "More than 9 million paying business users" [0]. That's for example more subscribers than for Adobe Creative Cloud. [0] https://openai.com/index/scaling-ai-for-everyone/ https://openai.com/index/scaling-ai-for-everyone/
    - xigoi 1mo ago
      > more than 50 million consumer subscribers So, about 0.6% of the world’s population is willing to pay for something that’s supposed to be hugely useful for literally everyone (as opposed to Adobe products, which are only for digital artists)?
      - 1mo ago
dang 1mo ago
LLMs have helped us keep HN up and still (relatively) fast amid a huge onslaught of new traffic over the last year or so. We've been able to solve problems and find opportunities for optimization that we'd never have gotten to without the help of Claude or ChatGPT. Although this is one of those threads where people love to report how much they dislike HN, how it's a poor shadow of its former self, and how they barely look at it anymore—a popular local sport for 15 years or more—but to the extent anyone still reads the site, there must be some positive impact in having it running and rendering pages, even if you don't like what's on them!
- mrweasel 1mo ago
  Hopefully HN is just getting more popular, but isn't a large part of the "huge onslaught of new traffic" driven by AI companies scraping the site for content or writing comments for various reasons? Fixing the problems created by LLMs using LLMs seems like a bit like hiring a bully for security to prevent that same bully from beating you up. But yes, there's plenty of positive things that are now possible. See as a combined net-positive vs net-negative, I'm still leaning towards the net-negative.
  - runarberg 1mo ago
    I fear this is not the only reason even if it is true. The more negative reason is a loss of skill/talent. We used to be able to know what to do in these situations, and how to fix things when they went wrong. Companies like Y Combinator used to be able to hire talented systems engineers who knew how to minimize the risk of things going wrong, and fix them when they did. Now with LLMs it is just vibe-coded until it is fixed. Find the right prompt and hope the statistics is in your favor. If this is the case, there is nothing positive about it.
  - dang 1mo ago
    I take your point! But the positives are still positive. I've been amazed by how much LLMs have helped us do. None of it was undoable otherwise, but we (where by "we" I mean "I") would never have gotten around to it otherwise. Lowering the bar from months to days, or weeks to hours, is significant.
encrypted_bird 1mo ago
>because the technology needs to find it's way into applications and appliances. I hear what you're saying, but speaking for myself: can we *not*? I really have absolutely zero interest in having ChatGPT on my microwave or refrigerator. In fact, I'd rather have my appliances *not* be connected to the Internet, all things being equal.
- pixl97 1mo ago
  >I'd rather have my appliances not be connected to the Internet, It's getting harder and harder to find things that don't connect to the internet as time goes on. The moment a manufacture figures out how to sell your appliance data for more than it costs to add it, seemingly every model they produce gets it added with the only choice of going to some other manufacture if you don't want it... and even then finding one not internet connected gets nearly impossible. In general most people don't care enough for people like us that don't want connected devices to move the dial.
someguynamedq 1mo ago
What are you doing in tech that has not been impacted by AI?

jrflo 1mo ago

I don't think that AI has to influence every single person's daily life to make a huge impact. I think for probably 90% of people it's pretty useless out side of being a better search engine. But that doesn't mean it won't have a huge impact on science and technology at large. There are a lot of snake oil salesmen trying to stick it into everyone's face, but I don't think that should be conflated with the real progress that's being made.

mattmaroon 1mo ago
I would say 90% of people do not yet realize how useful it is. It is not useless to them, they just don’t understand yet what it can do. And there were a few years there where a lot of BS AI hype turned them off to it. So a lot of people rightly dismissed it and don’t realize the inflection point it hit in the last few years. ChatGPT work is basically a personal assistant for $20/month
- xigoi 1mo ago
  > ChatGPT work is basically a personal assistant for $20/month A personal assistant that will happily tell you that you’re the world’s largest supergenius who invented perpetual motion. I wouldn’t want that if they paid me $20/month to use it.
  - polnoner 1mo ago
    Current Opus and Fable simply don't do this. You post is stupid.
    - JSR_FDED 1mo ago
      There’s more than 2 LLMs in the world. Now whose post is stupid?
  - mattmaroon 1mo ago
    It’s never told me that, but it does help me fix problems. For instance the other day I noticed that my state unemployment insurance rate had increased from 0.75% to 12.75%. I absolutely could have spent hours of my time scouring the website, trying to call and waiting on hold, talking around the issues with a poorly trained state agent. Instead, I asked ChatGPT what happened. It did a dive and figured out that I was being assessed a penalty rate because I had switched to a new payroll provider that does not file wage reports in my one quarter (seasonal business) where I have no wages. Without a wage report, you are considered delinquent. You have to love the government, it is the only place where you can be delinquent on a payment you do not owe. ChatGPT filed the correct wage report, navigated to the Support site requested a retroactive rewrite, which was granted and saved me many thousands of dollars. Would I have done this myself eventually? Probably. But I work a lot in season. Something more important would have been neglected. It would have taken me an amount of hours that I would happily buy back for an entire year of ChatGPT business. It didn’t even hit my 5 hour usage limit to do it. So maybe instead of asking it how it feels about you, ask it to do useful things. It’s my employee, not my girlfriend.

anthonypasq 1mo ago

i just gotta say that i find it hard to believe that this comment is true for you but you hang out on hackernews. almost everyone here is a software engineer or works in tech, they all use ai all day to do their entire jobs. > even thought the benefits aren't all that clear yet it isnt 2023 anymore. wtf are you talking about. >he hype will die down, especially once we start to see the actual costs, e.g. ChatGPT doesn't actually provide enough value for the average user to warrant a subscription, again, it isnt 2023 anymore. none of this is true.

mrweasel 1mo ago
> they all use ai all day to do their entire jobs I assure you they do not, many truly do not care and don't want to. That's just what the hype and the article and the stories tell you. The HN bubble tells you that's true, but 90% of my co-workers don't even want to touch Claude, despite being given a license. And again, if e.g. ChatGPT is providing so much value, why aren't people buying?
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
- falcor84 1mo ago
  > why aren't people buying? They have "more than 50 million consumer subscribers" and "More than 9 million paying business users" [0]. That's for example more subscribers than for Adobe Creative Cloud. [0] https://openai.com/index/scaling-ai-for-everyone/ https://openai.com/index/scaling-ai-for-everyone/
  - xigoi 1mo ago
    > more than 50 million consumer subscribers So, about 0.6% of the world’s population is willing to pay for something that’s supposed to be hugely useful for literally everyone (as opposed to Adobe products, which are only for digital artists)?
    - 1mo ago

dang 1mo ago

LLMs have helped us keep HN up and still (relatively) fast amid a huge onslaught of new traffic over the last year or so. We've been able to solve problems and find opportunities for optimization that we'd never have gotten to without the help of Claude or ChatGPT. Although this is one of those threads where people love to report how much they dislike HN, how it's a poor shadow of its former self, and how they barely look at it anymore—a popular local sport for 15 years or more—but to the extent anyone still reads the site, there must be some positive impact in having it running and rendering pages, even if you don't like what's on them!

mrweasel 1mo ago
Hopefully HN is just getting more popular, but isn't a large part of the "huge onslaught of new traffic" driven by AI companies scraping the site for content or writing comments for various reasons? Fixing the problems created by LLMs using LLMs seems like a bit like hiring a bully for security to prevent that same bully from beating you up. But yes, there's plenty of positive things that are now possible. See as a combined net-positive vs net-negative, I'm still leaning towards the net-negative.
- runarberg 1mo ago
  I fear this is not the only reason even if it is true. The more negative reason is a loss of skill/talent. We used to be able to know what to do in these situations, and how to fix things when they went wrong. Companies like Y Combinator used to be able to hire talented systems engineers who knew how to minimize the risk of things going wrong, and fix them when they did. Now with LLMs it is just vibe-coded until it is fixed. Find the right prompt and hope the statistics is in your favor. If this is the case, there is nothing positive about it.
- dang 1mo ago
  I take your point! But the positives are still positive. I've been amazed by how much LLMs have helped us do. None of it was undoable otherwise, but we (where by "we" I mean "I") would never have gotten around to it otherwise. Lowering the bar from months to days, or weeks to hours, is significant.

encrypted_bird 1mo ago

>because the technology needs to find it's way into applications and appliances. I hear what you're saying, but speaking for myself: can we *not*? I really have absolutely zero interest in having ChatGPT on my microwave or refrigerator. In fact, I'd rather have my appliances *not* be connected to the Internet, all things being equal.

pixl97 1mo ago
>I'd rather have my appliances not be connected to the Internet, It's getting harder and harder to find things that don't connect to the internet as time goes on. The moment a manufacture figures out how to sell your appliance data for more than it costs to add it, seemingly every model they produce gets it added with the only choice of going to some other manufacture if you don't want it... and even then finding one not internet connected gets nearly impossible. In general most people don't care enough for people like us that don't want connected devices to move the dial.

someguynamedq 1mo ago

What are you doing in tech that has not been impacted by AI?