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I think Meta's strategy is to capture the 'normie-tier' of AI users. I know most of us here on HN track model releases quite frequently and discuss every parame

by abixb 25d ago

I think Meta's strategy is to capture the 'normie-tier' of AI users. I know most of us here on HN track model releases quite frequently and discuss every parameter weight out of them, but most of the world is just... oblivious? I was discussing latest in tech with an accounting friend out of curiosity, and I kept talking about tiers of GPT-5.6 (Sol vs Terra vs Luna) and asked which one she used on the desktop 'Work' app, and she responded with, "just ChatGPT, what is Sol?." I then realized that most people just stick with whatever default they're provided with, and it's a lot of them. So, us serial HN users and commenters are the extreme minority, and I'm sure millions of people will gobble up this Muse agent from Meta as if it's some sort of an innovative cutting-edge way to use the internet by Meta alone. Curse of knowledge and all. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge

ajkjk 25d ago
I think you're right, but I'd add that... if this wasn't obvious to you without being told, you should really question your worldview a bit. A lot of people think that chat.com is an AI called "chat". Most people don't know acronym "LLM". Most people don't know about the existence of companies called "OpenAI" or "Anthropic", or that they are worth a lot of money. Etc.
- abixb 25d ago
  > you should really question your worldview a bit. Yeah, I still struggle with it. I have a diverse friend circle and sometimes I forget that most of them don't have the same information diet that I do (or don't even care about tech the way I do). Maybe I should be more like them and just chill? I don't know.
  - wredcoll 25d ago
    You don't have to "be like" anyone but yourself. You should, however, be aware of what you know and more importantly what you do not know.
    - tough 25d ago
      And be aware of unknown unknowns existance even if not specifics, helps uncover them
      - rabid_0wl 25d ago
        "You don't know what you don't know" has served me well in life so far.
  - ajkjk 25d ago
    well probably even your friends know a lot more than "most people". But walk into a random town and ask a random person and I'd wager they'll be about at what I described, on average.
  - rr808 25d ago
    Tech is a rather minor part of the world of knowledge. How many languages do you know? Do you know the styles of Renaissance painters? Slept with super-model? Ever seen an elephant stampede? Meditated by the Ganges? Read thousands of stories? Climbed a mountain so high you need Oxygen? Tech stuff is so boring.
    - tough 25d ago
      > Slept with super-model What's the knowledge supposedly required to attain this on your mind?
      - Avicebron 25d ago
        About 4 months of reading about PHP in the early 2000s?
        tough 25d ago
        lmfao
      - 9dev 25d ago
        It instills into you the arcane knowledge of how incredibly mundane and unremarkable sex with very beautiful people can be, given that they are also just normal people after all. I suppose. Then again, what do I know - maybe you'll awaken with the answer to everything on the spot?
    - N_Lens 25d ago
      Are these achievements you’ve personally experienced?
    - derektank 25d ago
      A large number of those are far less accessible than tech, requiring either extensive travel or superlative physical capabilities (and the one’s that equally accessible don’t strike me as particularly more exciting than tech.)
  - throwaway2037 25d ago
    > I forget that most of them don't have the same information diet that I do It is interesting that you conflate "information diet" with "tech". The biggest info junkies I have ever met are: (1) medical doctors, (2) STEM PhDs, and (3) journalists. There are probably some other categories that I am missing. And almost none of the info they are consuming is "tech".
    - TonyStr 25d ago
      Isn't "information diet" perfect usage here? The medical doctor's information diet probably consists of different information than the tech enthusiast's, or the STEM PhD's, and the journalist's information diet may consist of more politics and contemporary events. I thought it was a pretty creative and apt word choice
    - jaapz 25d ago
      I don't think the person you reply to conflates "information diet" with "tech". They are just saying that their information diet consists for a large part of tech news, and other people have other information diets that don't contain that much tech news..
- fathermarz 25d ago
  This is very accurate. I teach seniors about how to use AI responsibly and they are always mind blown, and I keep it very high level. The amount of Chat”GTP” users there are out there that have no idea who the main vendors are. Most of them also think that Google is just a “search” company.
  - svachalek 25d ago
    Wait, isn't it ChatGBD?
    - monk_grilla 25d ago
      ChatGibbity
  - pmarreck 25d ago
    How would I be able to help do something like that?
    - fathermarz 24d ago
      In my experience, it depends on the community. Where I live most people are retired so there is tons of interest and a really well ran community program called Elder College. I would look into similar programs near you!
- mathisfun123 25d ago
  > OpenAI this is unnecessarily austere or whatever - people absolutely know what openai is because lots of "normies" now use chatgpt https://www.youtube.com/shorts/dRE41eYkui4 https://www.youtube.com/shorts/dRE41eYkui4
  - ajkjk 25d ago
    I think you are wrong, but of course it's just a guess.
    - mathisfun123 25d ago
      Chatgpt has 469 million daily active users as of September 2026. Who exactly do you think they are? Martians? Because there aren't half a billion SWEs on planet earth.
      - loeg 25d ago
        What percent of ChatGPT users do you think know the company behind it is OpenAI? 10%?
        mathisfun123 25d ago
        What percent of Instagram users know the company behind it? Like is this even a real question?
        ajkjk 25d ago
        I feel you like you cited that as an example of people knowing companies behind things and you don't realize that very many people do not know that the same company owns Facebook and Instagram... Corporate structures are things you know about if you follow tech news, but people mostly do not know about them otherwise. They've never heard of "Alphabet" either. Stuff like that.
        stackbutterflow 25d ago
- ctkhn 25d ago
  Even Shingy called chatgpt "chat" when he went on Ed Zitron's show. It was very weird to hear from a guy who has been around tech world for such a long time even if he's non technical.
  - King-Aaron 25d ago
    I'm a pretty seasoned software dev, but I've also kept the frontier AI race at arms length from myself. I run Claude alongside my day to day workflow but don't really get overly concerned about the latest and greatest models, as I'm not leaning on it to do my job for me I suppose. In my mind I'm after a stable tool, not wanting to dabble in the bleeding edge. I did that back in the early days of web coding and have settled into a much more subdued kind of industry/life in that regard.
  - sam345 25d ago
    Even Shingy. Ia he really the standard for explaining tech to normies? Ouch.
  - edgyquant 25d ago
    Everyone calls it chat. I am technical and even I’ve come around to calling it that because that is what everyone, including very technical people, call the product.
    - dboreham 24d ago
      Never heard it called that until this thread.
  - tnolet 25d ago
    Shingy, from “Everybody in the club getting Tipsy”?
  - stackbutterflow 25d ago
    I didn't know who Shingy was. He looks like Jensen Huang's subconscious.
- dd8601fn 25d ago
  The joke of it is that I see those same people (ones who haven’t heard “LLM” before, don’t know what a model is or even the vaguest idea how these work, etc) have very strong opinions on the state of AI, where it’s headed, and are willing to make projections with timelines. Bill Maher is one example.
  - ihaveajob 25d ago
    In general you can't take anyone whose job is to opine too seriously. When you're not familiar with what they're talking about, they make it sound reasonable and convincing. It's their skill after all. But now and then they talk about some topic you understand and care deeply about, and realize they're just repeating the talking points some staffer prepared for them shortly before. Most recently it happened to me with John Oliver talking about housing, reading from the standard left-NIMBY bingo card. I like him as a comedian, still.
    - mmahemoff 25d ago
      Gell-Mann Amnesia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect As tech became more pervasive in the past couple of decades, it became commonplace for pundits to spout nonsense on the topic. Those takes should give anyone in tech pause about how everything else is reported.
  - enos_feedler 25d ago
    This problem has permeated everywhere. Nobody can predict the future. Even VCs can’t and yet I’ll get a weekly email with a confident narrative about the future. Looking at a16z. CEOs do this as well. Listen to Satya talk about how AI will transform things. We’ve trained everyone else to casually state what the future will look like on timelines. As if it’s knowable at all.
    - psychoslave 25d ago
      What is a16z please?
- itemize123 25d ago
  I think you are overestimating things. While there will be people who don't know - it's probably not as many as you think.
  - anonzzzies 25d ago
    Over 90% of humanity and that's probably still underestimating it. Most people cannot point on a map where they live. Many people think 'chat' is conscious and being locked up by evil humans: many think 'chat' is a god or aliens communicating with us. And getting worse as people cannot make a sandwich without asking 'chat', let alone learn anything worthwhile.
    - Eisenstein 24d ago
      The remaining 10% of humanity is still 830 million people.
- tyre 25d ago
  TIL openai owns chat.com I hung out with my parents this weekend and heard them talking about "chat", as a noun. I assumed they were talking about ChatGPT; there being a literal chat.com makes sense why they'd call it that.
  - anon7000 25d ago
    Just redirects to chatgpt.com
  - rpozarickij 25d ago
    I've seen people using "chat" to refer to ChatGPT because it's easier/simpler. I'm pretty sure an average person has no idea that chat.com will redirect you to chatgpt.com (or what a redirect is for that matter). It's similar to how people were calling the COVID-19 pandemic or the virus itself "covid".
    - parl_match 25d ago
      people in the industry, especially those who work for oai, refer to it as "chat" at least in the ai industry, chat is like kleenex
      - zxexz 25d ago
        I've heard it as shorthand, in-context. Never heard it being chat-as-in-kleenex. I've supposedly been in the industry since before ChatGPT. Maybe that's where I went wrong :D
      - falsemyrmidon 25d ago
        Guess I'm not in the industry enough lmao
    - kachnuv_ocasek 25d ago
      ChatGPT is commonly referred to as Chappie (チャッピー) in Japan.
      - 25d ago
- hn_throwaway_99 25d ago
  > Most people don't know about the existence of companies called "OpenAI" or "Anthropic", or that they are worth a lot of money. I agree with your general premise but that one sounds like bullshit to me. Tons of people who otherwise don't know anything about LLMs know about these companies specifically because they are worth a lot of money, and of course tons of people know who OpenAI is because of ChatGPT.
  - chicagobuss 25d ago
    go ask 100 random people across the world and I bet less than 20 will know both those company names.
    - dboreham 24d ago
      I'd go with fewer than 5.
  - oblio 25d ago
    You're grossly overestimating how many people care about big companies, at least on a daily basis. Most people don't invest in anything and will never get a job at a big American company. They do know about ChatGPT but that doesn't mean they know who makes it.
  - ajkjk 24d ago
    You're one of those people who needs to expand their worldview, then. I live in a progressive city in North Carolina and constantly find that when people have never heard of them things that every HN reader (and probably every Bay Area resident, I dunno) would know about. Bubbles are real.
- juggle-anyhow 25d ago
  They call it "Chatty"
- robofanatic 25d ago
  People are generally bad with acronyms. For the longest time I used to refer to San Francisco as SFO. On my first visit to Bay Area, I was talking to a local friend and casually said - last weekend, I went to SFO for sightseeing. He was confused and asked why I was sightseeing at the airport. That’s when I realized it’s SF not SFO.
  - sgerenser 25d ago
    I live in Raleigh, NC and it’s a going joke the amount of travelers or newcomers who refer to the area as RDU (the Raleigh/Durham airport code). I guess it’s a common problem elsewhere.
  - dboreham 24d ago
    Both are wrong. It's called "the city".
    - robofanatic 23d ago
      what about San Fran?
- dofm 25d ago
  > Most people don't know about the existence of companies called "OpenAI" or "Anthropic", or that they are worth a lot of money. Etc. UK perspective: because our broadcast news and current affairs science/tech coverage is still good, I think the average person (at least the average working-age person) likely knows what OpenAI is, knows ChatGPT is called that, and knows what an LLM is. (Whether the average pensioner does, I don't know; maybe older men do) Anyone who watches the news is likely to know there are several big AI companies, even if they can't name the second; they are likely to know that these companies have absurd valuations and are seeking to build massive data centres; many will know that despite these valuations they are ever deeper in astonishing levels of debt and that this debt could end up being a wider problem. I doubt the average person has a sense that a company called Anthropic made an AI called Claude; they may not know about Claude. But I think this speaks more to Anthropic's positioning of their own brand and products than anything else; I would expect younger people and anyone working in a white collar position to be a little more likely to be aware of Claude. Some of this difference in perspective has to do with the nature of being an english-speaking non-American; we see a lot of what you are complaining about on social media, the news covers more of the USA's troubles, etc. And at the same time we are developing an increasingly adversarial position with the USA, so there's a bit more know-your-adversary going on here. The perceived threat of AI is very much entangled with the perceived threat of a dysregulated USA.
Gigachad 25d ago
I think we are lacking in the easy to use side of things. Once you go beyond browser based chatbots things become hard to set up. I see lots of posting about using AI to create patches to get new apps working in wine, or reverse engineering firmware. But every time I’ve tried it it’s been quite a lot of work to set everything up. Even more so if you want VMs and some level of isolation from your sensitive data. Having something that’s just a one click product that just works is more important than the smartest model.
- abixb 25d ago
  I remember Logan Kilpatrick from Google talking about how AGI will be more of an experience with a product than raw 'intelligence' of a model. [0] No one outside of the nerd community cares about benchmarks or any of the other crap. They just want their tech to work so they could go do other IRL things. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1ldkkth/google_deepminds_logan_kilpatrick_says_agi_will/ https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1ldkkth/google...
randycupertino 25d ago
I think of my mom who doesn't care and doesn't understand the difference between google AI Overview vs actual google search results. "I looked it up" - she doesn't care what tool she is using she just wants answers to how long bake pork or the best throw pillows to buy or whatever else she is looking up. She's mostly using google AI tools because it's easy and free and on her landing page.
- m11a 25d ago
  tbh I also use google AI tools frequently. It’s convenient (search bar is top of my window), and extremely fast at generation. For quick Qs, opening a chat bot and changing the default reasoning from my coding settings, switching from Work to Chat, etc etc, is too much of a faff.
  - yard2010 25d ago
    I ended up adding -ai to every search in the browser level to turn this crap off. I couldn't find a way to disable it otherwise. I did it after it hallucinated the world cup games schedule which made my friend send wrong events to everyone after he "looked it up". Can't stop this from him, but at least this honest mistake won't happen to me.
    - ShadowOfThePit 25d ago
      Surely there's an extension for whatever browser you are using? Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hide-google-ai-overviews/ Chromium: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hide-google-ai-overviews/neibhohkbmfjninidnaoacabkjonbahn Safari: Seems there are none
  - hbn 24d ago
    Google Search's AI has gotten... better. But it's still frequently spouting as much made up shit as I expected from LLMs not doing their research a couple years ago. Just this morning I looked up what time today's Nintendo Direct livestream is. It correctly told me it's today at 7am PT (confirmed from actual link sources). It then tried to get smart and tell me what that would be in my city's timezone and it was an hour off (possibly because I'm in a timezone without daylight savings)
magicmicah85 25d ago
Literally what I was about to comment. This is meant to capture the normies, the busy parents managing school and work, the grandparents who want to make most of their retirement. I am trying it now. It let me name my muse as Satan. I appreciate that it understands my humor, but I'm also not joking at the same time.
- arcanemachiner 25d ago
  Is "normies" finally a mainstream word? Just wondering how out of the loop I am here.
  - magicmicah85 25d ago
    I've never heard a normie use it. ;)
    - mech422 25d ago
      I think it's very common - its just what a 'normie' is depends on your particular poison... it seems to have been incorporated in a lot of hobbies/niches to refer to anyone not deep in the niche ?
- webern777 24d ago
  My parents are in their 70s and retired, I can't even vaguely imagine what they would use this for. If they have any problems in life, it is that they have too much time on their hands already. An AI agent that automates tasks so they have more free time is exactly what they would not want. What they really want is something worth spending their time on. That is what everyone pretty much wants but instead we get this bullshit.
tikotus 25d ago
I'm a coder and a daily driver of ChatGPT and I don't really know what Sol is or how I can access it. I follow discussions here and know of its excistence, but I can't remember its relation to other models or tiers by heart. What ever the default thing the website is giving me has been good enough for my needs for years.
- marcd35 25d ago
  Its mostly used with Codex so you can give finer control over task delegation. its definitely worth learning the different strengths and weaknesses for each one and which you should use for planning/building/testing/documentation updates etc. No point in burning excessive tokens using a high tier/expensive reasoning model like Sol/Xhigh if just updating a readme file.
- redox99 25d ago
  Do you... code by copy pasting chatgpt web???
  - tikotus 25d ago
    Yes! Though I mainly use it for one-shotting full files, so I'm not copying over small diffs. I did try copilot at some point in vscode, but after a week or so I felt like it was slowing me down. Something I knew would be a simple and quick change was now slow since I didn't have enough ownership of the code to do it quickly myself, and prompting for the change took longer than changing it manually if I had had full ownership. So I went back to coding by hand things that aren't a one-shot file.
    - redox99 25d ago
      Thanks for the reply. I'd suggest you improve your workflow with better tooling like Codex or Claude code, and if you have some kind of weird constraint they'll easily follow an AGENTS.md with that.
      - matkoniecz 25d ago
benatkin 25d ago
To me it sounds like they are simply taking social moon shots. They tried to do a phone, tried to make a kitchen videophone, tried to make their own cryptocurrency, and tried to dominate open source AI, and now this is trying to make something like a digital robotic assistant. It might have reached a peak with the metaverse, when Zuck thought his corporation was destined to be the ruler of a Snow Crash style metaverse, to the point of renaming it. Maybe that's still the plan and they are looking for something that will lead to another metaverse play.
- Gigachad 25d ago
  They need the next big thing to secure the future of the company. Facebook and Instagram are still money printers which can sustain these repeated failures, but without something new, they could be completely ruined if the social media landscape changes.
MattDamonSpace 25d ago
Yeah this to me is why Apple wins
nikcub 25d ago
> "just ChatGPT, what is Sol?." i'd really like to see some analytics on what proportion of users have ever switched the model in chatgpt because I anecdotally believe it is < 5%
- dd8601fn 25d ago
  Honestly I rarely change it in either of them unless I’m using the cli or cowork to do something. That’s where smarter work means less iterative un-fucking, later. Any quick questions or rubber ducking in a regular “chat”… the model just doesn’t really matter anymore. They’re all smarter than I need for that stuff (and whatever unfortunate thing that says about me).
- SoftTalker 25d ago
  I didn't even know you could. Work pays for ChatGPT and I just assumed it is what it is.
  - Barbing 25d ago
    On average, generally, do you dig into settings (or maybe if something works, good enough usually)? (I’m always on the hunt for “please don’t just friggin sell my data to everyone, if you’re scared enough over getting sued that you’ll listen to the toggle” and “disable sponsored this-and-that”. Plus power user stuff.)
    - SoftTalker 25d ago
      I used to, very much. I've slowly come around over the last ten years or so to just using everything in its default config. I guess I don't want to spend the time I have left fiddling with settings.
- Barbing 25d ago
  95%(?) have never paid. Maybe that helps the stats: for those who’ve paid, perhaps it’s all the way to 10% who’ve switched models?
- 25d ago
bluegatty 25d ago
They are not 'normies' - we're just 'nerds'. You're driving a home kit car, they're driving something out of the factory. Eventually - we'll probably drive factory variations as well.
- BatFastard 25d ago
  Neurodivergent
- phil21 25d ago
  Yeah you’re describing normies. They are the norm. It’s in the name. People as described make up the vast majority of the population. Nerds have always been in the extreme minority. Ignoring the influx of cosplaying MBA financing bros and industry hangers-on as tech became the place where the money is of course. The tech industry started attracting the normies as soon as it became almost as lucrative as finance, so these days the definition gets a little blurry.
  - bluegatty 25d ago
    You're right!
deleted 25d ago
[deleted]
TechSquidTV 25d ago
It's not a bad market to aim for. No one else really is.
ramraj07 25d ago
Even with all of this nuance why would the regular joe go to muse when they have chatgpt and gemini? Most of their actual productive data is likely with Google anyway.
almogo 25d ago
Yesterday I helped a maaaaybe 40 year old woman connect to the wifi at my local library so she could get on a zoom call. Made me realize most of the world is exactly like that.
throw03172019 25d ago
It seems like on the “Chat” mode of ChatGPT it doesn’t allow switching the model. It’s just “5.6” with the effort level
willsmith72 25d ago
I agree, and stay away from meta generally in life wherever possible That said, I've got more time for projects this week so flew through my Claude max plan. Now I'm trying muse spark 1.3 with opencode which is free with pretty generous usage allowance. First time I've been impressed by meta's AI products. It feels not far below opus 4.8ish
rconti 25d ago
I use claude all day every day, and sometimes codex, and I still don't change models. I guess I'm more interested in accomplishing the thing than in experimenting with a dozen ways of accomplishing the same thing.
- greenchair 25d ago
  most people are not on the unlimited plan and can't use it all day every day for complex work which is one reason they are forced to learn about the options available and optimize their workflows.
  - rconti 24d ago
    That's a great point I was overlooking-- that said, I know plenty of people on my corp plan who also have strong opinions on different models' strengths, so there _also_ are plenty of people who are legitimately digging into the pros and cons of each model, independent of price.
throwaway2037 25d ago
I confess that when I ride the subway, I like to peer at other people's phones to see what they are doing. The ones that interest me the most are other people talking with an LLM. I am always surprised by the wide variety of people who are using LLMs to ask an infinite variety of questions. From the surface-level PR annoucement here by Meta, this seems like a good business idea.
- throwaway2037 24d ago
  Related: Today, I was in an elevator, and a middle-aged Japanese woman next to me was text chatting with ChatGPT on her mobile phone about a Chinese brand of spicy (mala/麻辣) instant noodles that she was holding in her hand. Chinese food has many ingredients that do not exist in Japan cuisine, so she was asking about various spices used in the noodles. I asked her if this was her first time trying those noodles. She replied yes, and asked me if I had also tried it. I said yes -- they are very spicy! She laughed. Again: Cool to see normies using ChatGPT (and other LLMs) for normie stuff.
fr2029 25d ago
[dead]
wocram 25d ago
This is not limited to non technical users. Plenty of people don't care to switch between models and just pick the latest model.
villgax 25d ago
Cant wait for Snitch Bench results of this
XCSme 25d ago
I think all AI companies want to capture normie users too, it's a huge market. All ChatGPT, Claude, Google, Microsoft have/want to have their own assistants.
- michaelt 25d ago
  > I think all AI companies want to capture normie users too, it's a huge market. Huge revenue? Or just huge volume? If I boost the productivity of a $100k employee by 50%, a business will happily pay $1k/month and consider it a great deal. But from what I've heard, consumer-facing LLMs find most users won't hand over even $20/month (which is a heavily subsidised price anyway).
  - XCSme 25d ago
    In a dystopian outcome, the goal of having more people use your AI will not be for them to pay for it...
MisterMunchkin 25d ago
I met a normie who was using ChatGPT to write production code… in instant mode. No thinking enabled.
Schlagbohrer 25d ago
Many people deep into tech (like most commenters here) may fall into the trap of overestimating average user's knowledge or interest in the details of the tech: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2501:_Average_Familiarity https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2501:_Average_Fam...
herbst 25d ago
To be fair I stopped caring about specific versions as well. I don't seem to notice the big difference anymore on daily tasks and questions.
teiferer 25d ago
> I then realized Oh, your grandma doesn't know which android version her phone is running? Or the build number of the Windows on her laptop? You just realized this?
KronisLV 25d ago
> I think Meta's strategy is to capture the 'normie-tier' of AI users. For what it's worth, maybe that would help people who struggle with technology in general? Because as far as UI/UX goes, a chat interface for an agent is about as easy as it gets (not every site having its own crappy assistant that can't really do anything useful for you, but is slapped on there for the sake of a checkbox). I watched the marketing video and to me it seemed pretty nice and practical for the average person.
- aatd86 25d ago
  But who is going to trust Facebook/Meta with everything? Even my parents are wary of their products. I can't see a personal assistant coming from them and being successful.
  - fg137 25d ago
    If this is still not obvious to you, most people don't care about privacy. You and your parents are outliers.
    - aatd86 25d ago
      Not obvious from our discussions with friends or even from videos on youtube about everyone wondering how they are ad tracked. They care but then it has been made very difficult to find privacy preserving services. Or convenience takes over. It is like replaceable batteries. Everyone cares but we are not given the choice. Or the headphone jack... I think it is different here. First it is easy to build. Second that is too much information that should remain private.
latexr 25d ago
> I know most of us here on HN track model releases quite frequently and discuss every parameter weight out of them You know it? I sincerely hope you don’t and that it’s not really “most” of us. That would be incredibly sad. Tracking model releases and discussing “every parameter weight” is very far from intellectually curious discussion (what HN is ostensibly about). > I then realized that most people just stick with whatever default they're provided with (…) > Curse of knowledge and all. If there’s one thing many of us on HN suffer from, however, is intense hubris. The juxtaposition of claiming “curse of knowledge” while admitting to not having known the most elementary principle of designing for people is a tad tone deaf. Yes, of course most people just stick with the defaults, that’s why dark patterns work and hiding settings is a thing. The industry has been using those strategies to manipulate people for years and years.
KaiserPro 25d ago
Former meta prick, sorry employee: > Meta's strategy Meta has no strategy. The people that made llama work left two years ago. MSI are a bunch of charlatans who are trying to change the culutre and tooling of meta from the outside (I can see their point, trying to work outside of the defaults is incredibly hard.) its basically a bun fight, with all of your productive workers being poached by frontier labs, and everyone else is either a new grad, burnt out, or a master bullshitter.
- alt227 25d ago
  Meta certainly do give the impression that they are burning through ridiculous amounts of cash with not much to show for it, and thats just from the outside.
  - Dlemlo 25d ago
    Yeah and if you look at there numbers, they can just afford it. When you realize how big zuckerberg still is.
  - dewey 25d ago
    If you scroll Instagram for a few minutes you'll see what they have been working on and that are also making a ridiculous amount of cash by selling and serving ads while burning some on side projects like that.
    - sensanaty 25d ago
      I had to laugh to the point of tears the other day when I saw my friend scrolling through Instagram and they encountered an "Ad Break". The app simply doesn't let you scroll through another post, story or reel until you sit there like a good boy and let the ad sit for 10 seconds or whatever. How people put up with that kinda crap and continue to use these apps daily for hours on end is mind blowing to me.
      - Zambyte 25d ago
        I wonder if the prevalence of adblock has helped make a lot of things like this possible. Like, it's hard to imagine people putting up with this without literally protesting in the streets. But the people who can't tolerate it have mostly gone through the effort of opting out, and those who can just put up with it. And thus, the frog boils.
thinkindie 25d ago
in a way it's not much different from a time where the E icon of internet explorer was considered "the internet".
jatins 25d ago
Given that cost of building is down, strategy of most companies is turning into "do everything" and see what sticks
whazor 25d ago
I'm confident that Muse can do lots of agentic tasks succesfully for normies on outdated models. Like buying sneakers, booking appointments, dealing with government forms.
ChrisMarshallNY 25d ago
> So, us serial HN users and commenters are the extreme minority Words to live by.
fg137 25d ago
At $dayjob, a company with ~10k employees, there are like 3 people who cannot shut up discussing the latest models in the internal AI forum, 10 others that constantly compare models and talk about "strategy" of using the models. The rest of the users just use whatever the default is and get their work done.
- hightrix 24d ago
  Is this really new though? In the olden days, you had some engineers that REALLY cared about linting, various architectures, standards design, and so on when the majority of engineers just follow the spec and standards as is. You need those people digging into the latest newness and discussing strategy on how to best use new tools so that the "rest of the users" can follow and do the work.
  - analog_daddy 23d ago
    I think I have some tendencies to do so as well. More specifically, I have the itch to just spend some time, knowing or understanding the tools I use better. It Has paid dividends for me, since the tools we typically use for $work are super buggy yet powerful and like any good proprietary tool, abstracted behind an obscure shitty API. Experimenting with crazy things just allows me to run into bugs early on when, I have the patience to solve them. But, it’s the first time in my short career, i have shied away from being on bleeding edge of tooling. Specifically, LLM tooling. Firstly, since LLM’s are not yet needed or good in my field of $work, but; even in my programming hobby, whenever I venture out to explore, it all feels too snake oil to me. And do I even need to begin why the f*k people curl | bash?? I dunno maybe its just old habits, but I can’t bring myself to download a skill or whatever without going through its contents. And then it just is too much to keep up. For instance, for a period of time, everyone on hn were glazing claude and then after having a great UI experience on their ios app, i got a simple one month subscription, but by that time, hn already was making friends with codex and pi. My searches for blog posts written by ‘AI/LLM’ normies using it for reasonable tasks, has been disappointing, and just too polluted with people completely vibing and not reviewing any code. And then you have power users whose entire purpose is to try out new stuff, rather than stay consistent on one toolchain and maybe also share a perspective of if the tool is degrading or not. Sadly, amongst all the agentic hype, the autocompletion mode seems to have fallen behind which I enjoy a lot more since it allows me to architect things in a particular fashion without bugging myself with nitty gritty details. Hopefully, as these things start costing more money, things will get streamlined to the point where few camps will emerge similar to how the text editors work. I am looking for an update to ‘what the vim of llm tooling look like’ blog post any day now.
TacticalCoder 25d ago
> I then realized that most people just stick with whatever default they're provided with, and it's a lot of them. That's why Google already captured such a big part of the market with Gemini: they're now integrating it with just about everything. GMail? Gemini. Search? (asnwer by and "do you want to continue discussing this with") Gemini. Workspace? Gemini. https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/products/gemini-app/one-billion-monthly-users/ https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/products/gemini-app/on... They may not have yet the same number of MAU as OpenAI but the Gemini experience is much more streamlined than ChatGPT: when people are presented with it, they just use it. And to be fair Google's flash model are just amazing.
dkrich 25d ago
I dunno what the correct level of abstraction is for LLMs to achieve the type of widespread adoption you’re referring to but I can guarantee it sits above the name of the model. If you have to possess that level of knowledge you ain’t gonna use it. Google achieved mainstream success for a reason. People don’t want to know how the sausage is made.
chemtrail68 25d ago
I feel like people analyzing LLM models and acting as if they know what they are talking about is kind of the new "fools gold". As an end-user can you actually prove that what you are experiencing is because of the model change, or its just a different circumstance and you got a different reply? Also, it feels counterintuitive to have an artificial intelligence do crazy calculations and write code, but having to manually select which model to use for it. Best would be, if there was a model in the first place that would just choose the most optimal model to execute your request, otherwise why bother automating everything in the first place?
- hbn 25d ago
  > Best would be, if there was a model in the first place that would just choose the most optimal model to execute your request, otherwise why bother automating everything in the first place? Practically every chat UI these days defaults to "auto" mode which does that
- dboreham 24d ago
  Similar to psychology.
YavenTeam 24d ago
[flagged]
sockaddr 24d ago
Yup. ChatGPT is going to be the new "Microsoft Word" of the corporate AI world
heaney-555 24d ago
>I then realized that most people just stick with whatever default they're provided with, and it's a lot of them. This is something I wish more people in tech understood, especially anyone who gets to decide the defaults for popular hardware and software. The average consumer will never, ever change the defaults. So it's incredibly important that your product is an amazing experience with the default settings.

by abixb 25d ago

ajkjk 25d ago

I think you're right, but I'd add that... if this wasn't obvious to you without being told, you should really question your worldview a bit. A lot of people think that chat.com is an AI called "chat". Most people don't know acronym "LLM". Most people don't know about the existence of companies called "OpenAI" or "Anthropic", or that they are worth a lot of money. Etc.

abixb 25d ago
> you should really question your worldview a bit. Yeah, I still struggle with it. I have a diverse friend circle and sometimes I forget that most of them don't have the same information diet that I do (or don't even care about tech the way I do). Maybe I should be more like them and just chill? I don't know.
- wredcoll 25d ago
  You don't have to "be like" anyone but yourself. You should, however, be aware of what you know and more importantly what you do not know.
  - tough 25d ago
    And be aware of unknown unknowns existance even if not specifics, helps uncover them
    - rabid_0wl 25d ago
      "You don't know what you don't know" has served me well in life so far.
- ajkjk 25d ago
  well probably even your friends know a lot more than "most people". But walk into a random town and ask a random person and I'd wager they'll be about at what I described, on average.
- rr808 25d ago
  Tech is a rather minor part of the world of knowledge. How many languages do you know? Do you know the styles of Renaissance painters? Slept with super-model? Ever seen an elephant stampede? Meditated by the Ganges? Read thousands of stories? Climbed a mountain so high you need Oxygen? Tech stuff is so boring.
  - tough 25d ago
    > Slept with super-model What's the knowledge supposedly required to attain this on your mind?
    - Avicebron 25d ago
      About 4 months of reading about PHP in the early 2000s?
      - tough 25d ago
        lmfao
    - 9dev 25d ago
      It instills into you the arcane knowledge of how incredibly mundane and unremarkable sex with very beautiful people can be, given that they are also just normal people after all. I suppose. Then again, what do I know - maybe you'll awaken with the answer to everything on the spot?
  - N_Lens 25d ago
    Are these achievements you’ve personally experienced?
  - derektank 25d ago
    A large number of those are far less accessible than tech, requiring either extensive travel or superlative physical capabilities (and the one’s that equally accessible don’t strike me as particularly more exciting than tech.)
- throwaway2037 25d ago
  > I forget that most of them don't have the same information diet that I do It is interesting that you conflate "information diet" with "tech". The biggest info junkies I have ever met are: (1) medical doctors, (2) STEM PhDs, and (3) journalists. There are probably some other categories that I am missing. And almost none of the info they are consuming is "tech".
  - TonyStr 25d ago
    Isn't "information diet" perfect usage here? The medical doctor's information diet probably consists of different information than the tech enthusiast's, or the STEM PhD's, and the journalist's information diet may consist of more politics and contemporary events. I thought it was a pretty creative and apt word choice
  - jaapz 25d ago
    I don't think the person you reply to conflates "information diet" with "tech". They are just saying that their information diet consists for a large part of tech news, and other people have other information diets that don't contain that much tech news..
fathermarz 25d ago
This is very accurate. I teach seniors about how to use AI responsibly and they are always mind blown, and I keep it very high level. The amount of Chat”GTP” users there are out there that have no idea who the main vendors are. Most of them also think that Google is just a “search” company.
- svachalek 25d ago
  Wait, isn't it ChatGBD?
  - monk_grilla 25d ago
    ChatGibbity
- pmarreck 25d ago
  How would I be able to help do something like that?
  - fathermarz 24d ago
    In my experience, it depends on the community. Where I live most people are retired so there is tons of interest and a really well ran community program called Elder College. I would look into similar programs near you!
mathisfun123 25d ago
> OpenAI this is unnecessarily austere or whatever - people absolutely know what openai is because lots of "normies" now use chatgpt https://www.youtube.com/shorts/dRE41eYkui4 https://www.youtube.com/shorts/dRE41eYkui4
- ajkjk 25d ago
  I think you are wrong, but of course it's just a guess.
  - mathisfun123 25d ago
    Chatgpt has 469 million daily active users as of September 2026. Who exactly do you think they are? Martians? Because there aren't half a billion SWEs on planet earth.
    - loeg 25d ago
      What percent of ChatGPT users do you think know the company behind it is OpenAI? 10%?
      - mathisfun123 25d ago
        What percent of Instagram users know the company behind it? Like is this even a real question?
        ajkjk 25d ago
        I feel you like you cited that as an example of people knowing companies behind things and you don't realize that very many people do not know that the same company owns Facebook and Instagram... Corporate structures are things you know about if you follow tech news, but people mostly do not know about them otherwise. They've never heard of "Alphabet" either. Stuff like that.
        stackbutterflow 25d ago
ctkhn 25d ago
Even Shingy called chatgpt "chat" when he went on Ed Zitron's show. It was very weird to hear from a guy who has been around tech world for such a long time even if he's non technical.
- King-Aaron 25d ago
  I'm a pretty seasoned software dev, but I've also kept the frontier AI race at arms length from myself. I run Claude alongside my day to day workflow but don't really get overly concerned about the latest and greatest models, as I'm not leaning on it to do my job for me I suppose. In my mind I'm after a stable tool, not wanting to dabble in the bleeding edge. I did that back in the early days of web coding and have settled into a much more subdued kind of industry/life in that regard.
- sam345 25d ago
  Even Shingy. Ia he really the standard for explaining tech to normies? Ouch.
- edgyquant 25d ago
  Everyone calls it chat. I am technical and even I’ve come around to calling it that because that is what everyone, including very technical people, call the product.
  - dboreham 24d ago
    Never heard it called that until this thread.
- tnolet 25d ago
  Shingy, from “Everybody in the club getting Tipsy”?
- stackbutterflow 25d ago
  I didn't know who Shingy was. He looks like Jensen Huang's subconscious.
dd8601fn 25d ago
The joke of it is that I see those same people (ones who haven’t heard “LLM” before, don’t know what a model is or even the vaguest idea how these work, etc) have very strong opinions on the state of AI, where it’s headed, and are willing to make projections with timelines. Bill Maher is one example.
- ihaveajob 25d ago
  In general you can't take anyone whose job is to opine too seriously. When you're not familiar with what they're talking about, they make it sound reasonable and convincing. It's their skill after all. But now and then they talk about some topic you understand and care deeply about, and realize they're just repeating the talking points some staffer prepared for them shortly before. Most recently it happened to me with John Oliver talking about housing, reading from the standard left-NIMBY bingo card. I like him as a comedian, still.
  - mmahemoff 25d ago
    Gell-Mann Amnesia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect As tech became more pervasive in the past couple of decades, it became commonplace for pundits to spout nonsense on the topic. Those takes should give anyone in tech pause about how everything else is reported.
- enos_feedler 25d ago
  This problem has permeated everywhere. Nobody can predict the future. Even VCs can’t and yet I’ll get a weekly email with a confident narrative about the future. Looking at a16z. CEOs do this as well. Listen to Satya talk about how AI will transform things. We’ve trained everyone else to casually state what the future will look like on timelines. As if it’s knowable at all.
  - psychoslave 25d ago
    What is a16z please?
itemize123 25d ago
I think you are overestimating things. While there will be people who don't know - it's probably not as many as you think.
- anonzzzies 25d ago
  Over 90% of humanity and that's probably still underestimating it. Most people cannot point on a map where they live. Many people think 'chat' is conscious and being locked up by evil humans: many think 'chat' is a god or aliens communicating with us. And getting worse as people cannot make a sandwich without asking 'chat', let alone learn anything worthwhile.
  - Eisenstein 24d ago
    The remaining 10% of humanity is still 830 million people.
tyre 25d ago
TIL openai owns chat.com I hung out with my parents this weekend and heard them talking about "chat", as a noun. I assumed they were talking about ChatGPT; there being a literal chat.com makes sense why they'd call it that.
- anon7000 25d ago
  Just redirects to chatgpt.com
- rpozarickij 25d ago
  I've seen people using "chat" to refer to ChatGPT because it's easier/simpler. I'm pretty sure an average person has no idea that chat.com will redirect you to chatgpt.com (or what a redirect is for that matter). It's similar to how people were calling the COVID-19 pandemic or the virus itself "covid".
  - parl_match 25d ago
    people in the industry, especially those who work for oai, refer to it as "chat" at least in the ai industry, chat is like kleenex
    - zxexz 25d ago
      I've heard it as shorthand, in-context. Never heard it being chat-as-in-kleenex. I've supposedly been in the industry since before ChatGPT. Maybe that's where I went wrong :D
    - falsemyrmidon 25d ago
      Guess I'm not in the industry enough lmao
  - kachnuv_ocasek 25d ago
    ChatGPT is commonly referred to as Chappie (チャッピー) in Japan.
    - 25d ago
hn_throwaway_99 25d ago
> Most people don't know about the existence of companies called "OpenAI" or "Anthropic", or that they are worth a lot of money. I agree with your general premise but that one sounds like bullshit to me. Tons of people who otherwise don't know anything about LLMs know about these companies specifically because they are worth a lot of money, and of course tons of people know who OpenAI is because of ChatGPT.
- chicagobuss 25d ago
  go ask 100 random people across the world and I bet less than 20 will know both those company names.
  - dboreham 24d ago
    I'd go with fewer than 5.
- oblio 25d ago
  You're grossly overestimating how many people care about big companies, at least on a daily basis. Most people don't invest in anything and will never get a job at a big American company. They do know about ChatGPT but that doesn't mean they know who makes it.
- ajkjk 24d ago
  You're one of those people who needs to expand their worldview, then. I live in a progressive city in North Carolina and constantly find that when people have never heard of them things that every HN reader (and probably every Bay Area resident, I dunno) would know about. Bubbles are real.
juggle-anyhow 25d ago
They call it "Chatty"
robofanatic 25d ago
People are generally bad with acronyms. For the longest time I used to refer to San Francisco as SFO. On my first visit to Bay Area, I was talking to a local friend and casually said - last weekend, I went to SFO for sightseeing. He was confused and asked why I was sightseeing at the airport. That’s when I realized it’s SF not SFO.
- sgerenser 25d ago
  I live in Raleigh, NC and it’s a going joke the amount of travelers or newcomers who refer to the area as RDU (the Raleigh/Durham airport code). I guess it’s a common problem elsewhere.
- dboreham 24d ago
  Both are wrong. It's called "the city".
  - robofanatic 23d ago
    what about San Fran?
dofm 25d ago
> Most people don't know about the existence of companies called "OpenAI" or "Anthropic", or that they are worth a lot of money. Etc. UK perspective: because our broadcast news and current affairs science/tech coverage is still good, I think the average person (at least the average working-age person) likely knows what OpenAI is, knows ChatGPT is called that, and knows what an LLM is. (Whether the average pensioner does, I don't know; maybe older men do) Anyone who watches the news is likely to know there are several big AI companies, even if they can't name the second; they are likely to know that these companies have absurd valuations and are seeking to build massive data centres; many will know that despite these valuations they are ever deeper in astonishing levels of debt and that this debt could end up being a wider problem. I doubt the average person has a sense that a company called Anthropic made an AI called Claude; they may not know about Claude. But I think this speaks more to Anthropic's positioning of their own brand and products than anything else; I would expect younger people and anyone working in a white collar position to be a little more likely to be aware of Claude. Some of this difference in perspective has to do with the nature of being an english-speaking non-American; we see a lot of what you are complaining about on social media, the news covers more of the USA's troubles, etc. And at the same time we are developing an increasingly adversarial position with the USA, so there's a bit more know-your-adversary going on here. The perceived threat of AI is very much entangled with the perceived threat of a dysregulated USA.

Gigachad 25d ago

I think we are lacking in the easy to use side of things. Once you go beyond browser based chatbots things become hard to set up. I see lots of posting about using AI to create patches to get new apps working in wine, or reverse engineering firmware. But every time I’ve tried it it’s been quite a lot of work to set everything up. Even more so if you want VMs and some level of isolation from your sensitive data. Having something that’s just a one click product that just works is more important than the smartest model.

abixb 25d ago
I remember Logan Kilpatrick from Google talking about how AGI will be more of an experience with a product than raw 'intelligence' of a model. [0] No one outside of the nerd community cares about benchmarks or any of the other crap. They just want their tech to work so they could go do other IRL things. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1ldkkth/google_deepminds_logan_kilpatrick_says_agi_will/ https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1ldkkth/google...

randycupertino 25d ago

I think of my mom who doesn't care and doesn't understand the difference between google AI Overview vs actual google search results. "I looked it up" - she doesn't care what tool she is using she just wants answers to how long bake pork or the best throw pillows to buy or whatever else she is looking up. She's mostly using google AI tools because it's easy and free and on her landing page.

m11a 25d ago
tbh I also use google AI tools frequently. It’s convenient (search bar is top of my window), and extremely fast at generation. For quick Qs, opening a chat bot and changing the default reasoning from my coding settings, switching from Work to Chat, etc etc, is too much of a faff.
- yard2010 25d ago
  I ended up adding -ai to every search in the browser level to turn this crap off. I couldn't find a way to disable it otherwise. I did it after it hallucinated the world cup games schedule which made my friend send wrong events to everyone after he "looked it up". Can't stop this from him, but at least this honest mistake won't happen to me.
  - ShadowOfThePit 25d ago
    Surely there's an extension for whatever browser you are using? Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hide-google-ai-overviews/ Chromium: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hide-google-ai-overviews/neibhohkbmfjninidnaoacabkjonbahn Safari: Seems there are none
- hbn 24d ago
  Google Search's AI has gotten... better. But it's still frequently spouting as much made up shit as I expected from LLMs not doing their research a couple years ago. Just this morning I looked up what time today's Nintendo Direct livestream is. It correctly told me it's today at 7am PT (confirmed from actual link sources). It then tried to get smart and tell me what that would be in my city's timezone and it was an hour off (possibly because I'm in a timezone without daylight savings)

magicmicah85 25d ago

Literally what I was about to comment. This is meant to capture the normies, the busy parents managing school and work, the grandparents who want to make most of their retirement. I am trying it now. It let me name my muse as Satan. I appreciate that it understands my humor, but I'm also not joking at the same time.

arcanemachiner 25d ago
Is "normies" finally a mainstream word? Just wondering how out of the loop I am here.
- magicmicah85 25d ago
  I've never heard a normie use it. ;)
  - mech422 25d ago
    I think it's very common - its just what a 'normie' is depends on your particular poison... it seems to have been incorporated in a lot of hobbies/niches to refer to anyone not deep in the niche ?
webern777 24d ago
My parents are in their 70s and retired, I can't even vaguely imagine what they would use this for. If they have any problems in life, it is that they have too much time on their hands already. An AI agent that automates tasks so they have more free time is exactly what they would not want. What they really want is something worth spending their time on. That is what everyone pretty much wants but instead we get this bullshit.

tikotus 25d ago

I'm a coder and a daily driver of ChatGPT and I don't really know what Sol is or how I can access it. I follow discussions here and know of its excistence, but I can't remember its relation to other models or tiers by heart. What ever the default thing the website is giving me has been good enough for my needs for years.

marcd35 25d ago
Its mostly used with Codex so you can give finer control over task delegation. its definitely worth learning the different strengths and weaknesses for each one and which you should use for planning/building/testing/documentation updates etc. No point in burning excessive tokens using a high tier/expensive reasoning model like Sol/Xhigh if just updating a readme file.
redox99 25d ago
Do you... code by copy pasting chatgpt web???
- tikotus 25d ago
  Yes! Though I mainly use it for one-shotting full files, so I'm not copying over small diffs. I did try copilot at some point in vscode, but after a week or so I felt like it was slowing me down. Something I knew would be a simple and quick change was now slow since I didn't have enough ownership of the code to do it quickly myself, and prompting for the change took longer than changing it manually if I had had full ownership. So I went back to coding by hand things that aren't a one-shot file.
  - redox99 25d ago
    Thanks for the reply. I'd suggest you improve your workflow with better tooling like Codex or Claude code, and if you have some kind of weird constraint they'll easily follow an AGENTS.md with that.
    - matkoniecz 25d ago

benatkin 25d ago

To me it sounds like they are simply taking social moon shots. They tried to do a phone, tried to make a kitchen videophone, tried to make their own cryptocurrency, and tried to dominate open source AI, and now this is trying to make something like a digital robotic assistant. It might have reached a peak with the metaverse, when Zuck thought his corporation was destined to be the ruler of a Snow Crash style metaverse, to the point of renaming it. Maybe that's still the plan and they are looking for something that will lead to another metaverse play.

Gigachad 25d ago
They need the next big thing to secure the future of the company. Facebook and Instagram are still money printers which can sustain these repeated failures, but without something new, they could be completely ruined if the social media landscape changes.

MattDamonSpace 25d ago

Yeah this to me is why Apple wins

nikcub 25d ago

> "just ChatGPT, what is Sol?." i'd really like to see some analytics on what proportion of users have ever switched the model in chatgpt because I anecdotally believe it is < 5%

dd8601fn 25d ago
Honestly I rarely change it in either of them unless I’m using the cli or cowork to do something. That’s where smarter work means less iterative un-fucking, later. Any quick questions or rubber ducking in a regular “chat”… the model just doesn’t really matter anymore. They’re all smarter than I need for that stuff (and whatever unfortunate thing that says about me).
SoftTalker 25d ago
I didn't even know you could. Work pays for ChatGPT and I just assumed it is what it is.
- Barbing 25d ago
  On average, generally, do you dig into settings (or maybe if something works, good enough usually)? (I’m always on the hunt for “please don’t just friggin sell my data to everyone, if you’re scared enough over getting sued that you’ll listen to the toggle” and “disable sponsored this-and-that”. Plus power user stuff.)
  - SoftTalker 25d ago
    I used to, very much. I've slowly come around over the last ten years or so to just using everything in its default config. I guess I don't want to spend the time I have left fiddling with settings.
Barbing 25d ago
95%(?) have never paid. Maybe that helps the stats: for those who’ve paid, perhaps it’s all the way to 10% who’ve switched models?
25d ago

bluegatty 25d ago

They are not 'normies' - we're just 'nerds'. You're driving a home kit car, they're driving something out of the factory. Eventually - we'll probably drive factory variations as well.

BatFastard 25d ago
Neurodivergent
phil21 25d ago
Yeah you’re describing normies. They are the norm. It’s in the name. People as described make up the vast majority of the population. Nerds have always been in the extreme minority. Ignoring the influx of cosplaying MBA financing bros and industry hangers-on as tech became the place where the money is of course. The tech industry started attracting the normies as soon as it became almost as lucrative as finance, so these days the definition gets a little blurry.
- bluegatty 25d ago
  You're right!

deleted 25d ago

[deleted]

TechSquidTV 25d ago

It's not a bad market to aim for. No one else really is.

ramraj07 25d ago

Even with all of this nuance why would the regular joe go to muse when they have chatgpt and gemini? Most of their actual productive data is likely with Google anyway.

almogo 25d ago

Yesterday I helped a maaaaybe 40 year old woman connect to the wifi at my local library so she could get on a zoom call. Made me realize most of the world is exactly like that.

throw03172019 25d ago

It seems like on the “Chat” mode of ChatGPT it doesn’t allow switching the model. It’s just “5.6” with the effort level

willsmith72 25d ago

I agree, and stay away from meta generally in life wherever possible That said, I've got more time for projects this week so flew through my Claude max plan. Now I'm trying muse spark 1.3 with opencode which is free with pretty generous usage allowance. First time I've been impressed by meta's AI products. It feels not far below opus 4.8ish

rconti 25d ago

I use claude all day every day, and sometimes codex, and I still don't change models. I guess I'm more interested in accomplishing the thing than in experimenting with a dozen ways of accomplishing the same thing.

greenchair 25d ago
most people are not on the unlimited plan and can't use it all day every day for complex work which is one reason they are forced to learn about the options available and optimize their workflows.
- rconti 24d ago
  That's a great point I was overlooking-- that said, I know plenty of people on my corp plan who also have strong opinions on different models' strengths, so there _also_ are plenty of people who are legitimately digging into the pros and cons of each model, independent of price.

throwaway2037 25d ago

I confess that when I ride the subway, I like to peer at other people's phones to see what they are doing. The ones that interest me the most are other people talking with an LLM. I am always surprised by the wide variety of people who are using LLMs to ask an infinite variety of questions. From the surface-level PR annoucement here by Meta, this seems like a good business idea.

throwaway2037 24d ago
Related: Today, I was in an elevator, and a middle-aged Japanese woman next to me was text chatting with ChatGPT on her mobile phone about a Chinese brand of spicy (mala/麻辣) instant noodles that she was holding in her hand. Chinese food has many ingredients that do not exist in Japan cuisine, so she was asking about various spices used in the noodles. I asked her if this was her first time trying those noodles. She replied yes, and asked me if I had also tried it. I said yes -- they are very spicy! She laughed. Again: Cool to see normies using ChatGPT (and other LLMs) for normie stuff.

fr2029 25d ago

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wocram 25d ago

This is not limited to non technical users. Plenty of people don't care to switch between models and just pick the latest model.

villgax 25d ago

Cant wait for Snitch Bench results of this

XCSme 25d ago

I think all AI companies want to capture normie users too, it's a huge market. All ChatGPT, Claude, Google, Microsoft have/want to have their own assistants.

michaelt 25d ago
> I think all AI companies want to capture normie users too, it's a huge market. Huge revenue? Or just huge volume? If I boost the productivity of a $100k employee by 50%, a business will happily pay $1k/month and consider it a great deal. But from what I've heard, consumer-facing LLMs find most users won't hand over even $20/month (which is a heavily subsidised price anyway).
- XCSme 25d ago
  In a dystopian outcome, the goal of having more people use your AI will not be for them to pay for it...

MisterMunchkin 25d ago

I met a normie who was using ChatGPT to write production code… in instant mode. No thinking enabled.

Schlagbohrer 25d ago

Many people deep into tech (like most commenters here) may fall into the trap of overestimating average user's knowledge or interest in the details of the tech: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2501:_Average_Familiarity https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2501:_Average_Fam...

herbst 25d ago

To be fair I stopped caring about specific versions as well. I don't seem to notice the big difference anymore on daily tasks and questions.

teiferer 25d ago

> I then realized Oh, your grandma doesn't know which android version her phone is running? Or the build number of the Windows on her laptop? You just realized this?

KronisLV 25d ago

> I think Meta's strategy is to capture the 'normie-tier' of AI users. For what it's worth, maybe that would help people who struggle with technology in general? Because as far as UI/UX goes, a chat interface for an agent is about as easy as it gets (not every site having its own crappy assistant that can't really do anything useful for you, but is slapped on there for the sake of a checkbox). I watched the marketing video and to me it seemed pretty nice and practical for the average person.

aatd86 25d ago
But who is going to trust Facebook/Meta with everything? Even my parents are wary of their products. I can't see a personal assistant coming from them and being successful.
- fg137 25d ago
  If this is still not obvious to you, most people don't care about privacy. You and your parents are outliers.
  - aatd86 25d ago
    Not obvious from our discussions with friends or even from videos on youtube about everyone wondering how they are ad tracked. They care but then it has been made very difficult to find privacy preserving services. Or convenience takes over. It is like replaceable batteries. Everyone cares but we are not given the choice. Or the headphone jack... I think it is different here. First it is easy to build. Second that is too much information that should remain private.

latexr 25d ago

> I know most of us here on HN track model releases quite frequently and discuss every parameter weight out of them You know it? I sincerely hope you don’t and that it’s not really “most” of us. That would be incredibly sad. Tracking model releases and discussing “every parameter weight” is very far from intellectually curious discussion (what HN is ostensibly about). > I then realized that most people just stick with whatever default they're provided with (…) > Curse of knowledge and all. If there’s one thing many of us on HN suffer from, however, is intense hubris. The juxtaposition of claiming “curse of knowledge” while admitting to not having known the most elementary principle of designing for people is a tad tone deaf. Yes, of course most people just stick with the defaults, that’s why dark patterns work and hiding settings is a thing. The industry has been using those strategies to manipulate people for years and years.

KaiserPro 25d ago

Former meta prick, sorry employee: > Meta's strategy Meta has no strategy. The people that made llama work left two years ago. MSI are a bunch of charlatans who are trying to change the culutre and tooling of meta from the outside (I can see their point, trying to work outside of the defaults is incredibly hard.) its basically a bun fight, with all of your productive workers being poached by frontier labs, and everyone else is either a new grad, burnt out, or a master bullshitter.

alt227 25d ago
Meta certainly do give the impression that they are burning through ridiculous amounts of cash with not much to show for it, and thats just from the outside.
- Dlemlo 25d ago
  Yeah and if you look at there numbers, they can just afford it. When you realize how big zuckerberg still is.
- dewey 25d ago
  If you scroll Instagram for a few minutes you'll see what they have been working on and that are also making a ridiculous amount of cash by selling and serving ads while burning some on side projects like that.
  - sensanaty 25d ago
    I had to laugh to the point of tears the other day when I saw my friend scrolling through Instagram and they encountered an "Ad Break". The app simply doesn't let you scroll through another post, story or reel until you sit there like a good boy and let the ad sit for 10 seconds or whatever. How people put up with that kinda crap and continue to use these apps daily for hours on end is mind blowing to me.
    - Zambyte 25d ago
      I wonder if the prevalence of adblock has helped make a lot of things like this possible. Like, it's hard to imagine people putting up with this without literally protesting in the streets. But the people who can't tolerate it have mostly gone through the effort of opting out, and those who can just put up with it. And thus, the frog boils.

thinkindie 25d ago

in a way it's not much different from a time where the E icon of internet explorer was considered "the internet".

jatins 25d ago

Given that cost of building is down, strategy of most companies is turning into "do everything" and see what sticks

whazor 25d ago

I'm confident that Muse can do lots of agentic tasks succesfully for normies on outdated models. Like buying sneakers, booking appointments, dealing with government forms.

ChrisMarshallNY 25d ago

> So, us serial HN users and commenters are the extreme minority Words to live by.

fg137 25d ago

At $dayjob, a company with ~10k employees, there are like 3 people who cannot shut up discussing the latest models in the internal AI forum, 10 others that constantly compare models and talk about "strategy" of using the models. The rest of the users just use whatever the default is and get their work done.

hightrix 24d ago
Is this really new though? In the olden days, you had some engineers that REALLY cared about linting, various architectures, standards design, and so on when the majority of engineers just follow the spec and standards as is. You need those people digging into the latest newness and discussing strategy on how to best use new tools so that the "rest of the users" can follow and do the work.
- analog_daddy 23d ago
  I think I have some tendencies to do so as well. More specifically, I have the itch to just spend some time, knowing or understanding the tools I use better. It Has paid dividends for me, since the tools we typically use for $work are super buggy yet powerful and like any good proprietary tool, abstracted behind an obscure shitty API. Experimenting with crazy things just allows me to run into bugs early on when, I have the patience to solve them. But, it’s the first time in my short career, i have shied away from being on bleeding edge of tooling. Specifically, LLM tooling. Firstly, since LLM’s are not yet needed or good in my field of $work, but; even in my programming hobby, whenever I venture out to explore, it all feels too snake oil to me. And do I even need to begin why the f*k people curl | bash?? I dunno maybe its just old habits, but I can’t bring myself to download a skill or whatever without going through its contents. And then it just is too much to keep up. For instance, for a period of time, everyone on hn were glazing claude and then after having a great UI experience on their ios app, i got a simple one month subscription, but by that time, hn already was making friends with codex and pi. My searches for blog posts written by ‘AI/LLM’ normies using it for reasonable tasks, has been disappointing, and just too polluted with people completely vibing and not reviewing any code. And then you have power users whose entire purpose is to try out new stuff, rather than stay consistent on one toolchain and maybe also share a perspective of if the tool is degrading or not. Sadly, amongst all the agentic hype, the autocompletion mode seems to have fallen behind which I enjoy a lot more since it allows me to architect things in a particular fashion without bugging myself with nitty gritty details. Hopefully, as these things start costing more money, things will get streamlined to the point where few camps will emerge similar to how the text editors work. I am looking for an update to ‘what the vim of llm tooling look like’ blog post any day now.

TacticalCoder 25d ago

> I then realized that most people just stick with whatever default they're provided with, and it's a lot of them. That's why Google already captured such a big part of the market with Gemini: they're now integrating it with just about everything. GMail? Gemini. Search? (asnwer by and "do you want to continue discussing this with") Gemini. Workspace? Gemini. https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/products/gemini-app/one-billion-monthly-users/ https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/products/gemini-app/on... They may not have yet the same number of MAU as OpenAI but the Gemini experience is much more streamlined than ChatGPT: when people are presented with it, they just use it. And to be fair Google's flash model are just amazing.

dkrich 25d ago

I dunno what the correct level of abstraction is for LLMs to achieve the type of widespread adoption you’re referring to but I can guarantee it sits above the name of the model. If you have to possess that level of knowledge you ain’t gonna use it. Google achieved mainstream success for a reason. People don’t want to know how the sausage is made.

chemtrail68 25d ago

I feel like people analyzing LLM models and acting as if they know what they are talking about is kind of the new "fools gold". As an end-user can you actually prove that what you are experiencing is because of the model change, or its just a different circumstance and you got a different reply? Also, it feels counterintuitive to have an artificial intelligence do crazy calculations and write code, but having to manually select which model to use for it. Best would be, if there was a model in the first place that would just choose the most optimal model to execute your request, otherwise why bother automating everything in the first place?

hbn 25d ago
> Best would be, if there was a model in the first place that would just choose the most optimal model to execute your request, otherwise why bother automating everything in the first place? Practically every chat UI these days defaults to "auto" mode which does that
dboreham 24d ago
Similar to psychology.

YavenTeam 24d ago

[flagged]

sockaddr 24d ago

Yup. ChatGPT is going to be the new "Microsoft Word" of the corporate AI world

heaney-555 24d ago

>I then realized that most people just stick with whatever default they're provided with, and it's a lot of them. This is something I wish more people in tech understood, especially anyone who gets to decide the defaults for popular hardware and software. The average consumer will never, ever change the defaults. So it's incredibly important that your product is an amazing experience with the default settings.