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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 th
by ajkjk 23d 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 23d 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 23d agoYou 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.
- ajkjk 23d agowell 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 23d agoTech 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 23d ago> Slept with super-model What's the knowledge supposedly required to attain this on your mind?
- Avicebron 23d agoAbout 4 months of reading about PHP in the early 2000s?
- tough 23d agolmfao
- 9dev 23d agoIt 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 23d agoAre these achievements you’ve personally experienced?
- derektank 23d agoA 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 23d 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 23d agoIsn'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 23d agoI 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 23d agoThis 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 23d agoWait, isn't it ChatGBD?
- monk_grilla 23d agoChatGibbity
- pmarreck 23d agoHow would I be able to help do something like that?
- fathermarz 22d agoIn 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 23d 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 23d agoI think you are wrong, but of course it's just a guess.
- mathisfun123 23d agoChatgpt 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 23d agoWhat percent of ChatGPT users do you think know the company behind it is OpenAI? 10%?
- mathisfun123 23d agoWhat percent of Instagram users know the company behind it? Like is this even a real question?
- ajkjk 23d agoI 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 23d ago
- ctkhn 23d agoEven 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 23d agoI'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 23d agoEven Shingy. Ia he really the standard for explaining tech to normies? Ouch.
- edgyquant 23d agoEveryone 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 22d agoNever heard it called that until this thread.
- tnolet 23d agoShingy, from “Everybody in the club getting Tipsy”?
- stackbutterflow 23d agoI didn't know who Shingy was. He looks like Jensen Huang's subconscious.
- dd8601fn 23d agoThe 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 23d agoIn 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 23d agoGell-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 23d agoThis 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 23d agoWhat is a16z please?
- itemize123 23d agoI think you are overestimating things. While there will be people who don't know - it's probably not as many as you think.
- anonzzzies 23d agoOver 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 23d agoThe remaining 10% of humanity is still 830 million people.
- tyre 23d agoTIL 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 23d agoJust redirects to chatgpt.com
- rpozarickij 23d agoI'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 23d agopeople 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 23d agoI'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 23d agoGuess I'm not in the industry enough lmao
- kachnuv_ocasek 23d agoChatGPT is commonly referred to as Chappie (チャッピー) in Japan.
- 23d ago
- hn_throwaway_99 23d 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 23d agogo ask 100 random people across the world and I bet less than 20 will know both those company names.
- dboreham 22d agoI'd go with fewer than 5.
- oblio 23d agoYou'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 22d agoYou'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 23d agoThey call it "Chatty"
- robofanatic 23d agoPeople 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 23d agoI 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 22d agoBoth are wrong. It's called "the city".
- robofanatic 22d agowhat about San Fran?
- dofm 23d 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.