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Comment by nritchie | Hacker News Reader

I wonder the complete opposite. On Hacker News, people are excited about AI. Outside this bubble, in the real world, less so.

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I read more sceptical takes about AI on Hacker News than anywhere else (since I stopped following Gary Marcus, at least). My hunch is that some people here might feel professionally threatened about it so they want to diminish it. This is less of an issue with some of the 'normies' that I know. For them AI is not professionally threatening but use it to translate stuff, ideate about cupcake recipes, use it as a psychologist (please don't shoot the messenger) or help them lesson plan to teach kids.

Speaking as a software engineer, I'm not at all threatened by it. I like Copilot as fancy autocomplete when I'm bashing out code, but that's the easy part of my job. The hard part is understanding problems and deciding what to build, and LLMs can't do that and will never be able to do that.

What I am annoyed by is having to tell users and management "no, LLMs can't do that" over and over and over and over and over. There's so much overhype and just flat out lying about capabilities and people buy into it and want to give decision making power to the statistics model that's only right by accident. Which: No.

It's a fun toy to play with and it has some limited uses, but fundamentally it's basically another blockchain: a solution in search of a problem. The set of real world problems where you want a lot of human-like writing but don't need it to be accurate is basically just "autocomplete" and "spam".

I disagree with the characterisation of AI as "another blockchain: a solution in search of a problem". The two industries have opposite problems: crypto people are struggling to create demand, AI people are struggling to keep up with demand.

> crypto people are struggling to create demand, AI people are struggling to keep up with demand.

Today, 10 years ago crypto was what everyone wanted, you can see how bitcoin soared and crypto scams was everywhere and made many billions.

And no AI is not struggling to keep up with user demand, it is struggling to keep up with free but not paid demand. So what you mean is AI is struggling to keep up with investor demand, more people want to invest into AI than there are compute to buy, but that was the same for bitcoins, bitcoin mining massively raised the prices on GPU due to how much investors put into it.

But investor driven demand can disappear really quickly, that is what people mean with an AI bubble.

Google has built a multibillion dollar business on top of "free" users. ChatGPT has more than 400 million weekly active users and this is obviously going to grow. You are overlooking how easily that "free" demand will be monetized as soon as they slap ads on the interface.

"Obviously" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. They have a lot of competition and no killer use case and no IP rights. From the consumer point of view, they're fungible.

That's not even considering the probability that demand could slow as people lose interest.

I'm not claiming that OpenAI will be the winner of the AI race, but _somebody_ will win big time.

Regarding people losing interest: are you willing to bet with me that there will be fewer than, let's say 500 million active users of LLMs in 5 years?

Yep. Ten years ago HN was hyping blockchain as the future and there were a million blockchain startups. Just look at the list of startups funded by YC around then lol

> My hunch is that some people here might feel professionally threatened about it so they want to diminish it.

I don't think it's this. At least, I don't see a lot of that. What I do see a lot of is people realizing that AI is massively overhyped, and a lot of companies are capitalizing on that.

Until/unless it moves on from the hype cycle, it's hard to take it that seriously.

HN is a highly technical audience, and AI is showing the most benefit on highly technical tasks, so it seems logical to me that HN would be more excited than "the real world". (What is the real world, btw? Do people on HN not exist in the real world?)

> AI is showing the most benefit on highly technical tasks

It must be truly abysmal everywhere else then, because it doesn't show much value on highly technical tasks when I try.

Is it really unthinkable that you could be using it in domains different than those that provide value to other people?

My sister, who is a pretty technical kinesiology PhD student, does not know how to input Alt+F4 and insists that is esoteric knowledge. There's a litmus test for how out of touch HN users may be with the way normal people use computers.

Exactly, and of course there's a relevant xkcd (Average Familiarity) https://xkcd.com/2501/

I meet a non-technical woman using it all day long to help manage a landscaping business. This was a data point for me.

Anectodally all of my non-tech friends seem to be using ChatGPT much more than I do.

Maybe you as a tech person mostly get tech enthusiast friends? Enthusiasts are much more into trends than professionals.

I don't think so. None of them seemed to be a tech enthusiast before, if you don't consider using social media a trait of a tech enthusiast.

I think people who are interested in how things work and AI users are two entirely different cohorts. ChatGPT from user's perspective is more like a search engine or an autotranslator rather than some sophisticated technical gizmo.

Is that true? I have three kids now, two of them in high school, that are perhaps more AI-savvy than me (both good and bad). I think the article, and my limited professional view, is informed by SoftwareDev, IT infrastructure and Enterprise technology. I think a lot of younger people are happily plugging AI into their life.

ChatGPT is the number one free iPhone app on the US App Store, and I'm pretty sure it has been the number one app for a long time. I googled to see if I could find an App Store ranking chart over time... this one[0] shows that it has been in the top 2 on the US iPhone App Store every month for the past year, and it has been number one for 10 of the past 12 months. I also checked, and ChatGPT is still the number one app on the Google Play Store too.

Unless both the App Store and Google Play Store rankings are somehow determined primarily by HN users, then it seems like AI isn't only a thing on HN.

[0]: https://app.sensortower.com/overview/6448311069?tab=category...

Close to 100% of HN users in AI threads have used ChatGPT. What do you think the percentage is in the general population, is it more than that, or less than that?

I was at a get-together last weekend with mostly non-tech friends and the subject was brought up briefly. Seemed to be a fair amount of excitement and use by everyone in the conversation, minus one guy who thought it was the "devil"...only slightly joking.

If I were to write a "hard" sci-fi story of how the devil might take over the world in the near future, AI would be my top choice, and it would definitely fit with The Usual Suspects' "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist".

It's because we're excited about the possibilities. It's potentially revolutionary tech from a product perspective. Some claim that it increases their speed of development by a not insignificant amount.

The average consumer does not appear to be particularly excited about products w/ AI features though. A big example that comes to mind is Apple Intelligence. It's not like the second coming of the iPhone, which it should be, given the insane amount of investment capital and press in the tech sphere.

I don't know, I know many people (including non-technical people) that use a lot of the chatbots. (And I even heard some parents at the playground talk about it to each other. Parents that I didn't know, it was a random public playground.)

Not sure if they are 'excited', but they are definitely using it.

Lots of interns and students also use the bots.

The real world is made of bubbles.

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