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Comment by fmbb | Hacker News Reader

Depends on what the datacenters are used for.

AI has no utility.

Almonds make marzipan.

AI has way more utility than you are claiming and less utility than Sam Altman and the market would like us to believe. It’s okay to have a nuanced take.

"AI has no utility" is a pretty wild claim to make in the tail end of 2025.

Still surprised to see so many take this as such a hot claim. Is there hype, absolutely, is there value being driven also absolutely.

Whenever I see someone say AI has no utility, I'm happy that I don't have to waste time in an argument against someone out of touch with reality.

I'm more unhappy than happy, as there are plenty of points about the very real bad side of AI that are hurt by such delusional and/or disingenuous arguments.

That is, the topic is not one where I have already picked a side that I'd like to win by any means necessary. It's one where I think there are legitimate tradeoffs, and I want the strongest arguments on both sides to be heard so we get the best possible policies in the end.

I agree, but you can't win against religious people. Better spend your time talking to the rest of us.

The article made a really interesting and coherent argument, for example. That's the kind of discourse around the topic I'd like to see.

If AI is so useful, we should have a ton of data showing an increase in productivity across many fields. GDP should be skyrocketing. We haven’t seen any of this, and every time a study is conducted, it’s determined that AI is modestly useful at best.

I don't need data to know that I use it every day and offload lots of tasks to it.

It's like the smooth brains who still post "lol 6 fingers"

Well, I don't like marzipan, so both are useless? Or maybe different people find uses/utility from different things, what is trash for one person can be life saving for another, or just "better than not having it" (like you and Marzipan it seems).

ok in that case you don't need to pick on water in particular, if it has no utility at all then literally any resource use is too much, so why bother insisting that water in particular is a problem? It's pretty energy intensive, eg.

Marzipan is fun, but useful?

AI is at least as useful as marzipan.

Activated almonds create funko pops. I’d still take the data centers over the funko pops buying basedboys that almonds causes.

AI has no utility _for you_ because you live in this bubble where you are so rabidly against it you will never allow yourself to acknowledge it has non-zero utility.

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