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Comment by hmontazeri | Hacker News Reader

No one seems to worry about the demand of ai. That makes me wonder. My neighbors for example are normal working ppl they don’t know how to open a zip file (they call me to help them with something like this) and they are in their early 40s so not that old. Sure companies and workflows are going to become agentic but not everyone needs it or even wants it. Then there are smarter small models like Qwen 27b running on a Mac mini and this will also continue to get better and develop further. If the usage is easy I see ppl downloading a desktop app that’s dead simple instead of paying for ChatGPT. I just don’t see this growth curve going for 20 years for these companies to pay off their dept

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I would say your neighbors are the perfect use case for AI. AI can understand human language. Your neighbors probably never were able to use Google for search, compare flight tickets online, Wikipedia etc. Give your neighbors something like Alexa powered with better AI, and they are sold.

Now tell them it costs $100/month and, eh, not so much.

They need less than $20/month though. Probably just a free tier with ads. That gets you google.

Right. So my worry – inasmuch that I worry for the state of the global economy – is that this doesn't generate valuations that match the current hype.

There's so much ad money to go around. It currently fuels Meta and Google. Let's say Anthropic and OpenAI enter the field and take a slice. That's a fine business, sure. But does it justify the state of the market?

> ad money/free tier

And at what cost to the underlying quality of the product and its utility, and will that cost be acceptable to the end users?

I think we've already demonstrated that the vast majority of people don't care.

In the US, roughly 95% of AI users do not pay for it. So, they are sold, but only for the free tier. Technology is there, money are not.

Heck I use copilot at work and use M365 copilot chat for a lot of short things and small scripts and tools over credits in Github Copilot. At home I throw things things into copilot chat free, google AI, and more to avoid cost.

Then all the real AI work I'm using my local setup on dedicated hardware for large local models. I have usede my Copilot pr sub a few times this month to check work but it's either:

1. I ask about bugs and security fixes, glaring holes, and other checks before calling the work complete and posting a release to my persona github. 2% credit usage over 20 minutes and useful small changes. 2. I ask about information in a repo I'm using, like GUFO or Halogen-flash-next, and some key info. 35% of my monthly premium credits gone before the one chat completes.

How can 20 minutes on a whole custom project looking for bugs and issues use almost nothing, then a question about a repo eats 30%+? I don't even have budget to learn how I failed as 2 more tests and I'm burned on premium requests for the month (in minutes).

So I abuse the free options for everything I can. Draft scripts/sql/etc, stage prompts or handoff/etc files, ask questions or research something and pass on to vs code/copilot chat/etc like I run at work (with much more credits through the enterprise plan).

Having dealt with many family members just like this, I can tell you they certainly can use Google for search, they just don't want to. When forced to they use it fine.

If I were to guess, a lot of people, particularly older people, see computer use outside the web browser as an amateur might a chop-saw; a dangerous tool not to be used by inexperienced hands, so an AI that can also directly do the tasks for them might solve that problem (assuming it came preinstalled or someone else did that for them). Though then comes the question of whether they'd be willing to pay for it

Plus hallucinations. Most "regular people" questions aren't inherently easy to verify. And when regular people do have to verify the answers, the value of "AI" drops like a rock.

> Having dealt with many family members just like this, I can tell you they certainly can use Google for search, they just don't want to. When forced to they use it fine.

Exactly! I noticed this when I moved out of my parents' house, when suddenly my mom became an electronics whiz who can hook up VCRs and TVs just fine. I always thought I was the smart person in the house, but now I realize I was just taken advantage of.

'Taken advantage of' is very negative framing. Maybe it was just a normal instance of specialization of labor!

Maybe your parents wanted you to learn how to be self sufficient?

There is no "honest" AI though. It is always biased towards its prompt and ultimately its training data.

Compare flights? You have to assume it is objective and not tainted by corporate bias or backroom deals(aka ads and sponsored content), unless you selfhost and find an objective model.

Search Wikipedia? You have to constantly check that it is giving you straight facts instead of being constrained by its community and safety guidelines.

The problem with so many of these usecases is treating AI as a super intelligent Vulcan who is always logical and objective aka Spock, when we are better off treating it as if it is a salesman.

This is all true, but which travel booking assistant is really unbiased? Online comparison sites might not be, the good old 'brick and mortar' travel assistant most likely isn't either.

You don't need an unbiased one. Only someone who cares about the consequences of getting caught while being blatantly unbiased.

Your neighborhood brick and mortar, or an online one may care about that while a faceless trans-national big tech will not even register that you left.

agree. That's why i love models (agents) that just search the web get the answer and use tools to their disposale instead of guessing based on training data which is outdated anyway...

i dont know about that, they could've adopted using google which you could already search things in pretty much natural language and even got youtube snippets how fix your problem... so i'm not convinced they will adopt

Also, their neighbors are also the exact exemplars of what two generations later will look like. There isn't a lot of hard data on what AI usage might look like, but there is data on tech literacy, and the numbers are clear: We trained precisely -ONE- generation that actually understands computers. The incoming one will happily gobble up all the AI, same way they gobbled up willful ignorance of filesystems. Much like there is a button that corresponds to "gimme shot videos", there will be a button that corresponds to "Listen to what I'm about to say, and do it".

Demand will not stop in the next 20 years.

I'd say the exact opposite. People who have no idea how technology works shouldn't touch AI at all. "AI can understand human language" is fundamentally false, and it leads people to actually believe AI is "AI" and not just a token predictor.

These people WILL fall victim of their own ignorance and upload all their private information to an AI chatbot.

Based on my experience, you’re right. I know a woman in her late 60s that is basically tech illiterate (can barely send an email), and she has been making effective use of the ChatGPT free plan. AI has been helping her cut through the noise of navigating the web in 2026 (which in her defense is often a bewildering experience). It can’t help her with everything yet, but it’s a clear boost to her independence online.

> Give your neighbors something like Alexa powered with better AI

Didn't they literally try this and it failed miserably?

"Alexa but better" is not a profitable business. Amazon profits from Alexa being in people's homes, not from people buying Alexa.

> AI can understand human language.

It is a bit comical how the HN crowd spent the last number of decades trying to convince the audience that a programmer's value was actually in their system thinking, not their arcane knowledge of a particular language, but now that the language barrier is removed it turns out it was just the arcane language knowledge after all...

Although I'd posit that the old school HNers were the ones actually right. From what I see in the average Joes is that, while they can communicate with AI, they don't really see how to leverage it. Granted, the younger generations grew up in a school system that tried to promote system thinking more so than in the past, so that gap will likely shrink over time.

By "understand" you must mean uncannily appear to understand while creating a plausible human readable response. Except when the knowledge remixer glitches and produces nonsense, or worse still, gaslight the user with confident misinformation. At which point they've got problems much more baffling than how to print out their tax return with the printer they haven't used in three months.

This year, a lot of big companies are building the agentic layer.

This has to be build and takes time.

But this is the major thing were ai will be introduced into every single layer of software we have.

The HR System which might have needed x people? The agent has solved 90% of tickets already before they hit a human. Agents will do the repetitive but not that easy to automate tasks.

> But this is the major thing were ai will be introduced into every single layer of software we have.

How is that even possible? I thought they already put AI chats into everything. Maybe AI chat inside an AI chat.

Not just chat but an agent.

The agent will be running 24/7 and be triggered by different things. Chat input, scheduler, actions someone executes inside the software etc.

The SEO campaign tool? You might need to fill out a lot of different things, configure stuff then execute. In the future you will start the SEO campaign tool, the agent will ask you missing information, it then fills out everything, gets a budget and runs it. It will adjust the campaign based on feedback from the SEO tools.

Kind of a workflow engine but smart, so smart that it will handle A LOT more than what an traditional workflow engine could ever do.

This is the point. hmontazeri is imagining where AI still has left to grow as a consumer product, but AI is currently more of a business product. Even without a new consumer use case, it's easy to see demand for tokens keep going up.

Building the middle system that can take any model as a back end, based on cost/performance/client choices/etc, and API style present the same interface and functionality to end users is huge right now.

Local LLM usage is bouncing across major runtimes, custom runtimes and forks plus custom quants and variations of open models. llama-swap and some other tools integrate those and provide metrics but as the field expands can't keep up even with AI support.

I need to look at tailscales dashboard/etc again. I started on that when it launched but couldn't get my runtimes to go through it. I think the easiest tie in for metrics/etc is grafana + Prometheus but you need that stood up, and then a custom parsing job for each runtime based on metrics it reports and processing that data into useful dash.

I would love to see more standards here like OpenAI endpoints with metrics and information to link into. ./metrics is great but not standardized.

I actually disagree here. Mostly because when I’ve visited friends & family in rural, non-tech areas, even folks who are a bit older are constantly using AI in some for. Eg to help with car repairs, help plan family functions (to the point someone brought twice as much food as needed to a funeral bc ChatGPT said so), etc.

It is really, really easy to use, and I think triggers similar dopamine response that has cause FB so become so prevalent.

I mean, yeah, there are plenty of apps where AI fucking sucks and no one will use it, but I think basic ChatGPT-type use is extremely common already

>My neighbors for example are normal working ppl they don’t know how to open a zip file (they call me to help them with something like this) and they are in their early 40s so not that old. Sure companies and workflows are going to become agentic but not everyone needs it or even wants it.

Maybe not everyone (yet) but your neighbours clearly do need it.

Is using AI to open a zip file and not interact with the neighbor supposed to be an improvement? Maybe they just like interacting with their neighbor.

It's definitely an improvement. Most people would not want to depend on their neighbours for opening zip files. I know I wouldn't.

And if one of my neighbours ever asked me to help them open a zip file, I would not leave before I'm absolutely sure that they can do it themselves next time.

> companies and workflows [] going to become agentic

What makes you so sure? Some would call it "automated running scissors" and want tools firmly in responsible hands. And could assess "automated (indeterministic) reliability" as still far away in time.

Are there any contexts we may have missed that would surely, safely replace individual deliberate action with "the ANN can do it"?

price?

As in, "machines cost less"? Well, this general principle has always been present, as in "sucking rocks costs much less then cordon bleu", but there are "human costs" (U. Eco said for an equivalent area) involved.

Of course spending less is alluring: but you have to be able to afford spending less. Also considering that giving jobs to people who deserve it prevents other general "boomerang" social costs.

Feels like collectively we are under indexing on LLMs as user interfaces. I use a CLI with an agent to things I once did in a GUI. Your neighbors should never have to worry about zip files again.

Exactly!

I said it two years ago already: An LLM is the perfect user interface.

The problem though: It will make it a lot easier to do harder things which will devaluate jobs.

having to write "hey LLM-du-jour please unpack these files!" os strictly less efficient/more time consuming than clicking "extract" on a menu. I have hard time what usecase you have in your mind. (Unless the user is blind that is)

I'm sorry but if somebody born in the 1980s cannot or will not double click on a zip file to open it they also cannot or will not ask Claude to open it for them.

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