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
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.
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).
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.
These people WILL fall victim of their own ignorance and upload all their private information to an AI chatbot.
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.
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.
Demand will not stop in the next 20 years.
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?
And at what cost to the underlying quality of the product and its utility, and will that cost be acceptable to the end users?
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.