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Comment by jklinger410 | Hacker News Reader

> I'm not convinced at this point that conversational AI fills any legitimate use cases.

Silly opinion. This is the first wave of conversational AI, and you are calling it quits. This is like "I own a Model T and I'm 100% convinced we'll never make a better vehicle."

The use case, at minimum, is: customer support, answering phones, taking orders. Trained on specific data sets and told not to veer outside. Within one, maybe two more iterations of AI (maximum) we will be there 110%.

ChatGPT was released widely this year, and there are so many absolute statements about what AI will or won't do. It's frankly silly and maddening.

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The Model T was immediately useful and affordable to the average American. It's most notable contribution to American society was connecting those in rural areas to the rest of the country and being affordable enough for those people to afford them. That's why it spread across the US seemingly overnight.

ChatGPT on the other hand does a lot of tricks, but trying to fit it into the real world is challenging. Even using it in programming requires someone to double check it's work. The idea that it can handle customer support I think is very dangerous. In an industry that has done the opposite of creating fulfilling customer support experiences we should be wary of filling that void with an LLM that's fraught with factual errors in output.

That's to say, ChatGPT does novel things, but nothing useful beyond fantasy (I do hear people talking about using it for RPG characters - which is fair). Ironically, many of the commenters here responded the way cryptobros did when their tech was regarded as useless, which is telling about where this is going. The problem wasn't the tech, the problem was the inability in everyone around it to sit back and acknowledge that how they described it did not match what people wanted and experiences on the ground.

The difference is that, to this day, getting a straight answer on what web 3.0 is, is difficult. On the other hand, people are using ChatGPT to write all sorts of emails - cover letters, resignation letters, layoff letters, customer support letters - and that is a use case that those who aren't being willfully blind can immediately grasp as being useful, for people who are in job roles that require a lot of that sort of work.

> willfully blind

Nice jab.

I think if you produce a novel technology and make it free then people will use it. If you feel confident that these things are "useful" then have people pay for it. Will they still use it for beyond entertainment then?

CoPilot, after an extensive free preview period, garnered something like 400k subscribers at $10/m. I'm curious to see where that number settles at over time. My hunch is that the things you're seeing people use ChatGPT for are more novel than useful and a lot of the value prop is that it's currently free.

To put this in context, GitHub has $1B ARR and roughly 90M active users.

How much do you think grammarly.ai is worth.

Now consider that ChatGPT is able to subsume it https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/112z2j4/i_built_a_...

This is only one application among many. PS people _are_ paying for it, the premium is $20/month.

So yes, you are blind on this, sad to say.

Okay, let's take it back a notch. What if I compared it to the combustion engine, or the first engine with an electric starter?

It's easy to tear what I said apart if you fixate on the Model T. But the point of my comment is the potential GROWTH of the technology.

If you looked at a simple engine designed to chop firewood. You might say, there's no way the entire geography of the United States will be altered with highways based on this invention. Look at it, all it can do is cut wood! And who will be there to hold the wood in place? It doesn't know how to align with the grain of the wood, etc etc.

And imagine saying this within the first year of said motor's invention.

That is what people are doing with ChatGPT.

This may or may not hold true (this DS is nowhere near as convinced as you are) but your parallel with Model T is odd, seeing as how that was immediately useful and absolutely revolutionary.

I think the open question is whether its future is more like the Model T or the Segway. The introduction of the original Segway earned a prolonged and absolutely exhausting buzz cycle and many people earnestly thought whole cities would be rearchitected around it.

Now the brand mostly just produces traditional electric scooters and the self-balancing model found a small but legitimate niche among people who would otherwise patrol on foot all day.

Not everything that looks exciting meets all its revolutionary ambitions.

I can see a clear path of improvement for AI. If you can't you aren't really paying attention.

Whereas, what are the equivalent improvements to be made to a scooter?

Model T you could obviously compare to a Tesla. Which is how you would compare, say, a LLM to AGI.

But what are you going to do with a scooter? Make it fly? Add a cabin? lol

My main fear of this tech is how people are reacting to it.

> customer support, answering phones, taking orders

My secondary fear of this tech is that it will be used for these purposes. Especially support.

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