Comment by gspencley | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gspencley | Hacker News Reader

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Cool, so I'm Joe Sixpack next door. Things I care about: how to feed my kids, avoid getting laid off at the manufacturing plant I work for and my oldest daughter is learning to drive and has no idea how she's going to be able to afford a home of her own and, despite how much I love my kids, I really want her to move out before she's 30 so that my wife and I can enjoy retirement. Things I do for fun: play sports, video games and drink.

What problems in my life does generative AI immediately and obviously solve for me?

Like I said, it is "abstract" which is why you can make such a claim with such a high degree of confidence. Every person who sees POTENTIAL with generative AI has their own ideas as to what sorts of applications it has that they would find useful. The very words "generative AI" and "ChatGPT" create a Barnum Effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect). Right now, I would posit that ChatGPT is like pet rocks. It got popular because it is neat and novel. Once that effect wears off, people will stop caring and the hype train will die as fast as crypto.

Therefore, until a company releases a product that uses ChatGPT under the hood and solves a real problem that a lot of people need solving right now, there's no tangible value that is inherent in the technology that can be identified. Only ideas and potentials.

Your problem is that you think we need to sell generative AI to Joe for it to be significant.

> video games

Cool. There is a very real chance that he will have more of those because they will be cheaper to make. He won’t be using the generative AIs, he will be consuming content made with them.

> my wife and I can enjoy retirement

Joe doesn’t have to worry about retirement. Someone will use a combination of these AI technologies to make his wife fall in love with a perfectly attentive, smoky voiced older guy. When this AI powered person suffers a terrible car accident on a business trip she sends a significant portion of their savings to him. When Joe finds out he immediately calls his bank. There an other AI powered agent handles his issue. It takes a while for Joe to be understood, because the agent he is interacting with is heavily biased towards trying to upsell Joe on a new mortage.

Eventually he is able to claw back some of the money, but the stress and the implied emotional infidelity ruins their mariage. He talks with the assistant of a divorce lawyer (another AI). She collects all the information from him and the lawyer (this time a real person, albeit one heavily supported by various AI systems) sends over all the paperwork. The AI of Joe’s lawyer agrees with the AI of his wife’s layer about the details and once that is done the humans sign the papers and they are divorced.

Joe still has some money left. He can rent a bungallow and maybe he can spend his retirement there, but unfortunately Joe picks up a nasty addiction to online porn. (What Joe doesn’t know that the booties he is looking at are generated exactly to his taste, as measured by his pattern of clicking on the free samples.) This is the last straw, the addiction sucks Joe’s wallet empty and he dies destitute. Many many people with generative AIs have Joe’s money now.

To his last breath Joe doesn’t really understand what this AI thing is everyone is talking about on the news.

When is the next YC batch day? Sounds like a business plan.

It's not clear that Joe Sixpack even owns a computer from this description. Joe may not even have internet access -- just cable and a console. And there are probably a lot of folks in this bucket still, but it's categorically one that generative AI isn't personally useful for (though they may be affected by the tech indirectly.) But for anyone who performs knowledge work on a computer, or has a question about an offbeat subject, or needs help learning a new skill (eg, Joe's daughter wants to know why a certain answer on the practice drivers' exam is wrong), or needs to improve written communication, or wants a summary of a complex topic, or needs help transforming text... a very large group of ordinary people can still benefit from this tech.

Your daughter can use the new learning tutor, based on generative AI, that helps with her coursework and learn new materials. It's like an expert tutor in a bunch of fields that she didn't have access to before -- at least not at a reasonable price.

Now your daughter has learned a lot more, has opened up a world of possibilities and this helps her get a job (or create a company) that helps her buy a new home.

Also for video games, they could use these generative AIs to create more immersive characters and worlds. Your video game experience just became much better -- especially if you're drinking while playing.

And if you play sports at a local level, generative AI can take in as input a bunch of rosters and play-by-play data (maybe eventually creating the play-by-play data directly from video) and being able to output stories about games. Today coverage of local and club sports is limited because of resources -- but if you could apply AI to this problem then you're local bowling league could almost be covered like the NFL on the web.

EDIT: And another thing -- which actually is something we started doing now. You have a personal medical assistant that you use with your doctor to ensure that your wife gets the help she needs with her current condition. Joe Sixpack is happy that it is much less likely that the doctor misses something "obvious".

>Your daughter can use the new learning tutor, based on generative AI, that helps with her coursework and learn new materials. It's like an expert tutor in a bunch of fields that she didn't have access to before -- at least not at a reasonable price.

Now your daughter has learned a lot more, has opened up a world of possibilities and this helps her get a job (or create a company) that helps her buy a new home.

Those two paragraphs look like they are in opposition to me. If a degree becomes that much easier to get with AI assistance, then everybody else is also using the same assistance, and then the jobs available to graduates in that degree have also become less valuable as companies no longer need to hire them and they start laying off people already in those jobs.

You raise all boats. It’s about the learning. Notice I don’t say anything about degrees.

I mean, off the bat you might use it to replace Google, like bing is already doing.

And it doesn't have to solve a problem for you to make an impact on your life- it can make your life worse too. If your daughter is interested in writing, graphic design,or programming, well, finding a job and moving out by 30 might become a lot harder. Bing is already in use. Copilot is already in use. These are not small markets or use cases.

> I mean, off the bat you might use it to replace Google, like bing is already doing.

That's not for me. I gave it a try for a couple of days, but using ChatGPT as a search engine is much, much less useful to me than the old-fashioned method.

To be fair, using Google as a search engine is much, much useful than it used to be

Not sure if you meant to say "more" or "less" in there, but I assume "less", and I agree. That's why I don't use it either.

Bing was already in use before ChatGPT and Copilot is seen by most as an evolution of auto-complete. My last paragraph specifically said that I predict that the applications for generative AI will be in areas where we're already using ML. Search and auto-complete are two examples.

> Things I do for fun: play sports, video games and drink.

Video game NPCs will very quickly be replaced by LLms. No more boring scripted dialogue. This allows for a truly open world where the inhabitants can dynamically respond to your actions. Video games will become cheaper to create with generative AI that can quickly create a layout of a game world that can then be built on.

No more boring scripted dialogue. Now you get boring, procedurally generated dialog. About things that don’t matter, don’t make sense, or veer wayyyy off topic.

You fundamentally cannot make a random npc interesting because they are not supposed to be interesting. Ideally they say very little.

Agreed that LLMs, etc., will game development _cheaper_ by requiring less labor. It seems like software development in particular is will be getting a lot of powerful new tools over the next few years.

> Video game NPCs will very quickly be replaced by LLms. No more boring scripted dialogue.

I'm skeptical that this is what the users want. Sure, it would be nice to have, say, less repetitive background chatter in Skyrim. But, human-scripted dialog is intentional, which is at the core of a lot of gaming. Take that away and you end up with the early versions of No Man's Sky, where yes, there's an infinity of different variations to explore. But it wasn't what users actually wanted; they wanted a designed experience.

Sure, there are still scripted stories/quests and what not. But the background characters can become much more interesting if they're all LLMs that are just given a prompt like "you live in this cabin and are a subsistence farmer who has a dark secret" or something instead of just standing around looping a few lines. Open world games don't feel organic at all imo because these characters who should be adding flavor and making the game dynamic are just completely static.

And it's not necessarily about dialogs. All kinds of decision making can be wired up: https://gist.github.com/int19h/4f5b98bcb9fab124d308efc19e530...

I think whether or not it will actually be cheaper remains to be seen. Right now many AI products are still being heavily subsidized, thus the cheap or free price tag. Once these services decide they need to monetize, it may not be cost effective for most video games at scale. Maybe eventually these computations can (reasonably) take place on the client side, but I think that's so far away that we could very well see another paradigm shift by the time that's realized.

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