Maybe everyone else on Hacker News are all super geniuses who don’t benefit from it, but I’m a developer about 9 years into my career and have found ChatGPT4 to be absolutely astonishing for helping me learn new skills and improve my productivity. It helped me figure out the design flaws that were causing me considerable difficulties when writing some generics, and we’ve got a new subsystem in an important product up and running that ChatGPT helped me and the other engineers design.

Furthermore I use GitHub Copilot literally every day. The combo of chatGPT for “big picture” discussions and copilot for writing code feels like I iterate faster and learn all sorts of things I wouldn’t dredge up in the documentation, or just wouldn’t feel like I had time for (like using Theories instead of Facts in a unit test and running multiple sets of data through the test, I was vaguely aware of it but just hadn’t done it).

I’ve made amazing art for my entire D&D party. I’ve got at least a few hundred hours racked up on Colab Premium renting A100s and generating pictures and iterating until I get something really really nice in an hour or two. Someone offered me $250 to make him a picture using the pretty standard Stable Diffusion toolset after I showed him some of the stuff I’ve made.

I don’t see how people aren’t absolutely amazed at what these tools can accomplish, and they’re just going to get better. To be clear, I didn’t buy a single crypto coin and thought Web3 was total snake oil (still do), despite my friend literally making millions of dollars off of Bitcoin. But I think this is a radically different situation and the benefits (at least in the short term to someone like me, who is already technical) seem overwhelming and obvious.

Everyone thinks their AI product is the one that consumers will finally want. It's like the Cambrian explosion of coins except those didn't involve scraping all of our personal data.

In the question of datacenter water usage, its application (AI or not) is actually not very relevant to the problem at hand. I challenge the fact why (if true) the datacenters even need "new" water, instead of having a closed system with full recirculation of water.

I think there is huge demand and faith from corporate executives. They can secretly propose their wild ideas without any employee resignations, ethics concerns (spending millions on a contract, you won't get consumer-restricted "safe" AI), etc.

Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men - machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate - the unloved and the unnatural! Soldiers! Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty!

ChatGPT had over 100 million users a few months after launch, the demand is there.

I and a lot of other devs I know use chatgpt to assist then in various capabilities, be it writing code, debugging errors, setting up environments or suggesting libraries.

Other non devs enjoy humorous queries with chatgpt and other less constrained models, image generation is also popular