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Comment by zoogeny | Hacker News Reader

I disagree with most of this article. My own anecdotal experience is that dozens of non-tech friends, coworkers, etc. tell me that they are using ChatGPT every day. These are people who are telling me how they use it to draft emails, create marketing material, create sales support material, create education material, etc.

During every other hype boom I have been through that ultimately failed, those regular Joe types either hadn't even heard of the tech, simply didn't care or were actively hostile to it. Comparatively, with the new generative AI people are talking about how much they love it, how they use it every day, etc.

Even the Internet had a bubble that popped (back in the Pets.com days, circa 2001 [1]) and this short-term AI bubble will pop too. I expect the same pattern as the early Internet: an early pop followed by a recovery that leads to massive growth.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble

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> My own anecdotal experience is that dozens of non-tech friends, coworkers, etc. tell me that they are using ChatGPT every day. These are people who are telling me how they use it to draft emails, create marketing material, create sales support material, create education material, etc.

My reaction when I hear this is that those people are being paid entirely too much money if an LLM can do their job. I think this is where the real economic impact will come from: when managers realize it's just LLMs generating emails to be summarized by LLMs and it's just bots spamming each other with busy work all day. At some point companies will realize it's all pointless and start trimming these pointless jobs, leaving a lot of people without any actual skills.

> My reaction when I hear this is that those people are being paid entirely too much money if an LLM can do their job.

That feels like such an unnecessarily cynical view to me. First, parent comment didn't say they are using LLMs to "do their jobs". Frankly, I feel that if you're a knowledge worker and aren't using LLMs at least part of the time, you're likely being inefficient. E.g. LLMs don't replace my skill as a software developer, but they sure make it faster to learn new libraries/technologies faster.

Every. Single. Time. I have tried to learn a new library with chatgpt it has been wrong and I just went to read the docs myself.

I like that it can figure out my boilerplate, but I wouldn’t trust any info it spits out.

FWIW I've had the exact opposite experience with ChatGPT 4. I did have some issues with the code not always being 100%, but I've found it invaluable when I don't know the keywords for what I should be searching for. E.g. if I want to accomplish something fairly complicated in SQL, I'll explain the problem to ChatGPT, and it has always pointed me in the right direction as to what relatively obscure window function or whatever that I should use.

ChatGpT is good for discovering search terms I didn’t already know, but I’ve learned that I can’t trust any information it gives me.

I’ve had it write incorrect SQL many times, and when it is correct it’s not often the best query, so I only have it write sql for one off queries.

I often experience ChatGPT given outdated information which is wrong at this time, but wasn't necessarily wrong in the past. One big example is a popular framework for Laravel called Filament [0] which released a V3 a few weeks ago. I don't even bother anymore with it because it is useless. However, for example 90% of my DevOps tasks (mostly Kubernetes) are partially done with Kubernetes, either explaining impact or even writing manifests. It is genuinely awesome for that.

[0]: https://filamentphp.com/

> LLMs don't replace my skill as a software developer

Not the greatest example. LLMs fundamentally cannot replace software developers. At the end of the day an LLM is just an interpreter, much like python, but using a different programming language. Any input to an LLM is developing software.

Perhaps the previous comment would be more understandable if phrased as:

"My reaction when I hear this is that those people are being paid entirely too much money if software developers can do their job."

Am I the only one who is aghast at people using these things to write emails, or worse, educational materials? It feels impersonal and shitty to send someone an AI generated email. Furthermore, they lie all the time. Unless you know what you're talking about, there's a large risk to using it as an educational resource.

I think the pets.com analogy is apt. Everyone's running around making "AI-powered" companies (just like everyone was making online shops in the 90s) and clueless investors are throwing money at them because, "AI!"...

Nvidia is lucky though, a lot of big companies will want their GPTs in-house to ensure their secrets won't be used to train someone else's GPT, and that means buying a lot of hardware (could be on a cloud data center too, but, same result for Nvidia)

One thing to consider is that hardware companies that benefit from a boom don't always do so well in the long term. Lots of investors in Nortel and JDS Uniphase learned that the hard way in the early 2000s.

I'm cautious about picking winners and losers specifically. I remember back in the day all of the search engines: AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, Yahoo, Lycos, Web Crawler, Excite, etc. When Google popped up it was clearly superior to all of them and completely changed the landscape.

In fact, there are few Internet companies from the early 2000s that made it up until now intact. The same may end up true for this crop of AI.

But anyone who was alive during that time and working should ask themselves: would your career have been better or worse if you started getting familiar with Web Technologies in the early 2000s. What if you saw the impending dot com crash and you decided that the entire Internet was not going to live up to the hype?

I don't have a crystal ball but my gut is telling me that 20+ years from now we'll see any short-term market correction around AI as a blip.

> would your career have been better or worse if you started getting familiar with Web Technologies in the early 2000s.

Worse. The only time there was any real money to be made with web technologies was prior to 2000. Plain old boring RPC, serving interesting data to lowly web developers, is where the money has been made since.

Ok, to be fair I should have specified Internet Technologies rather than Web Technologies. And of course there are exceptions to all cases.

But I would wager many people are like me, having made a comfortable income on the back of tcp/ip, dns, bgp, http, html, javascript et al. and it is hard for me to think of very many jobs in the TC range of FAANG companies where familiarity with those technologies is not a requirement.

My point wasn't: you should have been a web developer in 2000. It was: in early 2000s the Internet was the most important advancement in tech and you should have been learning all about it. I am arguing that the same holds for the recent surge in AI technology.

What in the article did you disagree with?

The author said that AI was and has been obviously useful, but there’s a lot of dumb money flying around in AI land (to try building things like AGI)

I think it is great that you know many people that use it daily. Can I ask how many PAY for it monthly? Is it as many people that, say, pay for netflix? Outside the tech world, of course. Do you see your friends and family paying for AI services directly? Because the amount of money to provide AI services is at least as great as it is to provide netflix. Probably way more actually.

What companies are making a ton of money on AI? Nvidia? Nvidia makes money selling chips to large, massively profitable companies that are in an arms race to capture as much market share as possible. Or they are selling to smaller companies trying to make a name. But none of those companies are making any money from the AI services they sell. All of them are spending massive amounts of capital.

What happens when we reach an equilibrium point where AI services are ‘good enough’? I’ll tell you what will happen, it will become another cost center for the big companies and all further development will cease once they have eliminated the competition.

Want an example? Smart home speakers. Do you think that Alexa and Google home are the best that they could do? Do you ever wonder why Alexa came out and made a splash and then Google frantically made one of their own, but once market share was evenly split between both companies all new development ground to a halt? It is because they were only going to spend enough to keep the other company from dominating then stop spending. Because there is no way to monetize it. Not really. You can charge for the hardware, but that is a pittance to them. Can you charge for the service? I use my google home all the time for some things, but if they told me they were going to start charging me would I continue using it? Probably not. There is a reason Amazon recently RIF’d a bunch of people on the alexa team.

People say that this is not like pets.com because profits are real, but are they? Or is it some crazy ponzi-like thing where the amazing profits being had by companies like Nvidia are going to dry up eventually. I say it more like Cisco of 2000, where they were making tons of money selling hardware to all those pets.com companies. Follow the money. Once you get to the person/company paying for the service, there is none. Not on this scale at least. I think there will definitely be companies that pay for an AI service, but the amount of total market spend will be somewhat less than the total spend for something like cell phone service or streaming services. You know, like those things that everyone you know, from technical to luddite, from rich to poor, all pay for. I don’t see AI reaching that level of ubiquity. Do you pay for email service? I know that the people on this site do, to some extent. Email providers charging for their services are a niche market. AI is destined to be the same.

Just to be clear, I agree with you that this will be like the internet was. It will change the world. But it is without a doubt a bubble, just like the early internet. And for the reasons that you say - everyone can easily see that it is ‘something’ just by using it. The barrier to entry is very low, just like opening a browser and going to a website was. It does not take a genius to see the potential. Which is all the more reason that dumb money is flowing like water into this bubble.

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