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Comment by hubraumhugo | Hacker News Reader

There is one big difference compared to previous hype cycles:

While crypto or VR tech still hasn't arrived in our daily lives, most of my friends are already using tools like ChatGPT on a regular basis.

Generating images and videos is entertaining, but I believe that the true value of AI lies in automating tedious, repetitive work, both in the digital (e.g. data entry) and physical space (e.g. assembly or logistics work).

It's these "boring" use cases that will bring big efficiency boosts to our economy.

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And it's actually useful.

There is a big question to ask yourself when you see a new evolution: would I get sad if this disappears or be missing it ?

crypto ? wouldn't care VR ? wouldn't care google glass ? wouldn't care facebook ? wouldn't care internet ? would be a serious step back LLMs ? would be a serious step back etc

Very reductive. I recognize it's useful in some very specific use cases, yet I wouldn't miss it a second or care if it disappeared.

I would feel coding is much more tedious without Copilot.

When I'm using an editor that doesn't have Copilot, I keep waiting for it to auto complete, and get frustrated that now I have to write this block of code myself, and think what a waste.

I was able to code in the past and solve the same problems, it was just much more tedious and time consuming having to type all of it out that was in my head anyway.

Especially if working with multiple languages, which I used to despise in the past because of muscle memory ruining it - Hey python. I wished there was a single language syntax to rule them all.

Now copilot does it for me.

I use CodeWhisperer instead of Copilot, but sometimes it gets disconnected and it takes me days to realize "Oh I don't have this nice autocomplete anymore".

I agree that smart autocomplete it's a nice use-case, probably the most compelling I've seen so far.

But I could live without it.

How do you think about using it?

Because for me with Copilot, I think I can usually predict with 95% accuracy what it's going to output for me so I know that if I write "fun" (beginning of a function) in this context, it will immediately know based on all the context around it what will generate for me and that is what I'm looking for.

So my whole development is around it, that I can predict what it's going to complete, it just does it much faster with many lines at once, without the typos , index + 1 errors and other minor bugs I might do myself.

E.g. simple example, while usually things are more complicated, if I want a leftPad function, I would just write "function lef"... And mostly it is already able to know. While previously maybe I should've figured whether I should use an npm library where historically something went really wrong, etc. I'll just keep those helper fns in the codebase now.

But that's only a small example, it's able to handle non generic helper fns quite well too.

Like my muscle memory and expectations are around what Copilot can do or what I expect it to be able to do.

> There is a big question to ask yourself when you see a new evolution: would I get sad if this disappears or be missing it?

That’s the wrong question because it takes time to get used to that evolution. If I asked you in 1997 if you’d be sad if the Internet disappeared, it’s very likely that you would have said "no".

But GPT is already a big part of my workflows and a great productivity multiplier.

Something being in a bubble and being useful is not mutually exclusive. Remember the dot-com bubble?

There’s also an argument that ChatGPT kind of transcends the bubble. The bubble is everything that calls their API and now suddenly gets a huge valuation because it’s “AI”, but the feature the AI enables is of dubious value.

We'll see. I don't think that would help them if and when it pops. The survivors/big players tend to suffer disproportionally with regard to the actual fundamentals (look at dot-com again for comparison).

I think it's quite clear that we are both in a bubble and GenAI has a lot of potential for productivity gains and maybe even further utility beyond that.

That seems about right. There are definitely some “Long Blockchain Iced Tea” aspects to the AI hype cycle. Crypto was an embarrassing bubble given that it created almost zero value.

But there’s real AI products with real use cases, and a lot of other things that have no business calling themselves AI. And people who say it’s “all hype” are just as wrong as those who say it’s “all legit”.

Being the cause of the bubble doesn't make you immune to the bubble: I think Stable Diffusion is also equally important to the GenAI topic, but I wouldn't want to be one of their investors; and much as anyone saying "moat" in this context my eyes roll[0], just like every other business in the history of forever there can be no certainty that competitors won't undercut OpenAI on pricing and/or quality.

And until the dust has settled on intellectual property issues (and I don't just mean lawsuits: regardless of the results of those, governments may change the rules), all of the current models and labs are at risk.

[0] it's a thought-terminating cliché spoken by organic stochastic parrots.

> There is one big difference compared to previous hype cycles

Not if you compare for example to the dot-com bubble.

> most of my friends are already using tools like ChatGPT on a regular basis.

Are they?

As a counter anecdote, I don't know a single person who does. Even non techies are skipping personal assistants and such because they can run a google search themselves.

Now ask those friends how much they would pay for GenAI.

ChatGPT is free. A VR headset is hundreds of dollars for the most entry level, crypto is literally money, etc.

Although I probably spend up to $700 or so on AI tools monthly. I feel like I get multiples of value out of that.

Mainly it allows me to build side projects significantly faster. My salaried workplace output is accelerated so I have more time to work on side projects, I can do more side projects in similar amount of time, I can do consultation on the side, which allows me to bill for much more than $700.

Copilot gives enough energy to be able to code 12h+ a day.

Usually those little things that Copilot auto completes for you, really stack up in terms of being mentally exhausting.

But I can be in a "big picture" role, and think in terms of that, while Copilot does the coding for me, I will just check the code, rearrange something if required.

It is like I'm more of in a CTO or CEO role of my side projects and have this extra coder that I'm doing reviews for.

I probably bill around 60% of my salaried work freelancing on the side, and I wouldn't bother to do this freelancing without GPT, so for me it has directly contributed to 60% increase in income.

I think people who aren't willing to spend on that, either don't understand how to multiply their output from it or don't understand how to make multiplied output into effective income.

$700? What do you even pay for??? I don't think I'd be able to spend even $200 on GenAI even trying hard.

I'm interested to see which tools warrant this kind of money for an individual.

I imagine ChatGPT 4 and CoPilot but I can't think of anything else.

I have subscriptions to many different AI services, from Sona, Gemini, Perplexity to others, many I have just tried out, but of course they are not the main cost.

My largest costs are related to OpenAI API.

I use OpenAI API to go over my data, create embeddings of it, reorganise things, scrape data, standardize and analyse data, etc.

I have a personal journal/assistant type of thing that I use to chat with, or help me make decisions, sanity check myself - it has a prompt filled with various context it can search from embeddings. Like the people I know, the projects I'm working on, the goals I have in life, etc.

GPT goes over all the data and does summaries, organises, adds better search keywords for potential embedding callbacks.

The bubble bust on the Internet too; the outcomes can be wildly different.

You sure that the bubble bursted ? Tech companies are among the wildest valuations for all-time, including post-burst.

If you were QQQ investor in 2000 you are now extensively rich.

Most investors are fairly sure the dot-com bubble burst; but it recovered well, and obviously there were still winners. The last two times the AI bubble burst also did not stop us getting here.

"This time will be different."

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