Most People Couldn't Give a Crap About Using AI, Survey Finds | Hacker News Reader

Most People Couldn't Give a Crap About Using AI, Survey Finds

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38 pointscdme18 comments

Every tech is like this.

I was practically screaming at the "NFT" discourse that NFT is a protocol not a product. No one wants an NFT. Some people might want an online property trading platform that might be powered by NFTs or maybe a better protocol. Certainly not going to be useful for stupid monkey images. The best use case so far is still the first, CryptoKitties. A stupid pokemon style cat eugenics simulator.

Literally all the end user cares about is whether the product works and does what it needs. The technologies/protocols/labels are for everyone else. If you brand yourself as the technology people arent going to give a shit in a few years. Look at "General Electric" or "Telecom" now "GE" and "Telstra"

Finally, there is light at the end of the hype tunnel. I’m honestly hoping for Apple to reset the narrative. People don’t give a damn about AI features. They care about features that have value for them. Companies should therefore use AI as much as they like, as long as it’s for bringing actual value to the consumer. So far, instead, all we’ve seen is hype marketing centered about using AI as a blanket term for everything, because it’s just the “next big thing”. The normalization is near, though.

The main reason (what we’re now calling) AI (specifically, LLMs) is so popular here is that they happen to be a somewhat useful tool for programmers. Other than that, they’re not really that great. Unless you want slop: be it writing, art, music, or whatever. Use it for inspiration — nothing else. And certainly don’t trust it.

> they happen to be a somewhat useful tool for programmers

Outside the junior/mid level though you've probably mastered a combination of skill and research mastery such that an LLM would slow you down.

It's pretty hard to beat an LLM for filling in common boilerplate or autocompleting relatively obvious lines of code that can be checked in a second or two, no matter how much experience you have.

Adding to that, there's definitely techniques to make it autocomplete less trivial lines of code as well. Using comments and clear function names and sane abstractions to nudge it in the right direction helps a lot.

Hard to describe, but Andreas Kling's JIT compiler youtube series is a good demonstration of this technique.

I'm dumbfounded that anyone technical can feel this way. The more I use LLM tools, the more it feels like a super power.

Since you talking technical, is there some data to back that up or is it just vibes?

Number of Stackoverflow visitors going down by a lot, come to mind

Seems it was 14% when gpt4 came out https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/08/08/insights-into-stack-ov...

so noticeable, but not a lot, (though don't know the current data)

I only have personal data. Things that would have taken me a long time before take me much less time now.

As an LLM skeptic, I will say it’s been nice for learning new languages and frameworks for a side project (e.g. learning js/react as a backend/data guy). Things I’d probably not have bothered to learn because it’s just too much work and I’ve got enough value in my current skills. I don’t find it particularly helpful in my primary languages/frameworks though.

I also use it to generate some discussion on ideas. For example, the other day I asked if to consider pro/cons of technical approach A vs B. I don’t have to trust the output, but it’s usually good enough at helping me sketch out the problem space at a high level.

AI autocomplete can often do things faster than I could physically type the code, and it can do trivial but very uncommon things that I haven't encountered enough to actually learn, like sed/awk/etc syntax.

Here's the thing: the use of AI is an underlying implementation detail that the customer shouldn't need (and likely doesn't) care about.

That was my takeaway. People don't care about AI because they don't really know what it entails

When it's implemented to improve their typing on mobile, speech recognition or netflix recommendations then they care

We sell aspiration, not products.

Fits well with the focus on investors over users I suppose.

Aspiration, but also FUD, FOMO and other such appropriate acronyms.

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