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Comment by josefritzishere | Hacker News Reader

The galling part of this is that the demand for AI is artificial. Consumers are not demanding AI.

I'm demanding more/better code-completion style AI for sure. It's an invaluable part of my workflow now and I'm happy paying a monthly fee for the service.

Sure, but you are paying for that. It also has nothing to do with the bizarre and untrustworthy AI answers being shoved into Google and Bing search results, or Facebook's terrible AI search bar.

It's become a really indispensable productivity boosting tool. Code, translation, broad research, summarization, writing drafts, finding that word you know but just can't remember, making up terrible puns... the list goes on.

Hours of work compressed into a minute or two at most.

Exactly. I was the first to adopt nearly every new technology in my family growing up. With AI, I query claude like twice a week for things that a search engine never gives to me straight like - "How long do I cook a rack of ribs?", but it's not something I'm about to pay $20/mo for, which is the only way that AI is sustainable. I use it sparingly, and I only use it because it's free. There's just not much appeal to something as unreliable as AI.

If you don't know how long to cook a rack of ribs for - how will you know if the AI gave you a correct answer?

> There's just not much appeal to something as unreliable as AI.

Even your trivial example I would question regarding the unreliability.

AI is probably only best for qualitative things, like touching up photos, identifying data patterns for humans to then investigate. Places where 1% inaccuracy leads to bad tasting rack of ribs, or outright incorrect answers - the fact LLMs are able to produce reasonable sounding answers is amazing - but not necessarily useful.

ChatGPT is the fastest product in history to reach 100M MAUs.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chatgpt-on-track-to-surpass-1...

Consumers are definitely demanding something like ChatGPT. Other companies are trying to ride the wave, and their attempts often feel forced as they’re trying to inject LLMs where they don’t really belong.

It was/is free. All that proves is people have faster access to news.

Lets see what it's DAUs are on a long term basis.

Is it possible, in general, to know where something belongs — whether it's an LLM or anything else — before you try?

Pretty sure people said the same about fiber internet in the 2000's.

People also said the same thing about NFTs, and they were correct.

I think “AI” will eventually have more consumer facing uses, but the current crop is incapable of telling truth from fiction which severely limits the appeal to Google’s main user base. OpenAI is riding on hope and it feels like Google is chasing after that application to avoid looking like they are behind, but it’s not clear that actual customer demand is looking for Google to offer such half baked technology.

And that's still somewhat true. I'm up at our cottage right now, where we have 300mbps cable internet. The upstream is paltry (10mbps), but I haven't really felt it impacting my work (and my kids are still able to stream everything they'd like, too). Sure, I miss the 5gbps symmetrical we have at home, but in reality there's not a huge real impact.

People said the same thing about the Segway, and 3D TVs, and NFTs

> A winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, Paul Krugman wrote in 1998, “The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”

- https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/revolutions/miscellany/paul...

I'm all for doing down Nobel prize winning Paul Nobel prize winning Krugman and his Nobel prize (did you know he got a Nobel prize?) but as hideously as most of that has aged the bit about most people having nothing to say to each other was spot on.

... and they were right, and there was a massive destruction of capital invested in companies that installed dark fiber and went bankrupt. The difference was that the dark fiber then got lit later on, because it was useful physical infrastructure.

The same cannot be said of the present AI boondoggles.

How would you describe the behavior of Character.AI's millions of users if not demand? Who's paying OpenAI their billions of revenue? You can argue about how durable the demand for AI is, but I don't see how it's tenable anymore to claim it doesn't exist.

> How would you describe the behavior of Character.AI's millions of users if not demand?

"Disturbing"?

It seems to me that "I'm disturbed by consumer demand for AI" is different than and contradictory to "consumers are not demanding AI".

You ask a good question. Who is paying for AI, and is OpenAI profitable. A lot of the demand is there when cost is subsidized by investors -- will it continue when price actually must bare costs and profits?

Businesses and wealthy people want AI so they can lay people off and hold onto their money, and build stuff faster to capture more marketshare / power.

There wasn't demand for computers either. Or, the industrial revolution.

AI is a competitive advantage for those that can leverage it.

Consumers ask for AI all the time. Their requests sound like this:

  - "Google search is drowned by SEO, I can't find anything anymore"
  - "Wow all these ads suck"
  - "Ugh my social media is full of hucksters and bots"
  - "My job applications all go into a black hole"
  - "LoL gmail can't even find emails I know are there"
  - "Ffs stop autocorrecting to duck"
  - "Oh wow we can't even say 'vagina' anymore because The Algorithm"
  - "Support doesn't even read my message, why do I bother"
  - "I can't keep up with all my inboxes"
  - "This meeting should've been an email"
  - "The press release makes no sense, can someone translate corporatespeak?"
  - "Ecomm sites are awful why can't I just find what I'm looking for?"

etc.

We already use AI for all sorts of things. This will only accelerate. Half the things that used to be AI aren't even called AI anymore. That's because "AI" is a marketing label. When a technology becomes mundane, it ceases to be called AI and we find something new.

Those sound like requests for not AI.

> "Google search is drowned by SEO, I can't find anything anymore"

It's now powered by AI. [0]

> "Wow all these ads suck"

Well, they're powered by AI. [1]

> "Ugh my social media is full of hucksters and bots"

Yeah, mostly because the social media feed is all low-effort stuff generated with AI. [2]

> "My job applications all go into a black hole"

Likely because of an AI screening tool. [3]

[0] https://blog.google/products/search/how-ai-powers-great-sear...

[1] https://ads.google.com/intl/en_us/home/campaigns/ai-powered-...

[2] https://www.fastcompany.com/91113437/ai-making-meta-apps-bas...

[3] https://compensationxl.com/companies-are-using-ai-in-their-h...

Are you sure they’re asking for AI? It sounds to me like they are asking for the Internet to be turned off.

Source?

Gemini's terrible search answers didn't become a viral meme because people liked and appreciated it.

Consumers were not demanding the internet or computers either. But it turns out they were useful for consumers and especially for the profits of capitalists. People may not like it but AI will be an important part of our lives soon.

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