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Comment by textlapse | Hacker News Reader

Other than GH Copilot (which is amazing) and the like, I am yet to see a social/cultural impact of LLMs. I am ignoring the hype cycle fueled social media posts where influencers show cool stuff or model releases. I am talking about this stuff permeating through the society.. am I immune to it? Or is it hidden in saas/enterprise products layers deep?

I would imagine some productive cultural impact that’s wide spread, sticky, high retention not like ‘oh cool 3d tv or vr’ kinda thing?

Given how much ‘money’ has been burnt through the GPU heatsinks.

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It's the generation currently in schools and universities that are making LLMs a part of their daily routine.

Apart from people in education, a whole SEO industry has grown around LLMs and they love the newly found powers to produce spam at scale.

In business / government space people are cautiously introducing LLMs to improve productivity in the comms area where slight hallucinations or robotic corporate language are acceptable, because the final text is still produced by a human. On the customer support / sales side companies are investing money in "AI" versions of the good old phone menu trees that inevitably make you scream "I want to speak to a human" before you get connected to a human being.

Elsewhere adoption is slow, because we expect deterministic results and these are just not to be expected. I write software that interacts with LLMs via APIs and have to implement defensive coding techniques I haven't used for over a decade, because the output may switch from the requested structure at random. This makes use of structured output or function calling problematic.

It’s kinda easy to check it though. Ask your friends if they use it, preferably non developer. When I find out my accounting friends and marketing friends are using it for basic analytics/promotion write ups I realized this is being used by non developers already on a regular basis. The use by non tech folks is significant for this . Crypto as a counter example of hype hasn’t lived up to its purported use case as non tech ppl I know only “own” it through an exchange.

I did. Most of them if not all have tried it once just out of curiosity. None of them is using it on a regular basis- not even once a week. Maybe I am in the wrong group? Includes family / friends (non tech). Tech people (friends) use it regularly for coding though.

People around me and myself use it to basically replace some web searches.

Particularly o1-preview is really good at writing broad strokes mini review style articles that discuss some question you're interested in.

It only works in cases where there's a lot of text out there already that discusses the topic and that needs to be sort of remixed to answer your question specifically.

The chat format is much more efficient for this than a web search or reading a few related Wikipedia articles.

It's truly glass half full vs. glass half empty. I'm super impressed and excited about how useful this is, and yet it clearly isn't AGI.

Is that the general public (non tech)?

The people I'm referring to are not working in software if that's what you're asking, but it's definitely knowledge work.

It seems pretty clear to me that this is disruptive to most knowledge worker's workflows, even without getting into the whole discussion of how close are we to AGI and does this thing really understand anything.

It's basically Clippy done right ;)

Oddly , i think the media has not caught upon how much it is used. Most journalists and youtubers present trivial use cases. I ve found that the most unlikely people use it for all kinds of purposes. In most cases, they don't even want their bosses to know that they use the tools because they give them superpowers. I 'm talking about bank employees, store managers, local politicians, small business people etc.

I also used to be in disbelief, but i'm seeing more and more unexpected people use LLMs , and they even figure out how to prompt them right.

You might be referring to direct consumers but keep in mind that Microsoft has integrated Copilot in Windows and they keep improving the integration.

Once all outlook users have buttons to summarize, extract into, improve the email, then you have hundreds of millions using LLMs everyday.

searching, summarizing, writing

A highly advanced content retrieval system (but lacking in accuracy, so ok for situations where that may be ok).

I wouldn't say it's revolutionary -- certainly not as revolutionary as search, but it's a major step forward in being able to retrieve information. Ultimately will allow you to interact with computers the way you see in the old Star Trek movies, where you're speaking in plain English and receiving information back in the same (providing the systems which are the source of the needed information are interconnected and fed into the training set).

I find it most useful for initiating tasks and projects. This makes it invisible to social/cultural impact other than a boost in my productivity.

Go ask an English teacher how LLMs are affecting them.

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