Hacker News Reader

Comment by alemanek | Hacker News Reader

About 10% of the total world population is using it on a weekly basis. Take out those too old or young or illiterate technically or otherwise. Now subtract out the people without reliable internet and computer/phone. That 10% gets a whole lot bigger.

That seems like pretty strong evidence that it is generally, if not universally, useful to everyone given the opportunity.

View on HN

It’s interesting with the whole quote: “OpenAI has 800 million weekly active users, and putting aside the fact that OpenAI’s own research (see page 10, footnote 20) says it double-counts users who are logged out if they’re use different devices”

The number may not actually be too accurate - but I imagine it’s also paired with what another commentator has said - OpenAI is basically giving their product to companies and the companies are making the employees log in and use it in some way - it’s not natural growth in any sense of the word.

Like Microsoft 365 ... CoPilot ... something.

My work is apparently paying for seats in multiple AI tools for everybody. There's a corporate mandate that you "have to use AI for your job". People seem to mostly be using it to for (a) slide decks with cringe images (b) making their PRs look more impressive by generating a bunch of ineffective boilerplate unit tests.

Utility and destructive addictiveness are two very different things. You could argue this way about opium back when recreational consumption was widespread.

Only if you believe popularity is the same as usefulness.

idk even that "usefulness" won't help on the core question:

"does the numbers add up?"

this article is about NUMBERS regarding return-on-investment / etc

"useful" is so vague so it's too 'useless' to the discussion here... I'm not sure why everyone here is parrotting that like gpt hallucination

I’m sorry but I don’t see much logic in an argument that boils down to “A lot of people use it and that means it would also be useful to the people who don’t use it”. Maybe the people who don’t use it have an actual reason not to use it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com