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Comment by the_other | Hacker News Reader

This seems like an admission that LLMs don’t bring the productivity gains claimed/projected. Advertising works entirely counter to (individual) productivity. Adertising requires attention, and attention distracts from productivity. So oAI’s new route to profitability cannibalises their earlier route.

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If I play devil's advocate, I'd say the productivity gain is so significant that even with the distraction of ads, you still save time by using LLMs :)

Not sure how that makes sense. Using Google with ads is more productive for finding something than not using Google at all, as was the case beforehand.

Quite often these days I find myself not even finding what I was looking for with Google, making it a net productivity loss.

I’m sure it’s there, somewhere, buried in the SEO and AI slopspam, but I couldn’t find it.

To conclude that Google is a net productivity loss you’d have to also factor in the productivity of all the queries over time where you _did_ find what you were looking for.

Would you also subtract all the time spent on Facebook after Googling for "facebook" and clicking on the first link in order to get there?

Using google was more productive

Yes if these llms were so great, they would just be autonomous agents out there shilling brands on every forum, hacking every protocol to inject ads anywhere and everywhere you could imagine... not randomly shoved into the middle of a poor teens suicide note revision

Or that the vast majority of people don't actually value their own productivity and time that much. Which given the popularity of social media and people not paying a few dollars to avoid hours of streaming ads per month seems fairly clear to me.

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