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Comment by Aperocky | Hacker News Reader

> And let’s be clear: We don't need AGI (Artificial General Intelligence).

In general, I think we want to have it, just like nuclear fusion, interplanetary and interstellar colonization, curing cancer, etc. etc.

We don't "need" it similar to people in 1800s don't need electric cars or airports.

Who owns AGI or what purpose the AGI believe it has is a separate discussion - similar to how airplanes can be used to transport people or fight wars. Fortunately today, most airplanes are made to transport people and connect the world.

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> In general, I think we want to have it

Outside of tech circles no one I talk to wants AI for anything

Do they want self driving cars or domestic help robots though?

No.

They’re in a tiny tiny tiny minority then.

Got any stats to back that up?

Stats that people like to be chauffeured around and be helped with housework?!

Do you also need stats to back up the fact that people prefer using washing machines vs washing by hand?

Stats that people want shitty robots to do these things.

When it comes to driving, the people I know are either content to take public transit (or would be, if their locales had any) or -- get this -- they drive because THEY LIKE DRIVING. Are you one of those people who uses ChatGPT to read, write, and listen to your podcasts for you?

Yet somehow ChatGPT has almost a billion users. Thats a lot of tech bros.

Any time there is something new everyone will sign up to try it out. Give it time. Once there are enough intrusive ads, or subtle ads shimmed into answers, social manipulation and political bias once it hits critical mass, rewriting of history, squeezed rate limits, more cost for less rate limits that number will drop if they are honest and/or deleting inactive accounts. The negative features will not creep in until they believe they have achieved critical corporate capture and dependency.

The negatives don’t change the inherent demand from people for AI.

They actually do. I used to like twitter and now I don’t use it anymore because it’s gone to shit.

People used to google stuff before it became click bait content and ads.

Same thing is gonna happen with ai chatbots. You begrudgingly use them when you have to and ignore them otherwise.

Twitter has a TON of active users though and those aren't going anywhere.

Hell, those that did leave Twitter did it to move to Bluesky which is basically Twitter under a different banner.

Even if people move away from specific instances of some form of technology (like Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon or whatever) they are not necessarily moving away from the idea/tech iself (like microblogging in this example).

Same with other social media: notice how after "Reddit gone shit" the people who felt like that and did move away didn't move back to forums or whatever, they went to Reddit-like boards like Lemmy.

Active users on twitter has gone down massively the past 4 years! As far as we know, because the company doesn’t report numbers as proactively as it used to.

And sure, you can say people just moved to other platforms, but I don’t think you can substantiate that either.

Personally I just dropped all twitter likes, and a lot of my old twitter friends did too. We have discord servers now.

But it’s hard to have a discussion like this without data and we’re never gonna have the data. So you have to use qualitative data instead.

What's even more impressive is the retention charts: https://x.com/far33d/status/1981031672142504146

Every single cohort is smiling upward from the past two years. That is insane, especially at their scale! AI is useful to people.

I think there's quite a jump from "ChatGPT has a high user retention rate" to "AI is useful to people". That's like saying funko pops were useful to nerds just because they kept buying them.

Can second this. Am the only tech worker among my friends and family and every single one of them reacts to AI the same as to crypto or NFTs

AI does some things but it's nowhere near as good as it has to be to justify its valuations.

All of my family members bar one use ChatGPT for search, or to come up with recipes, or other random stuff, and really like it. My girlfriend uses it to help her write stories. All of my friends use it for work. Many of these people are non-technical.

You don’t get to 100s of millions of weekly active users with a product only technical people are interested in.

I meant as a society we should want AGI, but I understand that's not how most feel.

This seems stupid to me

As a society, nothing would be more harmful than AGI controlled by corporations and governments. The rest of us should fight tooth and nail to make sure that it never happens

If AGI can be controlled by corporation or governments, that's not very intelligent of it is it?

You have a clear idea of what AGI would look like, and don't want that. I think you don't and none of us do, it will surprise us just like internet and smartphone would to someone, even if very technically inclined, 50 years ago.

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