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Comment by base698 | Hacker News Reader

My father in law owns a small manufacturing business and is not technical at all. His computer skills stop with some CAD and basic excel. He pays for ChatGPT as does his wife and her kids. The internet and dot com bubble didn't have millions and millions of non technical users paying cash for a product. Almost every coffee shop I go to has people talking about AI and ChatGPT even in areas with no tech populations.

I still think it could crash, but it's got real users and a mind share like nothing I've ever seen.

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The internet and dot com bubble didn't have millions and millions of non technical users paying cash for a product

The dot com bubble was basically based on regular people buying computers and internet service, and then using them to buy products they used to buy in stores.

This seems to ignore the fact that millions of non-technical people did pay cash for a product: AOL. And in fact the AOL buyout of Time Warner coincided almost exactly with burst of the dot com boom.

> the AOL buyout of Time Warner

To be clear, there is a world of difference between IPOs and LBOs. In the risk they create. And in the risk they signal.

That may be the case but the idea that non-technical people didn't pay cash for internet products before the dot com boom is fanciful. I would say AOL's acquisition of a legacy media company did signal the peak of a mania the way these IPOs are.

These companies are never, ever going to make their money back off of retail customers. It's not even clear if those customers would be profitable at all, let alone enough to justify hundreds of billions in capital expenditures.

The question in my mind is persistence. Everyone goes through the honeymoon phase. I'm absolutely loathing the idea that phones are arriving soon with chatbot junk built deeply into it, enough that the thought is more what if I could maybe just stop using my phone so much. I threw myself at the Llama WhatsApp integration when I first got it, now the idea of having Llama in WhatsApp just feels so dumb.

I was a huge early fan of ChatGPT voice too, but I don't think I've used voice mode anywhere in at least 6 months. The question is what is the right level people are generally going to settle on for the use of these tools in the long term. 80% of my usage isn't much more than a better Google, I could live without it and I could live with cheaper options. I'm not sure the consumer money is going to be there en masse as hoped

Of course it still leaves a huge amount of business cases open, but I suppose the same principle applies. How soon will people tire of talking to robo-voice when they call their bank? etc.

I definitely believe in the broad existence of people like your father in law. What I’m not sure about is how many of them would keep paying if their subscriptions were priced profitably.

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