Comment by DrewADesign | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DrewADesign | Hacker News Reader

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Personally, I don’t think the general-purpose LLM as a standalone tool is long for this world, at least not in consumer-facing applications. I think when the economics make more sense, product designers will make things that people actually want to use that will pretty transparently handle whatever model interactions are necessary, when it makes sense. As a consumer, the last things I want in an interface are to a) be sycophantic enough to lessen my judgment, and b) be obstinate, obtuse, or argumentative, or generally just be something that I have to explain things to. I think a lot of tech folks are far more biased than they realize by the “ooh, neato” factor when imagining how nontechnical people might want to use things. And the weight of these tools just feels wrong for what a lot of people use them for: the thing that plays whatever music I feel like hearing absolutely does not need to be able to generate a volumes of fanfic about the movie that song was in. It’s abstractly impressive that something could do that, but it’s just not useful.

>As a consumer, the last things I want in an interface are to a) be sycophantic enough to lessen my judgment

This is EXACTLY what people like/are addicted to about chatbots.

My sister-in-law bombed an interview and asked AI about her answers to the interviewer's questions, chatgpt or whatever it was told her that her answers weren't bad, but that the interviewer could not see the gold in her responses. She said she felt much better.

I see this effect with all the non-tech people in my life

I prefix many of my LLM chat sessions with this line

> Chat rules : no sycophancy or over-agreeableness

(But even with that rule it's still necessary to be discerning about the responses you get and to push back against points made, or words used)

> I don’t think the general-purpose LLM as a standalone tool is long for this world, at least not in consumer-facing applications.

I use AI chat every day, I find it endlessly useful. It’s replaced google search.

Google search still happens, it’s just your agent doing it.

Google search is basically Gemini now. You get a Gemini summation including several links.

"You get a Gemini summation including several links."

Who does "you" refer to

Me, I don't get a Gemini summation (Tested with old version of Chrome)

As such I do not believe that "Google search is basically Gemini now"

I believe Google search is still scanning through a doclist to find which documents, if any, contain words parsed from a query. These documents are pointed to by the URLs I get in the SERPs

I do not get any Gemini summation

A typical US user using a typical browser with typical settings gets an AI summary above search results.

If this doesn’t describe you, then ymmv. Talk to your government or turn down your content filtering or reset the default settings in your browser, if you want to see what we see.

Why use the term "you"

Does it mean the HN reader

What if that reader is "non-typical"

HN comments have argued for many years that HN users are not representative of the majority of www users

I have read that some HN users do not like "AI summaries"

I’m sure a lot of people here do. I wouldn’t exactly call this a representative sample.

It’s a sample of the forerunners

See: product adoption cycle

I encountered multiple people in HN that had Apple Vision Pro. How many people here use Linux? Have flagship model phones? Drank soylent? Microdosed LSD?

Extrapolating based on what you see on HN doesn’t make sense.

Bottom line up front: LLM unlocks the power of a workstation for normal people.

Google Search ate the internet because everyone was using it. Some people said "free search isn't a business model, look what happened to yahoo"... and those people were wrong; not because they misunderstood the economics, but because they misunderstood what people needed.

Google Search reduced the friction of using the internet for normal people - suddenly the internet could be accessed with plain language, simple phrases, no networking knowledge or domain expertise required.

LLM is doing the same thing - reducing friction. Tradesmen and small businesses are building company landing pages and doing SEO by themselves. Businesses in every industry are programming applications in-house to unshackle themselves from SaaS systems. Entrepreneurs can build automated systems to handle mundane processes and get back to pulling the levers that actually move the needle. An LLM can level up your employees on the software they're already using.

The economic potential is only beginning to be realized.

Bottom line — all evidence gathered by modern interface design shows that most people don’t like conversing with their computers for anything more than a few single sentence commands. And people hate being forced to use chatbots with the fire of a thousand suns. If people chose their tools based on what engineers determined was the superior usage strategy or technology, nobody would use centralized social media, or MS Windows, unencrypted text chat, email without pgp, etc etc etc

Hi I am enjoying this conversation, but I am not understanding you.

> If people chose their tools based on what engineers determined was the superior usage strategy or technology, nobody would use centralized social media, or MS Windows, unencrypted text chat, email without pgp, etc etc etc

You're using this as an example of how normal people behave, but that CS/SWE's would advise against? I am having a hard time understanding how you connect this to LLM / chatbot to drive the argument that general purpose LLM's are over valued.

I've found LLMs useful for surfacing popular recommendations. I also get the overwhelming feeling that it's all very early days still when the machine mixes together whatever was crawled into the weights with a web search or two and dumps it into a markdown blurb.

I totally agree with the above that a more polished and less obvious use of LLMs integrated back into search engines may be more useful, but will definitely be more usable.

> I use AI chat every day, I find it endlessly useful. It’s replaced google search.

Extremely subsidized agentic search is very superior to Google at the moment, and of course it is. Google is a public company. The AI summary model has to work instantly, is likely as dumb as a 8T param model, and gives you incorrect details constantly. This sucks so much for Google. If you click on "AI Mode," suddenly the facts become more accurate.

Of course, if I want a real answer I happen to go to claude.ai, set it to a the best model, wait for a minute, and use many watts of energy. Slow agentic search that takes many seconds, and is greatly subsidized, is certainly better. This should not be a surprise, should it?

I think it was on a sub like r/singularity that I saw a post along the lines of "of course most people think that 'AI' sucks, as normies are interacting with 8T param models."

tone: genuinely confused about the world, not criticizing

Your comment about watts stuck out to me. I became curious how much power we might be talking about.

I’m into Claude for $20/mo (petty bourgeois tier), let’s assume for sake of examination this is only paying for power, infrastructure already amortized

Price of grid power approx $0.15/kWh

$20 / ($0.15/kWh * 30 days) = 4.4 kWh per day.

This same amount of energy can lift a 2-ton SUV 1/2 mile into the air. To me this seems astounding.

If only half the $20 pays for power it’s still quite impressive.

Not half, only on the order of 10% of the cost of inference is electricity.

Great, I can expect the price of Claude to drop to $2/mo

With a crane and a good pulley system, a human should be able to pull that off inside of hour. Not all that impressive to me.

RIGHT - 30 HOURS OF WORK FOR $20 - WHAT A VALUE

Just realized my typo, hopefully it was obvious that I meant 8B param, not 8T.

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