My reaction is: that's an appropriate amount. AI is probably the biggest thing to happen (in tech) in the last two decades, so I think it's fair that it's taking up a lot of the discourse.
It seems a bit self-reinforcing. AI makes almost zero (positive) impact on my day to day life and isn't actually something I interact with directly and the same holds true for most people I talk to.
There's a few of my friends in tech for whom AI has obviously massively changed how they work, but again not in a clear positive direction.
To me there seems to be a push to heavily prompte LLMs, even thought the benefits aren't all that clear yet. Some people are seeing massive improvements in how they work and it's understandable that they, like with blockchains or Kubernetes previously want to share their optimism. I just question if maybe these people are being to louder and have to much influence. There's a large silent majority for whom all the AI stuff is almost completely pointless.
It does need to take up more space on HN, compared to your normal media, because the technology needs to find it's way into applications and appliances. The hype will die down, especially once we start to see the actual costs, e.g. ChatGPT doesn't actually provide enough value for the average user to warrant a subscription, hence the ads. For now, it seems that AI is heavily pushed by industry and a group of fans, the amount of news and articles just doesn't line up with the actual daily use.
LLMs have helped us keep HN up and still (relatively) fast amid a huge onslaught of new traffic over the last year or so. We've been able to solve problems and find opportunities for optimization that we'd never have gotten to without the help of Claude or ChatGPT.
Although this is one of those threads where people love to report how much they dislike HN, how it's a poor shadow of its former self, and how they barely look at it anymore—a popular local sport for 15 years or more—but to the extent anyone still reads the site, there must be some positive impact in having it running and rendering pages, even if you don't like what's on them!
Hopefully HN is just getting more popular, but isn't a large part of the "huge onslaught of new traffic" driven by AI companies scraping the site for content or writing comments for various reasons?
Fixing the problems created by LLMs using LLMs seems like a bit like hiring a bully for security to prevent that same bully from beating you up.
But yes, there's plenty of positive things that are now possible. See as a combined net-positive vs net-negative, I'm still leaning towards the net-negative.
I take your point! But the positives are still positive. I've been amazed by how much LLMs have helped us do.
None of it was undoable otherwise, but we (where by "we" I mean "I") would never have gotten around to it otherwise. Lowering the bar from months to days, or weeks to hours, is significant.
I fear this is not the only reason even if it is true. The more negative reason is a loss of skill/talent. We used to be able to know what to do in these situations, and how to fix things when they went wrong. Companies like Y Combinator used to be able to hire talented systems engineers who knew how to minimize the risk of things going wrong, and fix them when they did.
Now with LLMs it is just vibe-coded until it is fixed. Find the right prompt and hope the statistics is in your favor. If this is the case, there is nothing positive about it.
I think the scrapers have gotten pretty good and can imitate real traffic. And it isn’t just scraping for model training. A large amount would be LLM tool calls searching the web (and HN) for info about some prompt.
I don't think that AI has to influence every single person's daily life to make a huge impact. I think for probably 90% of people it's pretty useless out side of being a better search engine. But that doesn't mean it won't have a huge impact on science and technology at large. There are a lot of snake oil salesmen trying to stick it into everyone's face, but I don't think that should be conflated with the real progress that's being made.
I would say 90% of people do not yet realize how useful it is. It is not useless to them, they just don’t understand yet what it can do.
And there were a few years there where a lot of BS AI hype turned them off to it. So a lot of people rightly dismissed it and don’t realize the inflection point it hit in the last few years.
ChatGPT work is basically a personal assistant for $20/month
> ChatGPT work is basically a personal assistant for $20/month
A personal assistant that will happily tell you that you’re the world’s largest supergenius who invented perpetual motion. I wouldn’t want that if they paid me $20/month to use it.
It’s never told me that, but it does help me fix problems. For instance the other day I noticed that my state unemployment insurance rate had increased from 0.75% to 12.75%. I absolutely could have spent hours of my time scouring the website, trying to call and waiting on hold, talking around the issues with a poorly trained state agent.
Instead, I asked ChatGPT what happened. It did a dive and figured out that I was being assessed a penalty rate because I had switched to a new payroll provider that does not file wage reports in my one quarter (seasonal business) where I have no wages. Without a wage report, you are considered delinquent.
You have to love the government, it is the only place where you can be delinquent on a payment you do not owe. ChatGPT filed the correct wage report, navigated to the Support site requested a retroactive rewrite, which was granted and saved me many thousands of dollars.
Would I have done this myself eventually? Probably. But I work a lot in season. Something more important would have been neglected. It would have taken me an amount of hours that I would happily buy back for an entire year of ChatGPT business. It didn’t even hit my 5 hour usage limit to do it.
So maybe instead of asking it how it feels about you, ask it to do useful things. It’s my employee, not my girlfriend.
>because the technology needs to find it's way into applications and appliances.
I hear what you're saying, but speaking for myself: can we *not*? I really have absolutely zero interest in having ChatGPT on my microwave or refrigerator. In fact, I'd rather have my appliances *not* be connected to the Internet, all things being equal.
>I'd rather have my appliances not be connected to the Internet,
It's getting harder and harder to find things that don't connect to the internet as time goes on. The moment a manufacture figures out how to sell your appliance data for more than it costs to add it, seemingly every model they produce gets it added with the only choice of going to some other manufacture if you don't want it... and even then finding one not internet connected gets nearly impossible.
In general most people don't care enough for people like us that don't want connected devices to move the dial.
i just gotta say that i find it hard to believe that this comment is true for you but you hang out on hackernews.
almost everyone here is a software engineer or works in tech, they all use ai all day to do their entire jobs.
> even thought the benefits aren't all that clear yet
it isnt 2023 anymore. wtf are you talking about.
>he hype will die down, especially once we start to see the actual costs, e.g. ChatGPT doesn't actually provide enough value for the average user to warrant a subscription,
again, it isnt 2023 anymore. none of this is true.
I use it a couple times a week, not even daily. It's useful about half the time, and a complete waste of time the other half. It's a useful tool to reach for sometimes and I'll keep using it for the things it's good at, but it hasn't really changed how I work. Shrug.
Just saying "it isn't 2023 anymore" isn't an argument. Yeah it's not 2023. And LLMs still can't actually do anything useful outside of sift logs and write small scripts. They still hallucinate things regularly so that you have to check everything they do, which negates the time savings they supposedly provide. And that's not even getting into the externalities! LLMs are a very crappy technology.
I guess Hex-Rays and Vector35 must be hallucinating their effects for, say, reverse engineering. OFC rev isn't be all and end all of computing but the effect LLMs had on security research and adjacent spaces (say, CTF) is interesting
I am so fucking sick of this. No, you dumbshits -- ALL of us DO NOT use LLM's to write code. Just fucking STOP assuming every developer needs the same crutch that the rest of you can't seem to live without.
I assure you they do not, many truly do not care and don't want to. That's just what the hype and the article and the stories tell you. The HN bubble tells you that's true, but 90% of my co-workers don't even want to touch Claude, despite being given a license.
And again, if e.g. ChatGPT is providing so much value, why aren't people buying?
They have "more than 50 million consumer subscribers" and "More than 9 million paying business users" [0]. That's for example more subscribers than for Adobe Creative Cloud.
So, about 0.6% of the world’s population is willing to pay for something that’s supposed to be hugely useful for literally everyone (as opposed to Adobe products, which are only for digital artists)?
Not everyone in the world has $20/month of disposable income, nor does everyone have the disposable time to learn how to make it hugely useful to them.
Also, these are just the numbers for OpenAI. A lot of others are ok with e.g. "paying" for it by going to Google's AI Mode, and getting some ads.
So ChatGPT cannot deliver you $20/month worth of productivity to offset the cost? That's at least my point, for developers, businesses and a ton of use cases, access to a good AI is worth every penny, because it easily pays for itself. For the average consumer, that's just not true, apparently.
HN is in an extreme hype bubble around LLMs, because of AI coding. Normal people outside of the tech bubble range from 1. not caring at all about AI to 2. disliking or opposing it.
Meanwhile, here on HN, you have people who earnestly say things like "AI is the subtrate the future runs on"[1] (actual quote).
There's also a part of me that misses the earlier days of Hacker News when the subject matter was much more eclectic and seemingly every day I'd have a chance to learn about something completely different.
And that's maybe what I miss. Nowadays Hacker News feels increasingly like another social media platform: mostly a lot of opinions, war stories, and self promotion. That feeling of serendipity that so characterized earlier ages of the Web is fading here, too.
Yes, it's appropriate given the metric you have chosen ("big"ness), though maybe the word should then be "expected", since "appropriate" implies some kind of broader human-oriented concept of rightfulness/goodness.
Upvoted: I was going to write this exact reply. Everyone is a bit tired of hearing about AI, but it's advancing fast and it's the most important thing right now. As Demis says, if we get to ASI, we can solve all other issues with it.
Actually, it (LLM models) has been advancing slower for a while. This is pretty much in the mainstream. And the current approach is facing all sorts of obstacles that are not exclusively technological. The compute needs are no longer sustainable. Financially, big labs are drowning in debt and backlash against data centres has grown so much that it has become an electoral topic in at least one major country.
> if we get to ASI, we can solve all other issues with it
Jesus Christ this has to be bait. Added to the favourites to laugh about it when the lunacy and hype has died down in 5 years and the trough of disillusionment has truly settled in.
Or to laugh about it when ASI actually has arrived and we're waiting in line to be turned into biofuel for the Greater Good.
Everybody is literally pinning their hopes that God itself comes out of machine to save them from the exponentially accelerating pile of tech debt, and they're not even half joking about it. This is not engineering, this is utter madness.
I'd say it is engineering. There's a Moore's law like steady progress where the effective IQ goes up each year which will result in neither troughs nor biofuel but just smart AI.
Given human nature I also think it'll be kind of undramatic. Like when jet aviation transformed things people moan about check-in queues and maybe with ASI people will probably moan their robot butler is only 200 IQ when their neighbours is 205.
Shit we’re onto thinking ASI is happening soon? I guess people hyped up AGI so much that it’s no longer thrilling to talk about despite not getting to that point either.
why exactly do we want ASI, and further, if we DID, why on Earth would we want it controlled by the likes of Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, and Larry Ellison?
Problem is other cool hacky stuff gets drawned out. Nobody votes on those because I imagine it's no longer attractive to the type of visitor that HN attracts now. I reckon there's many more non-tech, "make me a millionaire" gold rush crowd here, as cynical as it sounds. I base that on pure logic, since it's kind of inevitable with AI having delivered a massive democratization of tech knowledge, but also on the amount of snarkier, shorter, less technical, less logical, one short sentence type of comments.
I know it's been said countless of times before, but I think this community has truly changed within last year.
Feels more like another blockchain hype cycle to me.
Especially the part where we're always on the cusp of the entire world changing while the biggest change is just that huge sums of money changed hands, inducing psychosis in a large group of investors.
Funniest part of all of it is it’s all the same actors. Same hardware even. Just the crypto shills now talk about agentic capabilities & we’re approaching a singularity man! Can’t you see!!?
I know what you're saying, there is a lot of speculation going on in AI right now. The difference is there is hard evidence of AI capabilities accelerating now: we've gone from toy chatbots to sort-of useful coding helpers to agents solving novel math problems in 3.5 years. We could plateau any day and a lot of investors would be stuck holding the bag, or we could continue on that trajectory and they'll make crazy profits. With crypto, the bet was always "how much money will people keep sticking in this market?" which seems a lot more flawed to me.
The irony with blockchain is that it also had a bunch of real life use cases but the sheer extremity of the hype cycle managed to actually prevent them from being effectively brought to life.
There was a lot of genuinely useful tech that blockchain could have facilitated and all we were left with in the end was a mountain of scams and bitcoin.
I'm seeing something similar with AI where the genuinely useful stuff is getting washed out by the hype simply because it's a gradual improvement and not "disruptive". Meanwhile the stuff sold as disruptive like vibe coding is mostly bullshit.
What was the useful blockchain tech? It seemed to me to all be different ways of avoiding regulations or bypassing existing system or addressing issues that were already solved by using centralized systems.
it let you decentralize trust. as one example, I was hoping that as well as "sign in with google" I could sign in with a blockchain based decentralized identity service where nobody could one day decide to revoke my identity on a whim.
i remember my friends excitedly telling me how cross border container trade is still done with paperwork because nobody trusts each others' IT systems. I'm pretty sure it still is because they can't be convinced to trust blockchain systems either.
trustworthy voting is another application. ive yet to see a political party that runs an internal voting system that doesnt rely upon you trusting a central server run by a few people. this is crazy.
So, they resolved solved problems but without centralized systems.
It seems to me that people don't want to run their own security upon which they have no recourse if they fail, and don't think that benefits of centralized systems are worth giving up for the dubious benefits of a decentralized trust. Imagine if the scams for the currencies occurred with voting systems, with no way to undo it.
The technologies just didn't do anything that more than a small number of people wanted.
You really have to expand the list to ridiculous levels before you get to something as big. We've already left humans behind in many ways (but in others we've failed to build LLMs that know how to find the gaps in implementation that humans are leaving out)
Cynics really say stuff like "but it's been 3 years and all they can claim is that it's changed text to speech, speech to text, photos to text, text to photos, programming, cybersecurity, research, mathematics, war...
"They lie about it being dangerous!" and simulataneously "They hacked a system with zero day exploits! Everyone involved should goto jail!"
Tech leaders are awful, but it is just that we've built a society that enables the most awful among us to benefit the most. It has never been the case that tech leaders are particularly amazing, they are just amazing at exploitation.
> You really have to expand the list to ridiculous levels before you get to something as big
Instead of expanding the list, it would be better to widen your vision. Email was more transformative than AI is right now. Unix, then Linux was more transformative. If you have a magic wand and remove AI, I think barely anyone would be impacted, but removing something like windows would be like erasing computers. And removing Linux would wipe most of the internet services.
Email in it's first five years barely extended beyond some research universities. And is it novel? Do you see email as somehow a difficult concept to imagine?
Unix in it's first five years reworked the way operating systems performed. I'd agree it's pretty important, but I don't see how it fundamentally changed the way we perform work in multiple disciplines (in its first 5 years). Same for Linux, but even less so.
We're in very early times, and generative AI is touching every corner of the workpace and education, for better and worse. Powerful technologies can have negative effects. Email has been negatively transformative in ways as well.
Part of the reason you can erase AI so effectively with so "little" effect is that it is new.
There's only a few months left for the core technologies of LLM, the transformer, to be a decade old (counting since the "Attention is all you need"). In a decade, we have gone from pure theory of computation (Turing paper in 1936) to the first general purpose computer (ENIAC in 1945). In 1971, the first email was sent over the network (ARPANET), by the early 1980s, we were looking at nationwide deployment of email systems.
> We're in very early times, and generative AI is touching every corner of the workpace and education, for better and worse.
Forcefully. By a mixture of free offerings and bundling AI in every tools with no disable button. It's still not an essential tech like email or Linux is (not even essential at the level of GitHub).
This is an entirely weird and bizarre conversation. The world today has network effects - specifically because of well, networking. It feels almost ridiculous comparing the impact of things like ENIAC to github because they aren't even in the same class. GIT and email (FYI, there is a predecessor to email in 1965 called MAIL) are specific implementations of systems that would have happened no matter what. GIT is awesome, email is kinda ok -- but that's beside the point.
> Forcefully. By a mixture of free offerings and bundling AI in every tools with no disable button. It's still not an essential tech like email or Linux is (not even essential at the level of GitHub).
We could survive without computers and the internet. We did it. I was there. We could go back. It's not essential. You've lived maybe 3 years with LLMs. No kidding they could disappear. As an old person, I have no idea why you think any other technology is any different. LLMs are new, that's the big difference as I said earlier.
> Forcefully.
So.... I hate mobile apps. I hate that TVs connect to the internet. I hate that we have cameras on every corner. I hate that we have cameras that watch us while driving.
Now, tell me about how this is different than all that.
> As an old person, I can tell you something: We could survive without computers and the internet. We did it.
As late as 2009, I was living without computers and internet. The most tech thingies in everyone home were the radio, the TV, the VCR (not everyone and half of them wasn't working properly) and a dumbphone.
I'm not saying that internet or any of the others is essential (in absolute). What I'm saying is that the supposedly "transformative" aspect of AI needs free offerings, dark patterns, and a mountain of hyping to just make it worthwhile to discuss in tech circles (removing the grifting on Linkedin). For everyone else, the most impact is the enormous amount of slop.
I paid for my computer. I'm paying for my internet connection and my electricity. I'm paying for my email service. Drop the free offering for any current AI service and see how much it is that transformative.
> As late as 2009, I was living without computers and internet. The most tech thingies in everyone home were the radio, the TV, the VCR (not everyone and half of them wasn't working properly) and a dumbphone.
The VCR? Hrm. What part of the world are you from? No computer and no internet? Hrm.
> Drop the free offering for any current AI service and see how much it is that transformative.
It is currently being paid for by millions of companies in Microsoft products, and I can tell you that many companies are happy with it.
Microsoft honestly has done a tremendous job integrating it with some of their products, less so in others. (Excel is a disaster, Teams has been pretty good)
The ambiguity partly comes from denial. LLMs in the end, to be brutally honest, replace us. That is the direction it's headed and some people can't face the cold hard truth.
AI is not limited to the rigid construction plan of an organism. A model also doesn't have to fit inside a small skull or be limited to the daily energy intake of a human.
> AI is not limited to the rigid construction plan of an organism.
This is some AI psychosis shit.
Explain how you think extrapolating off of 4-5 years of growth(I’m being generous here) means the development is asymptomatic instead of reaching a plateau like every other aspect of physics.
Are you one of those people who believes Anthropics claim that they will have the revenue of the entire United States yearly for their IPO?
> AI is not limited to the rigid construction plan of an organism. A model also doesn't have to fit inside a small skull or be limited to the daily energy intake of a human.
We haven't seen any significant progress at all, much less extreme progress. You still can't use these stupid slop buckets for actual useful work, despite the massive amounts of resources being wasted on them.
This analogy doesn't work. There is a material difference between SO and Github and a machine that can talk to you and understand you.
You may claim it doesn't understand you, then I can say, fine... a machine that perfectly and indistinguishably imitates a response made by an intelligent being that understands such that a difference cannot be measurably detected.
- A successful surgery may require both a surgeon and a nurse, but that doesn't mean the nurse has nearly as much impact on the successful surgery as the surgeon.
- The lighting of the match is mainly caused by the striking of the match, not by the presence of oxygen, even though both are necessary for lighting the match.
So a cause being necessary for an effect doesn't imply that its impact on the effect is very large.
