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points by daveguy 2 days ago | 0 comments

Or AI has been over promising and under delivering for half a decade. Amazon is just one of the dominos. This is a hedge by Amazon.

[–] nostromo 2 days ago

On what planet has AI under-delivered since 2021? Because it certainly isn't planet Earth.

[–] whatever1 2 days ago

Where? I am not aware of any significant business improvement on the actual bottom line.

We all feel more productive. But did your rust rewrite or my fancy react dashboard produce more value?

[–] Hnrobert42 2 days ago

I advise a B2B startup that went from 4 developers to just the founder, who is technical but not a developer. It is now profitable and delivering just as many features with arguably better security. N=1

[–] zrobotics 2 days ago

So how is this startup going to be a value add long term? If they can cut all the devs, what moat is there? What's stopping their customers from just prompting their own model?

Seriously asking, why would this look like a good business model to be in? If they don't need anyone besides a technical non-developer to create the product, why would this look like a good business? If it's B2B, then most of their customers will have that type of IT person on staff.

[–] fn-mote 2 days ago

A dry cleaner and a car wash can be a good business. Outsource things that are not your core competency. A moat means you can defend it better, but in this case your business can capture the value of them not having the IT person on staff and not having to spend the tokens. It’s a good old fashioned business.

[–] daveguy 2 days ago

Wait... Are anthropic and openai just commodity suppliers? Because dry cleaners and car washes both need soap, but I've never heard of a trillion dollar soap company.

[–] keeda 2 days ago

AWS, Azure and GCP supply a commodity -- compute -- yet each one of them could be a trillion dollar company in its own right. Even when on-prem is nominally much, much cheaper than cloud services.

Turns out there are ways to monetize commodities, to the tune of double-digit billions in revenue per quarter.

[–] adventured 2 days ago

If it were true that what OpenAI and Anthropic offer were commodities, that there is no moat, Microsoft could trivially eat their lunch. There would be no OpenAI. Google with its nation-state money, extreme AI talent, chips, datacenters, could eat their lunch.

So mighty Google can't manage it. But it's a commodity that's easily copied.

Somehow HN can't reconcile the contradiction even though it's laughably obvious.

Hey anybody could go MVP a ride hailing app over the weekend. It's a commodity app. Should be super easy with LLMs.

Oh shit, wait, you mean I'd have to take a billion users away from GPT and getting those users is now 50x harder than it was four years ago? You mean it's drastically harder to peel users away from existing services than if you get to start fresh? Ohhhh.

They have gigantic moats and so long as they don't do anything too stupid, those moats will just get stronger with time.

No VC is giving you money to try to run down OpenAI and Anthropic. Nobody is writing that $100 billion check. It's already over, HN is just in its standard denial phase.

[–] dalyons 2 days ago

a regular business is not a startup though. A startup implies a much higher ceiling on growth and profit. Worth investing in on a high risk, high multiple of return manner. An SME sized business is not that.

[–] michaelchisari 2 days ago

The hard lesson is that quality will be the new moat.

For decades, velocity, time to market and features all drove the industry. But AI puts speed in everyone's hands.

But quality is still hard. Maybe harder than ever.

[–] mkotlikov 2 days ago

Not to mention the possibility of 4 competitors popping up over night.

[–] marcus_holmes 2 days ago

The question is "what business value is AI driving?" and the answer was "a solo founder cut all the devs and still delivered a product".

Separate question: "now that AI is here and development isn't a moat any more, how does a business defend itself from competition?"

That second question is a direct result of AI. Five years ago the amount of cost and effort spent on software development was a moat. Now it's not. So that answers the first question completely, I think.

As for the second question - market sector knowledge, customer contacts and industry reputation, all the usual non-technical things that make a moat. Also, we may now be living in a world where software companies cannot expect to be monopolies in their markets any more. This company will have to compete with many similar competitors for market share, like in most other markets. I think this is a good thing. Less enshittification will ensue.

[–] whatever1 2 days ago

No extra value was generated in the example. If anything, AI in this example reduces the price of the product AND employment.

Value was destroyed.

The hope is that all these unemployed engineers can somehow generate value? Even if they do they need to generate enough value that would employ 4 engineers.

[–] marcus_holmes 2 days ago

I think this is Broken Window fallacy[0], though.

If a business can create software cheaper, then it can charge its customers less for that software (or, conversely, if a business can use an AI to create bespoke software for cheaper than it would cost to buy that software) then the customer business saves money. It, in turn, can use that money to improve its offering to its customers. They, in turn, and so on.

Having cheaper things means everyone gets more things. The value created is created further down the supply chain.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

[–] hattmall 2 days ago

What are some businesses where software was really a moat but the software lacks sufficient complexity that AI can reproduce it?

I can't think of any, I'm sure there are some, but I would really like to know. I just don't think for most business the software is so much of a moat unless it's very complex.

[–] marcus_holmes 2 days ago

Well, the most recent example would be the Adobe suite rewrite [0]

[0] https://www.afr.com/technology/ai-can-make-free-copies-of-ad...

[–] bluefirebrand 2 days ago

A company doing more with less sounds great, but I personally view a shrinking headcount as failing

[–] jnaina 2 days ago

yup, it's happening. many of the CEOs/CTOs of PE owned ISVs have their marching orders: put in strong product managers, software architects and other senior roles who define what to build and how the software should work, and thin out the developer teams, as agentic coding becomes the norm. Am not saying this makes for quality software, but this is where the industry is heading.

[–] whatever1 2 days ago

So the price of the product will just fall by 80%, unless nobody else cares to compete.

[–] nfw2 2 days ago

That's still increased productivity even if the consumer benefits instead of the business owner.

[–] tehjoker 2 days ago

This is why capitalism must always find new markets or die btw.

[–] leptons 2 days ago

It's going to be funny when AI soon costs 4x or more than it does now, and that non-developer CTO can't understand the slop codebase the AI created.

[–] selcuka 2 days ago

> It's going to be funny when AI soon costs 4x or more than it does now

What exactly will cause that? Hardware costs are (generally) going down, and open weight models are getting smarter. The subsidised subscription prices will go away, sure, but I don't see the average token getting more expensive.

[–] fn-mote 2 days ago

I also hope that rising costs return software dev to an elite, lucrative career. I’m not making my 10 years plan based on that theory, though.

Watch what the open weight models can do. Once they can manage your codebase, you’re safe from gouging.

[–] jan_m_savage 2 days ago

But there still remains the possibility of error/hallucination. Do you bet on a future where AI will never make any mistakes whatsoever?

I am often told humans make mistakes, too. But this is an elementary logical fallacy because the type, frequency and severity of the problems is never the same.

Also, humans are more likely to do as told, whereas AI often takes liberties (i compiled a book from a github repo and it did things on its own in the book though i had explicitly forbidden that).

[–] nradov 2 days ago

I'm not sure if I'm more productive, but in my role where most of my deliverables are technical documents or emails I think my output quality has gone up. Now that I typically use LLMs as a research assistant and editor before sending anything significant to co-workers or customers I'm sure I make fewer mistakes. AI catches a lot of gaps and errors. That's a significant qualitative improvement although I can't quantify that in terms of profit impact.

[–] lnxg33k1 2 days ago

I think you're letting the LLM write emails that are overly verbose that are shortened on the other side by another LLM and so there are 2 minus habens to both side of a communications that are communicating the same stuff as before but now are paying for altman's yacht in order to do it

[–] nradov 2 days ago

Nah, that's not what I'm doing at all. Did you even read my comment? I use it more like a fact checker. It's not perfect but it catches a lot of my errors.

Maybe you could use an AI assistant to help you write better HN comments.

[–] steve_adams_86 1 day ago

Where I work, we take on way more exciting and ambitious projects than we would have when I was hired. It's exhilarating at times. Genuinely, AI in general (not just LLMs) has radically transformed the types of work we can conceivably pursue and deliver on. We're an NGO so we have different staff than a regular tech company, but we're highly tech-driven. I don't doubt that this is the case at many orgs like ours.

And it's measurable. We don't just feel more productive; we get grants, we build systems, and we make plans we simply couldn't have before.

[–] vanuatu 2 days ago

Im surprised people still have this 2024-esque take

i add more value to my company because it lets me ship much faster, debug issues faster, onboard new people faster

total enterprise ai spend is climbing https://ramp.com/data/ai-index#adoption#overall

i know multiple stealth startups with 9 figure revenues and profitable and growing

lab arr is climbing

given the recent crackdown on token spend and from speaking to execs they are very focused on the exact ROI they will get from AI

Note that business revenues in competitive markets may actually not change that much, because if everyone is using the same models there's no competitive advantage from using AI. but if one of them didn't use AI they would fall hopelessly behind

[–] deadbabe 2 days ago

AI is not about productivity. It's about weaponizing the ability to ship fast go-to market features in the blink of an eye when it becomes necessary. If trends change fast and you can't adapt quickly with AI: you're dead. So you need to have AI ready to go, just in case.

[–] nfw2 2 days ago

How is shipping features fast not productivity?

[–] happymellon 2 days ago

Having a special Gemini button everywhere is "a new feature", but it isn't a useful feature, so the productivity needle doesn't budge.

[–] nfw2 1 day ago

This is what the parent post said:

ship fast go-to market features in the blink of an eye when it becomes necessary

Necessary go-to market features are useful

[–] nfw2 2 days ago

If you're getting more done but unsure of the resulting value, that is indicative of your role not the tools you're using.

[–] archagon 1 day ago

Actually, I think that is the very obvious incentive structure of generative AI.

[–] Art9681 2 days ago

We ship features faster and workers are more independent. They can get the answers they need faster than ever. And i'm talking about the business itself if the business has enabled that. There are a ton of productivity gains.

But make no mistake. Being more productive does not equal higher profits because your customers think you've added value. Both value and productivity are highly subjective terms which is why it is measured differently depending on where you work.

Most businesses adapted to AI by shipping a lot more features in smaller increments of time. What they should have done is become much more ambitious and build moon shots in two quarters instead. You need to go big or go home if you're going all in on AI.

[–] onemoresoop 2 days ago

I know it sounds crazy but for the amout of investments AI has underdelivered.

[–] adventured 2 days ago

GPT 3.5 is 2022. In the past ~18 months the majority of all human software development has been wiped out and the models keep getting better rapidly. AI has already radically overdelivered and the biggest returns are in the next 10, 20, 50 years.

It's 1987: The PC is underdelivering.

It's 2000: the Internet is underdelivering.

It's 2010: smartphones are underdelivering.

[–] afpx 2 days ago

Models are finally good enough that I'm confident that I can repeatably build pretty much any software reliably in less than 2% of the time that I could before 2022. I wouldn't have made that claim 6 months ago.

Even quantized local models like Qwen3.8 are good enough to handle a lot of drudgery. For example, I hooked my wife's computer up to a local model, and now she finally has a clean desktop. She just drops spreadsheets or powerpoints or whatever on her desktop and automation takes care of everything.

The caveat is that I developed software for 30 years, so I understand most of what it produces and can guide it to make fewer mistakes and fix what it can't do. The biggest challenge has been keeping my requirements focused - it's very easy to gold plate everything and prematurely optimize.

The biggest question I ask myself is why am I even still doing this. The smart people are probably already trying to figure out how to pipe raw matter and energy to their homes to build replicators.

The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed.

[–] adventured 2 days ago

Build experiences that are user dependent. The value isn't in the software it's in the users. That's the ultimate moat. It's what isn't properly grasped about GPT's position, insofar as they don't mess up big: they have captured a zillion users, they're Kleenex. Ask GPT = Google it.

You don't want to be in the CD selling or radio business with the Internet & digital & streaming & smartphones & iPods bearing down on you. Go for concerts. Notice that humans are spending more than ever on live concerts. Disney World and Disneyland still command extraordinary pricing power, despite everybody hiding inside on their phones.

LLM clones of eg Photoshop will end up being worthless, like ideas generally. The software will be worthless for the same reason ideas are: they're too easy. Users are hard, software will be (relatively) easy.

Is the value in McDonalds in the food? Everybody knows it's not. McD captured consumers, their heft is extraordinarily difficult to displace. Ie habits, brand awareness, location, etc.

[–] reeredfdfdf 2 days ago

"LLM clones of eg Photoshop will end up being worthless, like ideas generally. The software will be worthless for the same reason ideas are: they're too easy. Users are hard, software will be (relatively) easy."

I doubt that. If a clone out there offers all the Photoshop's features for free or much lower cost, without additional learning curve, then many professionals will switch to save money.

McDonalds would be gone too if somebody opened a restaurant chain serving similar food for free or 80% lower price. But that's impossible to do profitably, while freeware software has existed for a long, long time.

[–] adventured 1 day ago

Photoshop users could switch to GIMP tomorrow. They don't want to.

The many professionals are the ones that could most easily understand how to switch to GIMP, which is free to use. They could save enormous amounts of money. They prefer to spend money and stick with Photoshop instead. That has persisted for a very long time now.

[–] eudamoniac 2 days ago

Making your engineers use AI with little to no measurable improvement, but with very measurable high cost, is not delivering

[–] adventured 2 days ago

Astra, Fable, Opus 5.5 are drastically beyond the capabilities of the median software developer. It's not remotely close.

The bottom 2/3 of the human market is entirely dead. Their jobs are gone (AI-shored) they just haven't all gotten the forced retirement or pink slips yet, while they click a few more prompts for a few more pay checks. The frontier pushing forward will knock out most of the remaining top 1/3 without breaking a sweat over the next few years. The really good developers will graduate into babysitting AI as managers.

It is legitimately sad, it's millions of high paying jobs just in the US alone. It's going to be brutal on the housing market. Automation came for another field.

[–] mkotlikov 2 days ago

Software engineering isn't unique, if this is true then it's 99% of all white collar work. Those same software engineers are going to help automate every other job on their way out.

[–] imtringued 2 days ago

Correct. Everything will disappear, even hardware jobs and the trades but the people responsible with the automation jobs (software developers) will be the last to go.

[–] yeeeloit 2 days ago

Do you, personally, have a plan for the future? Like what are you doing about this, or are you hoping to be in the 1%?

[–] adventured 2 days ago

My income is not dependent on LLMs not taking all the software etc jobs from humans.

My suggestion to anybody staring this down is: do something for yourself while you can, while we're in the early going. Most people still have no understanding of AI, most tech employees are doing absolutely nothing interesting with it other than prompt prompt prompt prompt while at work and effectively doodling at home.

Go high value and go for the users. Do things that don't scale, that actually rings more true now than ever. Focus on areas of tech where it's really hard to get the users, where you have to practically hand acquire them to get started. Users are the moat.

It's not build the software and they will come. That's what nearly everybody has wrong about what is going on right now. The value is not in the software. Users, users, users, users - they should be your primary focus.

Also consider looking at software more as a layer related to something else you do, not as The Thing you do. Related to another service you offer, improving that service.

Let's say you started consolidating in the physical self-storage space ten years ago. You read that it was a very wide open field, where the market was not yet highly concentrated, 3/4 of the market was mom & pop operators. Over the next ten years you built up a lot of storage locations. LLMs can amplify your business, they can help you automate, layer better software on top of your physical business. You know what LLMs can't do? They can't build storage units, and humans love their storage space. That's just one example out of a zillion out there.

[–] fn-mote 2 days ago

I am improving my Spanish and staring at the massive savings that I have built up from my SV job. When my job goes and the industry is in flames, I am moving to Bolivia.

If you have a big mortgage and no savings, it’s going to be tough. Stop taking the Waymo now.

[–] eudamoniac 2 days ago

I don't get how anyone actively using AI can believe this. Astra sucks ass.

[–] malfist 2 days ago

> In the past ~18 months the majority of all human software development has been wiped out

What the hell does this even mean? Literally half of the code in operation I the world is still COBOL. The fuck is this nonsense wiped out

[–] adventured 2 days ago

It means in corporations across the globe, the majority of code is no longer being written by humans. That is over and it will only keep dwindling by the quarter.

[–] imtringued 2 days ago

Yes it means in corporations across the globe, the majority of code was no longer being written by humans long before the majority of code was no longer being written by humans.

Also remember, the majority of all human software development has been wiped out 18 months ago but the dwindling will keep going by the quarter until the majority of all human software development has been wiped out.

[–] malfist 2 days ago

Writing lines of code by hand is all of human software development? Pretty sure in all of those companies its still software engineers writing the code, even if they're using LLMs to do it.

Unless you're making the claim that software engineers aren't involved or that only writing code is software development.

[–] asadotzler 2 days ago

Nonsense. Nearly every software house in the world has just as many or nearly as many programmers as they did 7 years ago when GPT-2 was "too dangerous to release." You live in a very tiny bubble if you think most businesses are building software without humans. Total horse shit.

[–] adventured 2 days ago

Microsoft is laying off 60,000 people. That's just the early pin prick of the layoff gusher that is incoming.

One million software developers will lose their jobs in the US over the next ten years.

The big firing waves will begin when valuations decline as the initial AI boom slows. That has started already, although it's early. Companies like CoreWeave will basically collapse. Investors will demand & reward the layoffs, efficiency push, the end of rah rah times will prompt the inflection on employment in tech. And it'll never be like it was ever again.

[–] p-e-w 2 days ago

> Literally half of the code in operation I the world is still COBOL.

There’s no way this is even remotely true. JavaScript alone is probably 90+%, considering it’s on almost every website.

[–] jcranmer 2 days ago

There is definitely an unanswered question as to what the metric, but no, JavaScript is not 90+% by any useful metric. Most code is not a website, and JavaScript penetration outside of the client-side code on a website and some GUI applications on various operating systems is almost nonexistent.

Remember that all of the code in operation includes code like the microcontroller in your mouse, the hundreds of chips in your car doing things like keeping the engine running or "window goes up when I push the button," the DVD menu (which is actually Java code), not to mention all of the staid systems responsible for things like writing your paycheck every other week.

[–] f1yght 2 days ago

Most of the web is php, so JavaScript isn’t even the primary language on the web.

[–] blacksmith_tb 2 days ago

To be fair, most of those Wordpress / LAMP etc. sites probably also do have at least some client-side js, so they'd count for both?

[–] lovich 2 days ago

What AI lab is profitable?

And in before ‘JumpCrissCross chimes in about inference being profitable while ignoring all the investment costs needed to get inference to where it is.

[–] cosmicgadget 2 days ago

Profitability is an awfully narrow metric.

[–] gradus_ad 2 days ago

It's a powerful metric. It captures to what extent something is sustainably possible today.

[–] cosmicgadget 2 days ago

You'd think here, of all places, we'd look more toward adoption, disruption, and potential for future revenue.

[–] fn-mote 2 days ago

The full balance sheet captures the info. If the AI companies suck up all of our salaries and spend that money on R&D/training, they still aren’t profitable, right?

[–] gradus_ad 2 days ago

That wouldn't be sustainable, which is all I'm saying.

[–] zrobotics 2 days ago

>> Profitability is an awfully narrow metric.

I mean, if anything summarizes where we have gotten to as an industry this quote is sure it. From Uber using VC funds to subsidize growth to where the AI players are at...

[–] vanuatu 2 days ago

none (unless you count google and meta),

but profitability is a very narrow view on the labs, and investors are pricing in future free cash flow

you need to take into account the derivative, what is their growth? their opex and capex? their revenue growth? their moat? New product lines and applications?

Not saying that it's a homerun, but there is a case to be made for the labs being wildly profitable in 4-10 years

[–] adventured 2 days ago

Why have they needed to worry about profitability?

They have been chasing extreme growth with cheap money. That enabled them to hyper scale at a pace the world has rarely seen before. They have made the correct choice so far.

The absolute dumbest thing they could have done up to this point is slow down to try to turn a profit. They have not needed to. Market capture is the sole thing they should be focused on. Here's a hint: how many users does GPT have now versus three years ago?

There appears to be very widespread confusion about what purpose turning a profit serves and how business operations actually work.

Go back in time and tell Uber in ~2013-2015 that it needs to immediately become profitable and not focus on capturing the market.

[–] leptons 2 days ago

Market capture didn't work so well for Uber, and it won't work for AI, and even less so for AI because you can't get a driver in China to take you to LAX airport, but you can use cheaper Chinese AI.

Uber has to pay back all the billions of dollars it wasted trying to get people to use their platform, and now I can't afford most Uber or Lyft rides, it's way too expensive. So did market capture really work if they had to raise their prices so much as to make the service unworkable for most people? The only time I take uber is if my company pays for it, and that is getting less often.

AI is also going to have to become way too expensive so they can pay back the billions (trillions?) it is borrowing. And, when everyone is laid-off or fired because AI took their job, then who's going to be paying for AI? I guess the companies that lay off all the humans will, but when the wealthy business owners realize they've replaced everything with AI and nobody is buying what they are selling because there's no more jobs, then what?

Sounds like they should worry about profitability, and a lot of other things too.

[–] fn-mote 2 days ago

> market capture really work if they had to raise their prices so much as to make the service unworkable for most people?

Hate to say it, but in this case you’re not the market so you are irrelevant.

Here’s data from Chicago, USA, showing Uber and Lyft dominate the market now, so yes, it worked.

https://toddwschneider.com/dashboards/chicago-taxi-ridehaili...

[–] leptons 2 days ago

That's great that they dominate a shrinking market, because few people can afford to pay $80 to go 15 miles.

[–] adventured 1 day ago

Uber isn't dealing with a shrinking market. They're becoming critical transportation infrastructure and their business keeps expanding year after year.

$32b -> $37b -> $44b -> $52b -> $57b

That's Uber's sales growth year by year. And now they're solidly profitable.

The sole threat to Uber is the Waymo / Tesla automation angle. A merger is most likely there.

[–] lovich 2 days ago

Why do I need to care about profitability as a business if I can capture a shrinking market? /s

It feels like a related statement to someone willing to burn their own country to rule over the ashes.

[–] vanuatu 2 days ago

Huh? uber is an amazing success story given their market dominance and enterprise value created. of course the next kid on the block (Waymo) is going to do the same thing

The price of a given point on the intelligence frontier is only going to get cheaper, likely 10-20x over the next few years.

[–] redwood 2 days ago

Anthropic as of a few months ago.

[–] gamblor956 2 days ago

That explains the 80 Billion loss on their IPO disclosures.

[–] redwood 1 day ago

Have you looked at the difference between Q1 and Q2? There's a trend change where revenues have grown materially compared with costs

[–] cscheid 2 days ago

I mean, it literally does. Something like 70+ billion of those 80 billion are accounting adjustments because their debt is supposed to be handled in stock and their stock price skyrocketed.

[–] gamblor956 2 days ago

While I was being facetious, Anthropic is nowhere close to being profitable in the normal, i.e., GAAP meaning of the term. It's only using unicorn fantasy lalaland financials that they are "profitable."

Before someone else jumps in talking about "unit economics": unit economics only matters if you can sell the units long enough to make the initial (capitalized) investment (i.e., R&D) back. Models aren't commercially viable long enough for the unit economics to work.

[–] redwood 1 day ago

You're arguing the second quarter isn't representative of what they'll be able to sustain... that their revenue isn't durable? Let's see. But it's a profitable quarter

[–] lovich 2 days ago

Using GAAP or woo woo logic?

[–] BobbyTables2 2 days ago

The latest Claude models are spooky. About 100x faster then a senior developer snd utterly spooky in the speed and depth of analysis.

This isn’t the “hallucinate everything” style of model like the earlier GPT models…

[–] asadotzler 2 days ago

Too dangerous to release was 2019. Today it's only very useful for coding and other niche industries. It promised to automate all work and to usher in a utopia. Instead it helps programmers further enshittify Big Tech offerings. That's well short of any promise or expectation set out by boosters, paid and otherwise, for the last 7-ish years. Where's the civilization upending change? Where's the Beef(tm)?

[–] aplummer 2 days ago

Can you name 3 ways is positively impacted the average non tech persons life in a meaningful way? Meaningful would be more than the invention of the microwave, but not as important as a vaccine.

[–] ozim 2 days ago

I am not going to make up 3 things but it meaningfully replaced Google search that became unusable crap.

Downside is that OpenAI is already having ads on their chat interface, so I guess it will be crap any time soon.

[–] DennisP 2 days ago

Help with health issues is turning into a big one.

My mother-in-law has a complicated set of medical conditions and sees half a dozen different doctors. Fable with max thinking came up with a bunch of interactions between drugs and conditions that her doctors hadn't considered. We've run its recommendations by one doctor so far and he agreed with everything.

My brother has one friend who used a frontier AI to diagnose his wife's uncommon cancer, and insisted on a test for that. It was correct and she's fine now since they caught it early. Brother has another friend whose wife had back pain after surgery; medical team didn't find what was wrong, he uploaded the scan, and the AI said "oh they left in a staple," which turned out to be correct.

I've started using it to work on a cookbook for the medically prescribed diet I'm on.

[–] happymellon 2 days ago

I have mixed feelings about this.

Sure it has replaced Google for a lot of people. But was that driven more by Google breaking search and actively ranking down good results and putting blocks in the way of seeing even the bad results?

Google had (have?) people using their service out of habit but built a hostile enough environment. We have this "contradiction" where non-tech folks are supposed to be difficult to move off "what they know" yet here we are where they are using ChatGPT to search and be a doctor.

[–] lnkdinsuxs 1 day ago

How about 6:

- File taxes and find issues that "accredited", "certified" entities missed. In one instance, my federal refund increased by nearly $5k. At $20/mo, just the refund is two decades worth of value.

- Appeal health, home and car insurance claims successfully

- Find out details of interesting plants without forking out tens of dollars for an app that claims to do the same but fails to do so most of the time

- Summarize never ending email threads with 20 disinterested parties who would rather not be on the email but have to respond to show they are "engaged"

- Write a convincing email to my mother in law why I cannot meet her this weekend and hold her hand through the tough times she's having with her ethnic neighbor who annoys her with their "ethnic" music and "smell of fish" BBQ

- Locate the user manual for my microwave and what that rapid 3 beeps every 1s for 2 minutes that starts at 10AM since the last 2 days mean

[–] hdgvhicv 2 days ago

Microwave took decades from invention to being normal. VHS took weeks. The difference was pornography.

[–] gamblor956 2 days ago

Microwaves were popular from the beginning after residential models became avaliable in the 1960s.

[–] derwiki 2 days ago

But not ubiquitous, we didn’t get one until the late 80’s. And OTOH we had internet in 1996, and were among the early adopters in my town.

[–] gamblor956 1 day ago

The internet was around commercially in the 1980s...

[–] jgalt212 2 days ago

Microwaves are still of limited utility.

[–] ButlerianJihad 2 days ago

Microwaves, or microwave ovens? Because I can name all sorts of ways that microwaves have improved communications. So many long-haul telco links, and remote radio/TV stations, have been accomplished by microwave. It's a powerful method of transmission.

Unless you're specifically meaning microwave ovens, which are of "limited utility" in a full-service kitchen. I'd have to agree there.

My previous microwave oven was so intensely powerful, that I needed to dial down the power to "7/10" so that it would not destroy my frozen meals. I could never run it at 10/10. My current appliance is very nice, and has an automatic button to run until doneness. Works every time now.

[–] ChrisRR 1 day ago

Well of course. That's like saying you can't make toast in the kettle, but it doesn't stop the kettle being useful

[–] lesuorac 2 days ago

Microwaves are incredibly useful if you can do anything besides 100% power.

[–] n4r9 1 day ago

I'd argue they're the most useful kitchen appliance, except possibly for air fryers. You can cook almost anything in a microwave, usually faster and with less cleaning up than otherwise.

[–] malfist 2 days ago

What's your point? What doesn't have limited utility?

[–] jgalt212 1 day ago

Microwave ovens are of extremely limited utility. Happy now?

[–] malfist 1 day ago

So is a pacemaker. Still, what is your point?

[–] IshKebab 2 days ago

We're at the dot com boom stage of AI. You could say it didn't deliver because boo.com didn't make a profit or because the average person still used paper maps, but that was just because of momentum.

It's the same with AI. The technology is here now. My friends in financial advice and market research have not lost their jobs immediately, because of momentum.

[–] aplummer 2 days ago

I agree with this point completely, I think mine is also true in October 2026.

[–] vuurmot 2 days ago

1. destruction of the digital arts (music, 2d/3d art) industry

2. greatest hacking tool in history

3. greatest corporate espionage tool in history (stealing of Navier-Stokes solution)

4. greatest accountability transfer tool in history (whoops it was the AI that shot those missiles)

5. greatest capital raising tool in history (we use AI in our startup, and you should give us money)

6. greatest scamming tool in history (cloning people voices for scam calls, etc..)

Edit:Whoops, I didn't read "positively"

[–] redwood 2 days ago

Democratization of information. I think it's a similar jump a pre-internet search to internet search...

[–] skeeter2020 2 days ago

I find it kind of odd that you equate a small oligopoly of intermediaries gatekeeping information as "democratization". Similarly Google maybe made it easy to find for a while, but that was/is not democracy either.

[–] vuurmot 2 days ago

google? anna's archive? arXiv?

"democratization of information", maybe if you were too lazy to click on a google link

[–] keeda 2 days ago

This is democratization of information in the truest sense because the AI can not only find information for you, like Google does, but even patiently explain it to you. We never had that before.

Like, a normal person is not going to open up an arXiv preprint from Google search because for approximately the entire population, it's going to be way beyond the limits of their comprehension. They won't even glance at the link, if Google even serves it up as a result.

But, with a chatbot, they could actually ask questions and get answers in a format they can understand. They may get a very rough understanding of the topic, but I would bet it's 100 times better than the same reference explained by modern "science journalism," which insists on presenting the most clickbait-y interpretation they can find.

And this is not theoretical, I've seen my high-school level kids figure out undergrad (or higher) level concepts like locality sensitive hashing with the help of ChatGPT, and I know they understood it because they could sketch out working solutions using those concepts. They didn't get the Mathematical underpinnings, but they understood the high-level behavior and that was enough.

Everybody can now understand anything if they really want to. Nobody is doing it today because they don't know it's possible. But they can, and we should encourage them to do so.

[–] Fnoord 2 days ago

Linux (the kernel) and Git have done more in this regard, but think of FOSS in general. Without it, there wouldn't be Android. Without it, Windows NT would've won server space in the same way Windows won desktop space.

It is tools which are the commons (such as FOSS) and tools such as Wikipedia. But also open standards. LLMs cannibalize on these tools.

Furthermore, no customer wants an AI as customer bot. Especially elder people who are a bit computer illiterate can't find the real support (dark patterns). Can AI help a customer support representative? Oh, absolutely. AI can help a skilled person become better/quicker at certain tasks. But it cannot replace them, and it shouldn't either. If we do, we get all these 'fantastic' tools like *claw.

[–] E-Reverance 2 days ago

Opus 5.5 came out around a month ago, I'd give it some time before coming to that conclusion

[–] shiandow 2 days ago

Why? There's always some model that came out a month ago. It's been three years, what can we conclude?

[–] rpdillon 2 days ago

My conclusion is that this technology is operating in roughly the same way as the personal computer, and that it's going to take similar timelines for the effects to manifest. We still haven't nailed down all the stuff AI is good at, and it's capabilities in known-good domains are increasing consistently. Engineers on my team are chaining together fascinating workflows that I imagine could be entire products, but things just aren't mature enough yet.

Advances are still coming rapidly -- we have quite a bit of time before this settles.

[–] redwood 2 days ago

Amazon owns a big chunk of Anthropic. Plus they benefit from the rise of open models. They're being prudent.

[–] gumby 2 days ago

Half a decade? More like 60 years.

[–] __MatrixMan__ 2 days ago

Actually AI has been over promising and under delivering for about 70 years. Whether or not you think the juice is finally worth the squeeze, the distance we've come is impressive.