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.
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.
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.
I asked the OpenAI playground to compare and contrast the themes of Point Break and Fight Club. It did a bang up job and blew my mind. I then realized it basically worked for any of the scripts I had for my dev environment too. Fixing and expanding capabilities I'd wanted to had but never had the time to implement.
I just moved from a medium sized US city and any specialist provider I contacted for myself or my parents was 5 months or more. It's not good everywhere.
My family has moved around quite a bit from small to large cities. I have never been able to make a same or next day appointment. Sick or not. Where I'm at now (NOT a major city) it was over 6 months to get the next appointment. For our child we had to call around to 4 pediatric practices before we found one open to new patients. And even then it was still over 4 months before they had an opening. Urgent care is an option but there is still a wait and from my experience they are kind of a joke as to what they provide.
Starting to like the lack of memory. Claude remembers I have a grill and will interject in conversations about how maybe this thing would go well with BBQ when it's unrelated or just also about food.
This is so obnoxious. I ended up deleting all the memory from Gemini because it ended every response with, "As an engineer, father of X, you'll love this because...". As if I want my occupation and the number of children I have to be relevant to which lawn mower I buy.
Haha I recently asked Gemini for a product comparison for USB-C GaN chargers and it randomly inserted "as a Software Developer at $COMPANY working remotely, you may find the 100W fast charging useful when using your company laptop while travelling."
Like, thanks, really useful stuff (and definitely worth the creepy vibes to include that).
Gemini thinks my name is my brother in law's name, and despite explicitly telling it that's not my name + digging through the settings, it still amusingly calls me the wrong name.
I'm a network engineer and Claude loves to make analogies to network routing protocols and such. They are often very creative. You can actually edit the profile Claude makes of you. It can be very funny to say you are a professional clown or mime or something equally odd. I wonder what analogies it would create for horse semen extractor?
I have that disabled. I tend to use different chats as the LLM equivalent of private browsing, so I like it to not have memory transferred between them.
It's yet another Goodhart's law effect:
> Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.
The economic ideas are interesting, but the manipulation and 2nd order effects makes it not work as designed.
Even the system spell checker in Apple devices points out grammar mistakes. Vale works on the command-line, Grammarly was already a thing before publicly available LLMs. There are also editors like iA Writer (iA, not AI) which highlight clichés, adverbs, nouns, and more.
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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