Ask HN: So far, have there been any useful AI applications?

[amyWang419]

2023 was the year AI blew up, 2024 is supposed to be the year of Agents. But with so many AI products popping up, why does it seem like so few people are actually using them? How many of you have used an AI product and found it to be genuinely useful?

[nicbou]

Translations! It enables a lot of immigrants to communicate efficiently and not expose themselves as immigrants when dealing with government offices. Appearing as a native speaker makes you seem more professional and more likely to get what you need. It emboldens people to operate in a different language.

Deepl Write is a perfect language learning tool as it corrects everything you write. I made so much progress in German with that tool.

[keiferski]

Yes, I am working on a project which requires the creation of a large number of custom images, each following specific style requirements. If I did this 5 years ago, it would have cost me tens of thousands of dollars to hire illustrators. Now with a Midjourney subscription, it costs $30/month.

While you might say that this has eliminated work for illustrators (and in many cases it absolutely has), I'm just a regular guy on a budget – meaning that I wouldn't have hired those illustrators in the first place because I couldn't afford to spend $10k creating 500 images. So this project only exists because of image-generating generative AI tools.

[dualogy]

I guess the question is about the "general public" and everyday uses, rather than developer assistants and accelerants of the Copilot ilk.

But nevermind, since you asked about "useful" — I've as an initial skeptic and avoider nonetheless lately been thoroughly impressed with what the codeium.com/live chatbot achieves for my on-the-fly dev questions (what does X do, how to do Y, what's the prob with this Z, etc) on a certain underdocumented underblogged and under-StackOverflowed niche lang I've been just getting into. Really good to avoid flooding the actual user community itself with an endless wall of n00b Qs. Seems like actual repo grokkage is baked into it or close-enough-anyway-most-of-the-time. Hallucinations occur but seldomly and for dev stuff, anyway trivial to immediately detect or else swiftly falsify/verify. Sometimes saying "no that's not it", and another answer is proposed.

Old news here I guess, but took me a while to find a need for that sort of thing =)

[zer00eyz]

AI or LLM?

The money flowing into the market has allowed for a lot of fuzzy data analytics to be "automated" and cross checked by people. Satellite image processing is a huge market that leverages this. We're not counting cargo container turnover in ports by hand, or with basic tools any more.

The LLM side yes. There are tons of marketing and content farms that are making heavy use of these tools. This was already a bottom of the barrel market and the decrease in price + increase in volume has been a win for those who embraced the tech... there are fewer people working making a bit more money.

There is a LOT of nonsense out there that is NOT delivering. Flooz and Beenz...

[retrocryptid]

Having written algorithms for CV and satellite image processing, I can tell you that advancement in the field more or less halted in 2018 when everyone decided to dump money and time into CNNs.

I wrote a cloud detection algorithm that would run well on a 20MHz microcontroller powered by 4 AA batteries. But my bosses were worried they couldn't find devs to replace me if I retired, and figured a CS intern and a trained dog [*] could train a CNN to do the same thing. $600k and 2 years later they got something that worked until the dog got a better job and the intern returned to school. None of the surviving engineers could make heads or tails of the solution so they hired a PhD to replicate the work. After publishing his research paper he left and found a job at an east coast university.

So... Sure... CNNs are doing all sorts of things, mostly things we did with DFTs in the past and not quite as well.

* the joke here is the dog does the technical tasks while the intern's only responsibilities are to feed and walk the dog and give it a treat when it completes it's user stories before the end of the sprint.*

[moomoo11]

I feel like a cat after reading this.

[muzani]

Most of the AI products get disrupted by OpenAI itself. People don't use AI copywriting tools as much as they could because OpenAI does that for them directly.

However, last I checked, the second most used AI tool after ChatGPT is Character.ai. Many of the others are writing aids, Midjourney, and the free tools around these.

r/LocalLLaMA is one of the largest communities on Reddit.

[garzer]

Coding assistants are useful. Gpt4 is great for asking legal questions to a heuristic level. (E.g. understand a contract better than a layman but no substitute for a lawyer). Since a lawyer adds time and cost and delays, this might be useful for some situations.

AI to assist writing is useful. AI to summarize long paragraphs is useful.

[meiraleal]

I use ChatGPT the whole day and when not using it I'm using my own developed agent (WIP). I was using midjourney too but chatgpt got as good as it so not needed anymore. What I don't use anymore is Google.

[ggm]

And yet NVDA stock rises and rises. You would think, if the question is too ridiculous to be posed, that there would be clear signs what people want the magic chips for. And in due course, signs of innate value and not meme-stock inflation in the companies consuming Nvidia product, aside from the DC owners: Microsoft and AWS will find a way to pass their burden on to more gullible people, they won't be holding dead asset.

I consider the posing of the question a reasonable first approximation to "the emperor has no clothes". I would like to see a couple of blue chips, who make significant outcome in real world goods and services from this input source. Or a finance house or investment bank who decides to sack their quants. If they just supplement the quants with chips, then I think the claim the chips add value is open to doubt.

[bhag2066]

Sorry but with the greatest respect all the iterations of this question are starting to old. There are unlimited applications of AI within ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini. If people aren't using AI applications or the unending applications within the chat interfaces it's because a fear of technology is stopping them. It's not the technology, it's the people at this point