[bugbuddy]

I heard majority of the users are techies asking coding questions. What do you sell to someone asking how to fix a nested for loop in C++? I am genuinely curious. Programmers are known to be the stingiest consumers out there.

[cuchoi]

I'm not sure that stereotype holds up. Developers spend a lot: courses, cloud services, APIs, plugins, even fancy keyboards.

A quick search shows that click on ads targeting developers are expensive.

Also there is a ton of users asking to rewrite emails, create business plans, translate, etc.

[jsnell]

OpenAI has half a billion active users.

You don't need every individual request to be profitable, just the aggregate. If you're doing a Google search for, like, the std::vector API reference you won't see ads. And that's probably true for something like 90% of the searches. Those searches have no commercial value, and serving results is just a cost of doing business.

By serving those unmonetizable queries the search engine is making a bet that when you need to buy a new washing machine, need a personal injury lawyer, or are researching that holiday trip to Istanbul, you'll also do those highly commercial and monetizable searches with the same search engine.

Chatbots should have exactly the same dynamics as search engines.

[Lewton]

> I heard majority of the users are techies asking coding questions.

Citation needed? I can't sit on a bus without spotting some young person using ChatGPT

[LtWorf]

According to fb's aggressively targeted marketing, you sell them donald trump propaganda.

[disgruntledphd2]

It's very important to note that advertisers set the parameters in which FB/Google's algorithms and systems operate. If you're 25-55 in a red state, it seems likely that you'll see a bunch of that information (even if FB are well aware you won't click).

[LtWorf]

I'm not even in USA and I've never been in USA in my entire life.

[disgruntledphd2]

Wow, that's either a bug or an incredibly incompetent advertiser.

[LtWorf]

Are we surprised someone working for trump is not competent?

[disgruntledphd2]

From an advertising perspective, yes. Their ads team was super competent in 2016, at least.

[JackFr]

You sell them Copilot. You Sell them CursorAI. You sell them Windsurf. You sell them Devin. You sell the Claude Code.

Software guys are doing much, much more than treating LLM's like an improved Stack Overflow. And a lot of them are willing to pay.

[disgruntledphd2]

You'd probably do brand marketing for Stripe, Datadog, Kafka, Elastic Search etc.

You could even loudly proclaim that the are ads are not targeted by users which HN would love (but really it would just be old school brand marketing).

[tsukikage]

…for starters, you can sell them the ability to integrate your AI platform into whatever it is they are building, so you can then sell your stuff to their customers.

[naravara]

The existence of the LLMs will themselves change the profile and proclivities of people we consider “programmers” in the same way the app-driven tech boom did. Programmers who came up in the early days are different from ones who came up in the days of the web are different from ones who came up in the app era.

[yamazakiwi]

A lot of people use it for cooking and other categories as well.

Techies are also great for network growth and verification for other users, and act as community managers indirectly.