It is only spectacular because of the free tiers and the artificially lowered costs of the services. Put the real prices on the OpenAI and Anthropic services, remove the free tier and only than you will have a true picture of how many people are willing to pay to use it.
> It is only spectacular because of the free tiers
The thesis under discussion is "most people hate AI", not "most people will pay for AI". People who hate AI won't sign up to use the tools if they're free or paid QED AI service signups regardless of paid status are useful datapoints for "how many people don't hate AI".
The majority of users will see the convenient answer right in front of them and stop, because their question has been answered. We've seen it again and again across industries, an an accelerating cycle: make it easy, and the users will usually do what you want.
I was able to avoid talking to Gemini, but only by switching to DuckDuckGo and then also doctoring Chromium to run searches using a 'no-AI' option. At least I think I'm avoiding talking to Gemini, but for all I know I'm talking to it right now.
Appreciated, though I did say chromium. Chrome updates itself and changes itself when you're not looking, and I find that so distressing that I use ungoogled chromium instead :)
Don't use distilled little RTX models on your frankensteined home PC like a 0.00001%er who misses the ergonomics Claude Code solves. That's a "Year of Linux on Desktop 2010" grade failure waiting to happen.
Rent cloud instances and spin up thick model weights and contribute to the open source infrastructure for making this easy for everyone to use.
The hyperscalers should be eaten by cheap, competent, cloud-based open source.
??? - My comment doesn't even look like an LLM wrote it.
> It’s against the guidelines.
To be clear:
I wRoTe
- E V E R Y - w o r d -
by [picture ASCII art of "human hand" here]⠀
Do not accuse me of using an LLM as a substitute for thinking.
I do not use LLMs to write any of my Hacker News comments, and I never have.
I have used LLMs to help me search for information, but I have never once in my life posted the outputs of an LLM into a post verbatim as my own. That's laziness.
I'm not dismissing LLMs here. They produce better writing than a lot of humans. They are fantastic tools for constructing media, for getting work done, and for furthering your own capabilities.
But I curate my thoughts and craft my arguments. That sort of wanton dismissal of my comments is worse than using an LLM as a substitute for thinking. That's real "human slop".
Is that organic growth as people actually want to use it, or it's being foisted upon everyone. I use it everyday willingly, but I'm not sure that's true globally.
I opened a grocery store where anyone can walk in, take whatever they want, and walk out without having to pay for it. No grocery store has ever seen the level of customer growth as mine!
The reason for all the LLM spend & forced adoption is to make LLMs a critical part of everyone's processes while it's cheap/free, and then crank up the price once it's too late to easily back out. Just like I will jack up the price on my grocery store once all the fools at competing stores who are charging their customers money go out of business, and I'm the only one left in the area, leaving everyone (except for me!) worse off than where they started.
The numbers are not reliable.