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by dundarious 5 days ago
Every company is using it? The deli and the laundromat too? Every consumer? Maybe transitively because they use Google or what have you, but most people I know still don't really know what AI is, never mind have a puritan revulsion over using it (some people are quite performative about this on here), but they just don't use it themselves, except transitively on occasion.
2 comments
0xffff2 5 days ago
The deli is using it to make advertising flyers. Every consumer is using it as a replacement for google search as far as I can tell. I do a fair bit of work with people in the 18-25 range and almost all of them love to rail against AI, but none of them seem to be capable of completing even simple tasks without using it. Even my 63 year old mother uses it at work to generate reports. I would love to see some hard numbers, but I would be truly shocked if "most people still don't really know what AI is" is in any way justifiable across all adults in OECD countries.
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sroussey 5 days ago
Everyone using Google. Watching Netflix. Listening to Spotify. Shopping at Amazon or a Shopify store.

Or reading almost anything these days. :(

Advertising they see. Using a credit card, writing a check.

Beam forming wireless signals.

It’s everywhere. Not all AI is an LLM.

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dundarious 5 days ago
Was the 2% figure counting all those things? I don't think so. This is changing the grounds of the discussion. Ridiculously so. Do you take me for some zealot who hates tensors or matrices or something? I don't even hate LLMs, though I have huge issues with how data has been gathered. I feel like this discussion is useless.
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sroussey 5 days ago
Look at Meta’s capital budget and tell me people aren’t using AI. People use Facebook, Instagram, etc. I’d say the same for Google, but with Google Cloud it’s hard to know where the dollars are going and for whom.

Who exactly is the 2% figure? Can’t all be HN people on side projects using Claude code.

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dundarious 5 days ago
A lot of it is training, not inference, right? I really do think the vast majority of use is HN Claude Code, with some lawyers, etc., preparing initial draft emails that they rewrite, sprinkled on top.

As for capex implying high usage, look at xAI's capex and how it turns out most of it is now being rented out to Google, etc. High capex does not imply capex that has already found its customers and margins. Meta is an extraordinarily bad example to use, given the failure of the whole metaverse/VR thing that is now their name, but is completely vestigial.

Have a good afternoon.

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