In articles like this I’m always surprised that author did not take 5 minutes to think that well, maybe I’m living in a bubble and there’s lots of people that are actually excited about AI.
This is called "begging the question".
Obviously lots of people like it, especially when they don't specifically think of it as AI.
"Do you want an AI to filter all your information?" "No way!"
"Do you want Google to summarize your search results?" "Yes please!"
Maybe my position on this is obvious, I honestly don't know a lot of how others see it.
Preface: I'm generally an AI skeptic.
There are a LOT of people who are doing "business work" for a living, which is significantly different than hands-on coding. AI gives these people a way to just automate all of the (maybe necessary) work that they don't want to do.
The final product being 80% good enough is fine. It is done and doesn't require them to spend time on something they don't want to do.
More often than not, it is at 80% today.
I think that incrementally adding features (how OpenAI and their competitors) is a much better release strategy than a monolithic one by windows 11 and macOS and that’s a big part of negative feedback. Also Microsoft and Google never should have kept renaming their products multiple times such as ditching Cortana which has the largest brand recognition of any AI system. (Saying it was Cortana plus like Alexa is now is best ).
I’ve used many features of Apple Intelligence and Google Gemini and they have made me more productive after I have learned how to use them. Generally you get more complainers on a new product then people who use it. Being in the HN bubble doesn’t help either IMHO.
Because that hero image is exactly the graphite sketch (touched with white and gold paint markers) of a PCB the writer wanted, and it took five seconds and five cents to produce, and it is worth more than that to no one including the human artist who did not draw it, because it is only here so people don't assume this stock website layout is broken for its absence.
That the human artist still deserves and requires paying I enthusiastically agree. I would rather that happen in a way which will demean their skills less than having to subsist on makework like this garbage would.
I think it is in: "Oh well that is neat" "Anyways..."
Category. So generating some text, some image, something else occasionally is pretty cool. Maybe asking some questions and getting something explained. Or search when needed. And ofc, chatting when bored.
But for general person. I do not really think there is that frequent use. And then I really doubt that this can be sold a service for vast majority of population. Like say search can not.
Lots of hyperbolic language in this post, but little substance.
> "Secondly, there is an insane amount of money tied up in AI."
Money attracts attention, both passively and actively. People see OpenAI, etc. spending billions on training and figure there must be something to it. OpenAI and others also probably spend quite a bit on marketing and social media bombing too, and a lot of that will likely be done by humans. If you can spend billions on training, what's a few million more on social media?
It doesn't matter what AI can actually do now. If companies like OpenAI can attract enough investment and customers to stay afloat long enough, then they may yet become indispensable in the future.
The line between bubble and self-fulfilling prophecy is thin.
i think the idea that no one wants it is off
even if the models do not get better there is so much demand even just b2b
we have all these problems we can fix but we are totally limited by availability
cloud providers are overwhelmed by the demand - you can see this in how stingy they are with rate limits and how they don't even talk to you unless you've already spent a lot with them
"Why is AI so popular when nobody wants it?"
This sounds like that Yogi Berra-ism, "No one comes here anymore, it's too crowded."
I suppose well over half of the people who read HN are too young to remember the dotcom craze. Everyone had every scrap of money tied up in tech stocks. IMO, the hype over AI is relatively small compared to other hype cycles. The goofiest part was the endless predictions about the singularity, and "you don't know what exponential growth looks like, man!". I mean, it can still happen, but for a while that's what AI was all about.
I'm excited about AI after using Grok. It quickly replaced Google for me. I'm not sure I'd actually pay for it, I'd just go use another free AI, but it's very, very good. I definitely think a locally hosted AI running on my GPU that can use the internet, something like Nvidia ChatRTX will be everywhere soon. I know it'll replace most knowledge and arts jobs within 1, maybe 5, maybe 10 years. But nothing is going to stop that. It definitely helps me get through some real drudgery as a developer as well. I definitely focus on the bigger picture now more, and less on digging into mundane drudgery like a syntax issue. I think anyone that doesn't fear losing their job as an artist or as a doctor or developer wants it. It's going to do a better job in many things. Improving lives, quality of life, and lifespans. No doubt in my mind.
> But everything is getting labelled as AI
Welcome to ~15 years ago when everything was labelled data science. Rebranding statistics as data science was hot because it got investor dollars, and it could get you hired if you went to a bootcamp. Companies everywhere were hiring data "scientists" that barely knew how to program because that's what someone on their board or their investors wanted to see (or they thought they wanted to see it). Today it's AI (machine learning) which is an extension of that earlier data science phase, which itself was an extension of applied statistics branded with a trendier name.
And LLMs (generative AI) fall under the same trend as crypto systems a decade or so ago. If you toss it into your product (actually or just claimed) you get investor money. Because it's a fad. There may be some value from it, but the majority is not valuable it's just trend following.
Me: sees headline Golly, I wonder if anyone in the HN comments is going to be angrily pro-AI
How do you know 'nobody wants it?'
If it's tremendously popular, obviously people want it.
>yougov surveys.
Long ago it was revealed how easy it is to manipulate polls/surveys. I discount 100% of polls since. The big pollsters have good reputation because they attempt to eliminate the manipulation; but its not really possible to do. The questions in of themselves are doing it.
Here's an extreme example to illustrate.
Do you think illegal immigrants should get social net benefits?
Pretty much everyone says no.
Do you think an innocent child with a broken arm from playing at a park with friends, whose parents may be guilty of a crime, should get their arm set by the ER for free?
Pretty much everyone says yes.
News article: 99% of people support free benefits to illegal immigrants.
>So why is AI getting so much attention when it seems that there is limited actual demand for it?
He skips the main reason which is it will get better in the future. Today chatbots, tomorrow I, Robot/Terminator/Her/AI/The Matrix etc. Or better as the movies tend to be biased towards disaster.
Incidentally there aren't really movies about future crypto/NFT/dotcom bubbles. AI and robots are different.
out of touch article. ChatGPT doubles in searches on weekdays and more people search for ChatGPT than the Warriors basketball team
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%203-m&ge...
Google Gemini has 350m monthly users
I know I’ll get downvoted hard for this but I can’t tell if these posts are supposed to be satire.
Literally every person I talk to in every single industry uses AI daily: Community managers for sending different email content, sales managers for emailing marketing content and researching prospects and are actively researching agents to help communicate with people automatically, govt workers for generating RFPs, defense industry, coders, band members researching audio engineering, real estate marketing house descriptions, just to name a few. Everyone also says they love it and makes their job so much easier. Not a single person has ever said what these articles headline or try to claim: “man this is awful seriously AI is such a dumb concept and it’s making life worse, no one asked for all this AI to get in my way all the time.”
Obviously my experience is anecdotal but makes it very hard for me to understand this kind of negative content who it’s for and who it’s serving. I think people are aware of auto generated content and the words here ring so empty to me and I feel like it has to be the case for others as well.
Pessimists will get left in the dusts of these machines whose shoulders the optimists ride on.
> extra large high res image of generated useless fake unrealistic circuit board
> "Why don't people like AI?"
> many such cases
It's a damn cliche at this point, why does everyone still do it?
A lot of people seem to want it. At least they want it more than dealing with a human to cover their needs.
Only ChatGPT and Deepseek are seen as new "AI" in the mainstream.
The rest? 95% of people have not heard about.
Because no one wants to pay anyone for work
Beyond codegen, it seems to me that the resolution to this paradox is that ChatGPT is a very popular toy in peoples' home life, but a lot of those very same people are wise enough to not use it for enterprise applications. Or, if they foolishly trusted Satya Nadella, LLM-assisted work eventually blew up in their face and they stopped using it. So gen AI is quite popular, but badly falls short of tech's aspirations.
I hate generative AI and refuse to use it, but I hear of people using it all the time in low-stakes contexts:
1) recipes (the cookies might suck but they won't be poisonous)
2) low-quality infotainment (NotebookLM)
3) OpenAI proudly celebrating that horrible Studio Ghibli crap - unlike dishonest math benchmark scores, garish slop on demand actually brings in customers!
4) ChatGPT boyfriend scams :( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42710976
And I've also heard of people using it at work and being severely criticized:
1) ChatGPT-drafted license agreements that the executives would never agree to
2) summarizing documents you were too lazy to read and missing crucial context
3) coworkers being personally offended (or superiors being angry) about a ChatGPT email
Programmers and bottom-barrel creatives have the only reliable success with LLMs if there's real money at stake. Then there are notably but low-margin use cases like dyslexia assistance, Be My Eyes, etc. For everyone else, it's just a nifty doo-dad.
it’s a tech culture war, devs are gaslighting the business sucking down incredible salaries while reporting that the jira ticket is delayed by tech debt, the business is gaslighting the devs with the inept technology leadership, stupid HR games (my wife’s workplace dragged everybody in for fucking friendship bracelet day), secret DEI policies while paying high performers the same as negative performers because they can’t tell the difference.
These two groups hate each other and AI promises holy grail to both parties - devs can more easily learn the 1000th tech stack in between yoga classes while pretending to work, the business dreams of finally firing all the devs and keeping all that money for themselves. And neither group has a clue how this dream will be fulfilled, but they want to believe because computers can now talk, so enter the entrepreneurs and VCs to gaslight everyone involved with fake stories of how 35% of LOC at Google was coded by AI (erm, accepted IDE autocomplete), laughing all the way to the bank while they vacuum up all that dumb money, poor befuddled executives that roleplayed their way into an 8 figure budget responsibility by being tall white men with blue eyes
Shareholders are not nobodies.
I think people want to use it for their own benefit. Years of invasive advertisements has many people convinced that AI integrated into consumer products are more for corporate benefit, not the user's benefit.
Quite the opposite: It would appear, especially with the rise of the ChatGPT, that the vocal "I don't want it" people are the extreme minority.
ChatGPT alone has over 100 million active users per month. Not necessarily paying users; and not necessarily a number that's going to double overnight again requiring another server blitzscale; but it's comfortably cemented.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/06/chatgpt-doubled-its-weekly...
This April 3rd Pew research study is some fairly interesting reading:
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2025/04/03/how-the-us-p...
They find that the general public is overall much more skeptical that AI will benefit anyone, much more likely to view it as harmful and much less excited about its potential than "AI experts". A majority of Americans are more concerned than excited. There is interestingly a large gender gap between men and women -- women are much less likely to view AI favorably, to use it frequently or to be excited about its potential than men.
There is some research to suggest that consumers are less likely to buy a product and less likely to trust it (less "emotional trust") when AI is used prominently to market it:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19368623.2024.2...
So I think the data suggests that while there is excitement around AI, overall consumers are much less excited about AI than people in the industry think and that it may actually impact their buying decisions negatively. Will this gap go away over time? I don't know. For any of you working in tech at the time, was there a similar gap in perceptions around the Internet back in the days of the dot com bubble?
The other problem as pointed out is that MANY things are labeled as AI, ranging from logistic regression to chatbots, and probably there is more enthusiasm around some of these things than others.