We hate AI because it's everything we hate
Tech companies wanted "AI" to represent a bright future. Now it represents every annoyance in our daily lives.
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Ed Zitron is one of the loudest opponents against the AI industry right now, and he continues to insist that "there is no real AI adoption." The real problem, apparently, is that investors are getting duped. I would invite Zitron, and anyone else who holds the opinion that demand for AI is largely fictional, to open the app store on their phone on any day of the week and look at the top free apps charts. You could also check with any teacher, student, or software developer.
ChatGPT has some very impressive usage numbers, but the image tells on itself by being a free app. The conversion rate (percentage of people who start paying) is absolutely piss poor, with the very same Ed Zitron estimating it being at ~3% with 500.000.000 users. That also doesn't bode well with the fact that OpenAI still loses money even on their $200/month subscribers. People use ChatGPT because it's been spammed down their throats by the media that never question the sacred words of the executives (snake oil salesmen) that utter lunatic phrases like "AGI by 2025" (Such a quote exists somewhere, but I don't remember if this year was used). People also use ChatGPT because it's free and it's hard to say no to get someone to do your homework for you for free.
I love how every single app on that list is an app I wouldn’t touch in my life
Not even Google maps
Absolutely not, I haven’t used any Google products or services in 15 years
That's pretty impressive. I can't do without YouTube or Android unfortunately.
That’s fair. Once the “don’t be evil” was gone, so was I hahahaha
You can use the Google-free Android forks.
Posting from graphene OS
Also a fan. Check out Qubes OS on the desktop in case you haven't already.
I don't need chatGPT etc for work, but I've used it a few times. It is indeed a very useful product. But most of the time I can get by without it and I kinda try to avoid using it for environmental reasons. We're boiling the oceans fast enough as it is.
Exactly, the users/installation count of such products are clearly a much more accurate indicator of the success of their marketing team, rather than their user's perceived value in such products lol
In house at my work, we've found ChatGPT to be fairly useless, too. Where Claude and Gemini seem to reign supreme.
It seems like ChatGPT is the household name, but hardly the best performing.
My thoughts exactly, I use Claude and find it much better than ChatGPT. Less hallucinations, more useful information
Who owns Claude? Is it ethically sourced?
Anthropic and no of course not.
They at least seem to care slightly more about the impact they have on the world and humans.
people currently don't pay for it, because currently it's free. most people aren't using it for anything that requires a subscription.
Idk that the average GPT user knows or cares about AGI. I think the appeal is getting information specifically tailored to you. Sure, I can go online and search for something. Try and find what I'm looking for, or close to it. Or I can ask AI, and it'll give me text tailored exactly to my prompt. For instance, having to hope you can find someone with a problm similar to yours online, with a solution, vs. ChatGPT just tells you about your case specifically
I would certainly pay for ChatGPT if it became paid only
you're being downvoted but this is the reality of the market right now. it's day 1 venture capital shit. lose money while gaining market share, and worry about making a profit later.
Yea, and people are coping on this
Anti AI will not convince pro AI as well. They are a vocal minority
I wouldn't really trust Ed Zitron's math analysis when he gets a very simple thing like "there is no real AI adoption" plainly wrong. The financials of OpenAI and other AI-heavy companies are murky, but most tech startups run at a loss for a long time before they either turn a profit or get acquired. It took Uber over a decade to stop losing money every quarter.
OpenAI keeps getting more funding capital because (A) venture capital guys are pretty dumb, and (B) they can easily ramp up advertisements once the free money runs out. Microsoft has already experimented with ads and sponsored products in chatbot messages, ChatGPT will probably do something like that.
I wouldn’t really trust Ed Zitron’s math analysis when he gets a very simple thing like “there is no real AI adoption” plainly wrong
Except he doesn't say that. the author of this article simply made that up.
There is a high usage rate (almost entirely ChatGPT btw, despite all the money sunk into AI by others like Google) but its all the free stuff and they are losing bucketloads of money at a rate that is rapidly accelerating.
but most tech startups run at a loss for a long time before they either turn a profit or get acquired.
There is no path to profitability.
I wrote the article, Ed said that in the linked blog post: "There Is No Real AI Adoption, Nor Is There Any Significant Revenue - As I wrote earlier in the year, there is really no significant adoption of generative AI services or products."
There is a pretty clear path to profitability, or at least much lower losses. A lot more phones, tablets, computers, etc now have GPUs or other hardware optimized for running small LLMs/SLMs, and both the large and small LLMs/SLMs are becoming more efficient. With both of those those happening, a lot of the current uses for AI will move to on-device processing (this is already a thing with Apple Intelligence and Gemini Nano), and the tasks that still need a cloud server will be more efficient and consume less power.
a lot of the current uses for AI will move to on-device processing
How exactly will that make OpenAI and the likes more profitable?! That should be one of the scenarios that will make them less profitable.
If the models are more efficient, the tasks that still need a server will get the same result at a lower cost. OpenAI can also pivot to building more local models and license them to device makers, if it wants.
The finances of big tech companies isn't really relevant anyway, except to point out that Ed Zitron's arguments are not based in reality. Whether or not investors are getting stiffed, the bad outcomes of AI would still be bad, and the good outcomes would still be good.
I agree that this was poor wording on Ed's side. He meant to point at the lack of adoption for work/business purposes, but failed to articulate this distinction. He is talking about conversion to paid users and how Google cheated to make the adoption of Gemini by corporate users to looks higher than it is. He never meant to talk about the adoption by regular people on the free tier just doing random non-work-related things.
You were talking about a different adoption metric. You are both right, you are just talking about different kinds of adoption.
I don’t think he is talking about specifically businesses, though, because he also talks about Gemini replacing Google Assistant, which only matters in consumer products (Assistant was never an enterprise product). It’s more like he’s moving the goalposts mid-statement.
on-device processing
Oh, when will I get my free phone to do this ?
