Here are several real stories I dug into:
"My brick-and-mortar business wouldn't even exist without AI" --> meant they used Claude to help them search for lawyers in their local area and summarize permits they needed
"I'm now doing the work of 10 product managers" --> actually meant they create draft PRD's. Did not mention firing 10 PMs
"I launched an entire product line this weekend" --> meant they created a website with a sign up, and it shows them a single javascript page, no customers
"I wrote a novel while I made coffee this morning" --> used a ChatGPT agent to make a messy mediocre PDF
The content of the tweets isn't the thing.. bull-posting or invoking Cunningham's Law is. X is the destination for formula posting and some of those blue checkmarks are getting "reach" rev share kickbacks.
“I used AI to make an entire NES emulator in an afternoon!” —-> a project that has been done hundreds of times and posted all over github with plenty of references
It is really good in doing this.
those ideas are like UI experiments or small tools helping me doing stuff.
Its also super great in ELI5'ing anything
Welcome to the internet
There was a story years ago about someone who made hundreds of novels on Amazon, in aggregate they pulled in a decent penny. I wonder if someone's doing the same but with ChatGPT instead.
I average 1-2M impressions/month, and have some video clips on X/Twitter that have gotten 100K+ views, and average earnings of around $42/month (over the past year).
I imagine you'd need hundreds of millions of impressions/views on Twitter to earn a living with their current rates.
If it was successful, they wouldnt be telling everyone about it
The last one I did it on was breathlessly touted as "I used [LLM] to do some advanced digital forensics!"
Dawg. The LLM grepped for a single keyword you gave it and then faffed about putting it into json several times before throwing it away and generating some markdown instead. When you told it the result was bad, it grepped for a second word and did the process again.
It looks impressive with all these json files and bash scripts flying by, but what it actually did was turn a single word grep into blog post markdown and you still had to help it.
Some of you have never been on enterprise software sales calls and it shows.
Taking that 70% solution and adding these things is harder than if a human got you 70% there, because the mistakes LLMs make are designed to look right, while being wrong in ways a sane human would never be. This makes their mistakes easy to overlook, requiring more careful line-by-line review in any domain where people are paying you. They also duplicate code and are super verbose, so they produce a ton tech debt -> more tokens for future agents to clog their contexts with.
I like using them, they have real value when used correctly, but I'm skeptical that this value is going to translate to massive real business value in the next few years, especially when you weigh that with the risk and tech debt that comes along with it.
Since I don't code for money any more, my main daily LLM use is for some web searches, especially those where multiple semantic meanings would be difficult specify with a traditional search or even compound logical operators. It's good for this but the answers tend to be too verbose and in ways no reasonably competent human would be. There's a weird mismatch between the raw capability and the need to explicitly prompt "in one sentence" when it would be contextually obvious to a human.
Hah—I'm struggling to decide whether everyone experiencing it would be a good thing in terms of inoculating people's minds, or a terrible thing in terms of what it says about a society where it happens.
I pretty much never even went there for technical topics at all, just funny memes and such, but one day recently I started seeing crazy AI hype stories getting posted, and sadly I made a huge mistake and I clicked on one once, and now it’s all I get.
Endless posts from subs like r/agi, r/singularity, as well as the various product specific subs (for Claude, OpenAI, etc). These aren’t even links to external articles, these are supposedly personal accounts of someone being blown away by what the latest release of this or that model or tool can do. Every single one of these posts boils down to some irritating “game over for software engineers” hype fest, sometimes with skeptical comments calling out the clearly AI-generated text and overblown claims, sometimes not. Usually comments pointing out flaws in whatever’s being hyped are just dismissed with a hand wave about how the flaw may have been true at one time, but the latest and greatest version has no such flaws and is truly miraculous, even if it’s just a minor update for that week. It’s always the same pattern.
There’s clearly a lot of astroturfing going on.
Yet here we are, 20 years later, routinely ordering FURNITURE on the internent and often delivered "free".
My point being, sure, there is a lot of hype around AI but that doesn't mean that there aren't nuggets of very useful projects happening.
Neither argument works
Yeah I think so too. I even see it here on HN
I'm just tuning it all out. The big test is just installing the damn thing and seeing what it can do. There's 0 barrier to trying it
It doesn’t guarantee the skeptics are wrong all the time.
It is really hard to actually make anything substantial on social media exposure. Unfortunately this does not stop many from exaggerating claims in order to (maybe become) be internet famous, or seeing high number of clicks etc. So it is both bad business for creators, and poisoning the discourse for readers - the only real winners are the social media companies and the product companies that get hyped up.
However getting the AI to build production quality code is sometimes quite frustrating, and requires a very hands-on approach.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately in another context -- vira priests being anti-vax and realized it's the other way around: their motivation doesn't matter, but the viewers don't want to see moderate content, they want to see highly polarized and controversial topics.
The same with the claims about AI. Nobody wants to hear AI boosts productivity in nuanced way, people either want to hear about 10X or -10X so the market dictates the content/meme.
Reddit is like 90% astroturfing, trolls, and bots.
Stocks are another matter. There were wonder "algorithms" even before "AI". I helped some friends tweak some. They had the enthusiasm and I had the programming expertise and I was curious.
That was a couple years ago. None of them is rich and retired now - which was what the test runs were showing - and I think most aren't even trading any more.
I have gone from being challenged on the first point, to the second. The hype is not what it has been.