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- Hacker News
- Some of the advantages are second order.
For example; ChatGPT is replacing my Google searching. Not necessarily because it's better, or because it's summaries are better than Google (I find them subjectively better but it's not clear cut).
But because the app has a nice history; can ask a relatively complicated question and go do something else and then come back to it, ask a follow up. Etc.
None of that is specifically an AI benefit, but it's a workflow that really helps, well, flow.
by ErrantX - That's funny, Google Gemini and AI mode in search has replaced my ChatGPT prompting, because I know Gemini will correctly cite sources (as of course it's by Google) rather than hallucinating.
Also, Gemini is free or at least has much higher usage limits than ChatGPT or Claude, and it's well integrated into Android and soon Apple with their new Siri, so things like circle to search just work well.
by satvikpendem - The sales pitch was... we'd be left behind without adoption. I'm [still] waiting. Years later, my days are no different. Teaching people who wouldn't bother to read manuals or now, consult their chat bots. Never mind my own 'missing pieces of flair', what about theirs?
- > People are consuming AI like they eat meat: some are embracing it, some are limiting their use of it, and some are avoiding it altogether.
That's an interesting analogy as, despite the real ecological issues with it and principled arguments against meat eating, in general meat consumption has trended upward globally in country after country for decades.
by emodendroket - Maybe this is because I live in Wyoming, but "AI is not ubiquitous, there are some people, like Vegans, who eschew it" is not the most compelling argument.by sroerick
- Anyone who does a Google search gets a satisfactory looking answer as the very first entry. I daresay most people don't go beyond that, not even the entries on the first page, let alone go to the next. I argue that this is at the level of everyone for everything.
- Even if we accept that all people are satisfied with the AI search overviews, that would still only be everyone for one thing.by Planktonne
- When was the last time you used Google? The first entry (and a few after that) is always spam.
Anyone who does a search and accepts the first answer just doesn't care much or is incompetent. Anyone with any critical thinking whatsoever does way more than that if they want a correct answer.
by nutjob2 - It's been difficult to do, but I have recently picked up the habit of scrolling directly past the AI overview. It's not what I wanted, so it's useless to me (regardless of whether or not it's correct). I wanted search results. Sometimes that's a Wikipedia page, documentation, video results. But, web search results.
If I wanted to read an AI response to a query, I would use that tool specifically - I consider them different tools entirely.
It's definitely taken some time to get into the habit - perhaps defaulting to Google as the search engine was my first mistake.
However, most people I've seen run a quick search DO in fact just read the AI response (often with a caveat of "this is just from AI but..." which I appreciate), because for a lot of things it IS good enough or exactly what they needed.
- A "satisfactory looking answer" was what I got yesterday when I queried Google about a Pyodide question. It produced some code in html format that was supposed to work, but failed on execution. The AI generated result was incorrect and it was only 30ish lines of code that was supposed to print "hello world" to the console.by marking-time
- What Im question is how is Google increasing Price-per-Click each year if people are clicking less and less on the links below the AI search result
- > Anyone who does a Google search gets a satisfactory looking answer as the very first entry.
Google has search results still? I don't use Google much anymore (thanks Kagi), but this is what ends up showing for me, I don't even see any search results anymore: https://i.imgur.com/eHIA2Df.png It seems like it's 50/50 on page reload if the LLM-reply UI expands automatically or not, which covers my entire screen. I guess Google is doing some A/B testing perhaps.
- It's important to factor in just how many US adults are basically illiterate nowadays.
As of 2023, 27% of American working-age adults were at a PIAAC Literacy Level of 1 or below, out of a total of 5 levels. This has gotten drastically worse in the past 10 years as, in 2013, Level 1 and below was only 17%.
Full scores for 2023 are: % Level 1 or below: 27% Level 2: 29% Level 3: 31% Level 4/5: 13%
For reference, Level 1 means someone can't really handle a full page of text, and can sort of handle simple 1-page web pages. Level 2 is the point where someone can start to handle a few pages of straightforward text, but still nothing particularly complicated.
(Both of those descriptions undersell just how bad it really is, but I'll leave it at that, for the sake of brevity.)
People that aren't using AI at all often aren't using it because they effectively can't. On a fundamental level.
Source: https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/2023/national_results.asp
- "Response rates for this data collection were relatively low, both for the United States and for several other participating countries. There is evidence that procedures implemented to reduce bias associated with nonresponse have done so, and that the data are representative of the population. However, readers should be aware of the potential for bias and use caution when interpreting PIAAC results."
These stats don't pass the smell test. About a third of people in the US have a bachelor's degree, but only 13% can pass level 4/5 literacy challenge? If you dig into the sample questions, they are not hard. A level 4 task has the person read a short article and pull out the criticisms of some products.
I know not everyone with a bachelor's degree is 'smart' but it's hard to believe 2/3rds couldn't pass level 4/5.
Also 13% have a master's degree, does that mean those 13% are the only people passing level 4/5?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...
- I lurk on the teachers subreddit and get shown videos by teachers on TikTok and the impression I get from that algorithmic bubble is that the kids can't read any more - reading comprehension in particular is terrible. Lots of anecdotes of kids who can't read a few paragraphs and then answer questions about what was in them.by simonw
- I don’t think that’s it. AI mobile apps support voice conversations. And low literacy is rather a motivation for using AI to generate and summarize text.by layer8
- those levels weren't what I was expecting.
https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/measure.asp?section=1&sub_...
I'm curious as to how I would score, I would definitely count myself as "literate" but I wonder how well I'd do on the level 4/5 tasks and if they cross over into more general memory, intelligence, and study habit metrics that even a normally "literate" person would not do well at.
Though given those descriptions I can't help thinking those would be great tests for AI. I'd love to see the proficiency scores for various models.
EDIT: Ok I just needed to scroll further, they have sample items in the last section up to level 4 and even at level 4 the question seemed trivial.
The most wordy one is the Q Drum article (which by the way Q drum is a real thing, kinda neat idea) and there's literally only two basic criticisms (flat land and expense) and if you had any idea what the life straw is you can probably construe what the similar criticism in the email is going to be without even looking.
Based on the scores and the proficiency description I assumed they were actually targeting some sort of normal distribution and levels 4/5 would be genuinely difficult explaining the scores. I'm now much more sad that the scores are so low.
At least I got a laugh at how they refer to each test item as "the stimulus" which has such a sterile/clinical flavor to it.
- I fear AI is going to be used for everything not because it's the best solution, but because people are inherently lazy and just want to get their thing done, and they don't care so much about the quality.
"low effort and convenient" seems to consistently win over "best quality" and this is going to be a downgrade in everything, for everyone
by tripleee - I assume for a lot of people, an llm is going to produce higher quality results for most knowledge tasks than they could do on their own. I think that's okayby tty456
- We already see the slopification of everything as companies have been reducing the quality of their output for many years. Look at windows 11 vs 98. Yes it does more and crashes less but is it actually better apart from that? Of the things both of them do, which one does them better? Which one runs faster? Which one is easier to use?by inigyou
- Good piece, but I think there's a missing angle to it. He cites a study showing how often people say they "use AI", and a little over 50% use it less than once per week.
If we're just talking about AI chat interfaces, sure. But I think the way that AI usage is going to grow isn't mostly by getting more chat engagement. It's about baking AI features into software that people already use.
For example, suppose you asked the same people "How often do you search on Google?" I am willing to bet the numbers go up a lot. And all of those people are "using AI" in a very real sense, they just don't think about it when it's baked in.
by bjt - People are not terribly well informed on the specifics. Every time Spotify queues up a song, it has been selected by AI. That's been happening for a while without people getting upset about the effect on the employment of disc jockeys.
I am guessing the threshold is when changes outgrow mere consumer convenience and start being something imposed without choice.
by t0mpr1c3 - I'd say this argument is not relevant to the specific question the article tries to answer, as AI adoption through these means is forced and may in many cases go against user preferences.
Edit: The deciding factor being whether you want to figure out if people are interested in AI / find it useful, or if the question you seek answered is more akin to "X% of people consume lead in their food"
by magistr4te - I think the gap is because 1. For coding, Claude is amazing - mainly because of its curated skills and because massive amounts of working code has already been carefully labeled over the last decade or so via GitHub. And because with any Turing complete language, there is only so much one can do.
But 2. For most other things, LLMs are fairly underwhelming. Research is usually mediocre. Try being rigorous and repeat your research prompt many times - then make a confusion matrix to tally up how many false positives and false negatives occur. And for the rest, be honest and ask yourself if the LLM is doing much more than a basic search engine query or trip to Wikipedia would have told you. For “normie” use cases, it’s handy-ish but far from revolutionary
by AvAn12 - LLMs are always amazing doing stuff you're bad at. (And always underwhelming doing stuff you know.)
- I didn't understand your comment about Turing complete languages, could you explain that part please?by calf
- Also because programming is self contained in a computer where the results can be tested and iterated easily. For programming the agent can just run the compiler and tests and keep retrying until it works. If I wanted to for example sew a T shirt, AI is useless.by Gigachad
- Basically this. For tax, and law in general, LLMs are prone to giving the wrong answer for anything specific (though they're great at the super general stuff because they're just restating one of the millions of summaries written by humans).
Gemini still isn't sure what details are in the version of OBBA that actually passed, because there was more discussion about various proposals (that didn't make it into the bill) than there was about the final version of the bill itself.
Unfortunately, it's an intractable problem based on the ways that LLMs work. In order to overcome those limitations, you have to provide so much detail to the prompt that you would find the answer faster searching manually.
by gamblor956 - I've noticed several companies replacing deterministic systems in their support flows with a LLM version that is slower and worse. Many interfaces simply aren't better with AI addedby variety8675
- That's the completely opposite of what people should do. The laborious task of programing logical work flows is the only reason AI is useful for me.by filup