Comment by youre-wrong3
14 hours ago
It’s not an exception. People seem very short sighted when it comes to AI. Unable to think outside the box for how AI can be helpful or useful.
14 hours ago
It’s not an exception. People seem very short sighted when it comes to AI. Unable to think outside the box for how AI can be helpful or useful.
Yeah, I use AI for this stuff all the time. Found a visa agency, accountant, great cafes to be working, etc just in the past week.
Also sometimes when doing more complicated purchases that require multiple products, I use it to sift through Amazon.
Especially ChatGPT seems to be optimizing for this use case, like a “search engine that can actually reason” (by lack of a better description). It’s convenient, and saves me a lot of time compared to the mess that Google has become.
(Obviously it’s likely this will happen to AI as well in the future, but right now, it’s pretty good)
How many of the things you've listed here are $20/month better than a search engine? That's the actual deal here.
Obviously, a better search engine that also doesn't display ads is better. But is it $20/month better? When it's also got daily usage limits? And they're almost certain to start injecting ads as soon as they possibly can without alienating people?
I’m already paying for it, this is just one of the many ways I’m using it.
Your phone and internet connections also have usage limits, and you’re also using them in various ways.
I agree that it’s extremely likely that, especially post-IPO, monetization will kill the current user experience, which I already hinted at in my previous comment.
1 reply →
Kagi is a better (arguably) search engine without ads. Unmetered search is available for $10, and also includes an AI search tool.
> I use it to sift through Amazon.
...seems more like a case against Amazon (search) than for AI, then.
Maybe I'm fortunate enough to live someplace where Geizhals[0] exists, but it's been years since I gave up on Amazon altogether. The bad UX is just user hostile and there are many competitively priced retailers with web shops anyway.
[0]: https://geizhals.eu/
Don't you think that's backwards from how utility usually works? Most effective solutions come from attempting to solve a known problem, not by searching for problems to apply an available solution. Even thinking outside the box is usually in service of a particular problem - just applying creative or unorthodox solutions to that problem.
You're thinking about it the wrong way. Have you never come across some successful business idea and go, 'Huh, I never realized this problem even existed' or even 'People are paying this much for this? Wow'
These machines are general purpose technologies used by hundreds of millions of people. ChatGPT alone is used by over 900M people every week at least. You can count the technologies with that scale of users in your hand.
You'll never conceive all the sort of uses it could possibly have, much like nobody could ever conceive all the uses the internet had and will have and it would be misguided to think so. As you see, there's like 2 dozen people here telling OP the thing he thought 'No one' could possibly LLMs use for is in-fact seeing some use.
I don't think people doubt what AI _could_ do, they just have been through enough enshitification cycles to know this is not any different. Right now AI is better than Google but only because Google regressed so much. Market forces always prevail. The operating costs are just too high to offer AI for free for everyone but people will refuse to pay, so AI (at least for the masses) will become just an other marketing funnel companies can buy out. I also don't see how AI will change the fact that clothing companies target average users and don't serve the long tail.
Yeah it's a helpful and useful tool. It's the people who use it in annoying ways and marketing pushing it too much. It's natural for people to think like that. It's strange being there. Isn't exception a word that describes it well?
Twitter would make you think it’s dooms day with AI yet there are pockets of “wow that’s incredible”
It can be useful.
That's the problem. It moves an incredibly amount of power into a small handful of multinationals.
I don't want to live in a fucking world where an AI watches everywhere I go, reads everything I write, listens to everything I say, and makes decisions that affect me with zero appeal or recourse.
Because that's exactly where we are headed as people.
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As businesses, we are headed to a world where if you don't pay tribute to the AI syndicates, your business will be undiscoverable.