It is only spectacular because of the free tiers and the artificially lowered costs of the services. Put the real prices on the OpenAI and Anthropic services, remove the free tier and only than you will have a true picture of how many people are willing to pay to use it.
The majority of users will see the convenient answer right in front of them and stop, because their question has been answered. We've seen it again and again across industries, an an accelerating cycle: make it easy, and the users will usually do what you want.
I was able to avoid talking to Gemini, but only by switching to DuckDuckGo and then also doctoring Chromium to run searches using a 'no-AI' option. At least I think I'm avoiding talking to Gemini, but for all I know I'm talking to it right now.
Don't use distilled little RTX models on your frankensteined home PC like a 0.00001%er who misses the ergonomics Claude Code solves. That's a "Year of Linux on Desktop 2010" grade failure waiting to happen.
Rent cloud instances and spin up thick model weights and contribute to the open source infrastructure for making this easy for everyone to use.
The hyperscalers should be eaten by cheap, competent, cloud-based open source.
Is that organic growth as people actually want to use it, or it's being foisted upon everyone. I use it everyday willingly, but I'm not sure that's true globally.
I opened a grocery store where anyone can walk in, take whatever they want, and walk out without having to pay for it. No grocery store has ever seen the level of customer growth as mine!
The reason for all the LLM spend & forced adoption is to make LLMs a critical part of everyone's processes while it's cheap/free, and then crank up the price once it's too late to easily back out. Just like I will jack up the price on my grocery store once all the fools at competing stores who are charging their customers money go out of business, and I'm the only one left in the area, leaving everyone (except for me!) worse off than where they started.
If I use Google Search to do a search and I get an AI answer that I scroll past, do I count an AI user?
The numbers are not reliable.
You could use ChatGPT/anthropic/etc signups as your proxy if you wanted, and those show similarly spectacular trajectories.
It is only spectacular because of the free tiers and the artificially lowered costs of the services. Put the real prices on the OpenAI and Anthropic services, remove the free tier and only than you will have a true picture of how many people are willing to pay to use it.
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The majority of users will see the convenient answer right in front of them and stop, because their question has been answered. We've seen it again and again across industries, an an accelerating cycle: make it easy, and the users will usually do what you want.
Google search is not typically counted as consumer "AI usage" in the reports I've seen. They're comparing chat implementations.
People can like talking to gemini, but dislike claude taking their programming job.
I was able to avoid talking to Gemini, but only by switching to DuckDuckGo and then also doctoring Chromium to run searches using a 'no-AI' option. At least I think I'm avoiding talking to Gemini, but for all I know I'm talking to it right now.
This is what bugs people.
We now have an official noai Chrome Extension here: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/duckduckgo-no-ai-se...
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Then start using DeepSeek.
Don't use distilled little RTX models on your frankensteined home PC like a 0.00001%er who misses the ergonomics Claude Code solves. That's a "Year of Linux on Desktop 2010" grade failure waiting to happen.
Rent cloud instances and spin up thick model weights and contribute to the open source infrastructure for making this easy for everyone to use.
The hyperscalers should be eaten by cheap, competent, cloud-based open source.
Be the change you want to see.
Which GPU cloud instance are you using?
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Please don’t post AI slop to HN. It’s against the guidelines.
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Is that organic growth as people actually want to use it, or it's being foisted upon everyone. I use it everyday willingly, but I'm not sure that's true globally.
I opened a grocery store where anyone can walk in, take whatever they want, and walk out without having to pay for it. No grocery store has ever seen the level of customer growth as mine!
The reason for all the LLM spend & forced adoption is to make LLMs a critical part of everyone's processes while it's cheap/free, and then crank up the price once it's too late to easily back out. Just like I will jack up the price on my grocery store once all the fools at competing stores who are charging their customers money go out of business, and I'm the only one left in the area, leaving everyone (except for me!) worse off than where they started.
It's a scam, and it seems to be working.
The dot com bubble?
What has had the same level of money burning.
Covid. Black death. Measles. Cholera. Lots of examples