12 ms·

Not everyone is using AI for everything

• byteoptimizer 3mo ago
  True, but you're somehow involved in it even though you don't use AI.
• bronlund 3mo ago
  No, everyone is not using AI for everything - yet.
• negergreger 3mo ago
  Everyone is using AI, issue is not just everyone recognizes what AI actually is, how broadly it's used. Looking things up and asking questions was always something for a minority of the population so the language model usage being relatively low isn't a surprise. Problem arises if the non-AI segment is leveraged to create regulations that impact the AI using segment negatively.
• ErrantX 3mo ago
  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.
  • satvikpendem 3mo ago
    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.
    • ErrantX 3mo ago
      That's totally fair and things may change. For me its the history and the fact I can come back to it. If I am honest I believe my final solution will be a combination of Open Claw, a custom knowledge wiki based on Wikmd. I just need a good all for Claw with history that is as good as gpt Edit: and context too. It inferred my energy supplier from previously chats and so when I just asked a pertinent question it referenced their policy. Admittedly Google will have way more context if they get the product right.
      • satvikpendem 3mo ago
        Gemini has history and memory too though, maybe you weren't aware. It's an app just like ChatGPT and you can even import your history and memory, try it.
      • serial_dev 3mo ago
        Gemini also has it all, it learns and knows who you are, you have history of chats where you can just jump back into a conversation a week later if you want to.
    • inigyou 3mo ago
      Google just lost a lawsuit for citing sources and then displaying information that didn't occur in the sources. https://the-decoder.com/landmark-german-ruling-declares-googles-ai-overviews-are-googles-own-words-and-makes-it-liable-for-false-answers/ https://the-decoder.com/landmark-german-ruling-declares-goog...
    • gamblor956 3mo ago
      I've run into plenty of instances where Gemini cited sources and the claims they attributed to those citations were nowhere to be found in the actual sources they cited. It's happened to me over a dozen times this past week. The AI search results were actually better last year; significantly fewer hallucinations.
• acc_297 3mo ago
  On the post-grad job hunt right now - I note that most employers will ask in a technical interview or whiteboard interview "how are you using LLMs?" It's tough to answer because you want to hedge for both an AI enthused employer and an AI hesitant employer with limited information about who they are and how they personally use these products. I've been responding with a sort of long winded answer about how 'there is clearly a learning curve for how this technology fits into any process and how I always always always double double double check yadayadayada' I'm probably using the chat/ask functionality on a daily basis for quick debugging / new technology learning questions but I have yet to really use the fully agent or computer-use products because I've had more bad results than good the few times I've tried them (re-factoring a big repo of decades old fortran+C code for modern compiler/OS some things started to work but ultimately I abandoned that effort).
  • dmitrygr 3mo ago
    "for entertainment value, when i'd like to see how an enthusiastic 5-year-old would react to the task."
    • paulddraper 3mo ago
      Your 5 year old is going to a heck of a kindergarten.
  • hypfer 3mo ago
    > It's tough to answer because you want to hedge for both an AI enthused employer and an AI hesitant employer with limited information about who they are and how they personally use these products. Have you considered just answering truthfully? Would you even want to work somewhere where you need to play a role and where they flip out when you say the wrong word you should've correctly guessed through mind reading? That sounds not like a job but a toxic relationship.
    • emodendroket 3mo ago
      I assume it's because he is seeking to pay rent, food bills, and other expenses through employment.
• tanaykarnik 3mo ago
  everyone might not be using ai. but i see myself reaching for it for every small thing these days. it's like every curiousity or lifestyle choice or optimization is something ai can help research. i am not saying it's really powerful or great. but the lure is undeniable. because of how low friction it has become.
• arisAlexis 3mo ago
  Articles that start with no are inherently biased and only gather reads from people that agree.
• rafaepta 3mo ago
  So true, just built a deterministic system to identify duplicated code. It's offline and doesn't use AI on purpose, since a gate that blocks your CI has to give the exact same answer every time, and finding dupes means comparing every function against every other (that's index work). It does NOT use AI. But ironically, I used AI to build it (https://github.com/Rafaelpta/dupehound https://github.com/Rafaelpta/dupehound )
  • NathanaelRea 3mo ago
    Have you seen jscpd? What does your tool do differently?
  • rpdillon 3mo ago
    > But ironically, I used AI to build it This is a pattern I encourage - the AI might not be reliable, but with coaching, it can produce reliable tools. `colordiff` was causing issues with `less` when I was looking at diffs (character encoding issues I think), and when I asked Kimi K2.6 what to do, it built me a rust command-line diff tool in one shot that I've been using ever since (it even downloaded rust, wrote the tool, and compiled it).
• jacobgold 3mo ago
  I understand the point being made, but it does feel a bit like writing a post in the early days of the internet saying: "No, everyone is not using the internet for everything." Which would have been entirely true when written, and entirely false a relatively short time later. Everyone does use the internet for everything today, and everyone will use AI for everything soon.
  • sublinear 3mo ago
    You'll find it hard to pin down what you mean by "everything" otherwise you wouldn't have said that. Nobody uses the internet for everything. Local models are highly likely to dominate in the long run as "good enough" inevitably becomes trivially cheap. This is a very different pattern of incentives and adoption compared to the internet. I think it's more similar to the advent of personal computers. They had a brief surge and then turned into something else (smartphones, cloud, etc.) for all but a few niche cases. AI is not changing the consumer landscape. It's getting absorbed into existing platforms where there's a clear use case and benefit. It's just another expected software feature. This is far from the first time people have rejected a "personal assistant" concept and they'll just keep rejecting it.
    • jacobgold 3mo ago
      It seems fair to leave the definition of "everything" to a reasonable person's interpretation. It's obvious that the internet is beyond ubiquitous in modern life. I agree that where models run will will change over time, probably they'll run everywhere, but it's still the same kind of AI we are talking about. Smartphones are personal computers.
      • sublinear 3mo ago
        Just about every app has a "help" button, but do you really use it? What about captions on a video or any number of other accessibility features? They're in everything, but not used for everything. It makes perfect sense that they exist and were way overdue for an update, but they're just extra blades on the multitool. Perhaps in some designs they become more integral, but that is expected and invisible. Yes "everything", but that's not even close to sufficient to become a huge breakthrough like the internet.
• enraged_camel 3mo ago
  I'm using AI for most things. It has been an incredible improvement to both my quality of life and my wallet. Some of the most high profile items from just the past three months: - I'm getting my roof replaced due to hail damage. Insurance originally covered only $5k due to depreciation. I fed the insurance policy to AI. I learned about the appraisal clause and invoked it. At the end, I got another $6,500 back. - I was having issues with plumbing. Four different plumbers came, they all said the cast iron pipes under the house need to change. Quotes ranged from $35k to $55k. I had AI walk me through the process. It taught me about the yard line vs. under-slab distinction, and suggested getting just the yard line replaced first because it's much cheaper and can fix the issue. I did that and spent $6k. The issue was fixed. I "saved" $30k for now by deferring that massive month-long project. (For brevity, I'm omitting a ton of boring technical stuff I learned about plumbing that helped me make the optimal decision - none of the contractors bothered explaining any of it.) - My 2010 Hyundai Santa Fe is starting to show its age. I've taken it to multiple different repair shops, then fed their diagnoses and recommendations to AI and figured out which ones are trying to fleece me and which ones are being more careful and conservative with their repair recommendations. Probably saved several thousand dollars there. Learned a lot about cars too! - My partner and I are converting the backyard to a wildlife sanctuary. The AI helped us plan what to plant where (depending on lots of factors like sunlight location, irrigation access, etc.) and it has been going really well. Also planned out a dragonfly pond to deal with mosquitoes. AI created a project plan, including schematics, material purchase list and step-by-step instructions. - I've been wanting to do various other home improvement projects, but only ones that make financial sense. I took photos of my house, both inside and outside, and fed them to AI, and said "give me a list of projects I can do that will have high ROI for when I decide to sell this house". It spent 15 mins doing deep research, then came back with a long, prioritized list. If I do all the projects, I'd be spending about $40k and it would improve the house valuation by about $90k. I can go on. There's probably dozens of stuff that I've used it for over the past year that led to massive time and money savings, and I've learned a ton as well about topics I normally would not have been exposed to or bothered to research myself. And I'm not even including all the work-related usage, both for my employer and my side business. That would be its own very long list.
  • satvikpendem 3mo ago
• emodendroket 3mo ago
  > 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.
  • sroerick 3mo ago
    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.
• Lapsa 3mo ago
  [dead]
• vb-8448 3mo ago
  I'm going back and forth with the llm agents. They are great on exploring, understanding and finding bugs in existing codebase. They are great for simple or one time scripts/programs. They are terrible, really terrible coders. The overengineering is so deep in their training that no matter what is your prompt, your skills or agents.md/claude.md, if you don't babysit them continuously, at some point they will just fuck up your codebase.
  • KaiShips 3mo ago
    [flagged]
• panzi 3mo ago
  or for anything
• axegon_ 3mo ago
  Not everyone but most. And I've been having this discussion with people around me a lot lately and everyone that has the ability to think more than half a step ahead sees it(and frankly we are fed up). I previously discussed how a friend admitted that he's never seen the code that powers his project at an S&P 500 company. Yesterday I was talking to another friend and former coworker who complained that when cloudflare went out a month or so ago, his entire team just slammed their laptops and went home cause they couldn't work(no sloppus/sloppenai). Another friend of mine: her dad is in hospital with a terminal disease and her mom (in her late 50's or early 60's, idk) uses chatgpt as a personal therapist. Gatorade-fed crops here we come, Leeerooooy Jeeeenkins!
  • add-sub-mul-div 3mo ago
    Embarrassing NPC behavior to throw in the towel on working because you lost your crutch.
• kylehotchkiss 3mo ago
  I am using AI to take on a fun large scale analysis of churches in USA. I also just bought a completely mechanical film camera to learn a new old skill with no tech to fall back on.
• canyp 3mo ago
  Not to take away from the post, but "everyone is not" should probably be "not everyone is".
• tripleee 3mo ago
  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
  • tty456 3mo ago
    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 okay
    • demorro 3mo ago
      It's practically guaranteed. Most people will have no more need to learn how to perform miscellaneous knowledge tasks well if at all, and thus won't.
  • inigyou 3mo ago
    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?
    • Gigachad 3mo ago
      Windows is the result of having almost the entire market. There has been no reason for Microsoft to improve windows because it won't sell more licenses. They have already sold Windows to every person who will possibly buy it. So the only avenue for growth is selling additional services on top like cloud subscriptions, AI products, etc. Contrast that to the last 10 years in Linux where things have become immensely better.
    • mike_hock 3mo ago
      Given the hardware these systems run on, and the compilers and development tools they had available, Win98 was actually the more impressive piece of engineering.
• Avenassh 3mo ago
  [flagged]
• zeroonetwothree 3mo ago
  One of the reasons is that the free options are generally fairly poor and it’s hard to get people to sign up and actually pay for something. Especially if they assume it’s going to be similar quality. If I worked in marketing/growth for an AI company I would try to consider some ways of breaking through this gap.
• willmadden 3mo ago
  "Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that."
• michaelbuckbee 3mo ago
  A counterpoint to this is that we have some real different definitions of AI. If you consider things like the machine learning filters in your smartphone camera and Google's AI Overviews for searches it's entirely plausible that the US is currently at 75%+ of AI usage.
• edgarvaldes 3mo ago
  "But they will", "They do, but they don't know", "They do, indirectly" I don't get these comments.
  • FromTheFirstIn 3mo ago
    Just AI fandom
• AvAn12 3mo ago
  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
  • calf 3mo ago
    I didn't understand your comment about Turing complete languages, could you explain that part please?
    • AvAn12 3mo ago
      At the end of the day, the processor can only do Turing operations: assign values to variables (registers, memory locations, storage), loops, bitwise operations, and conditionals. Whether the source code is python, java, or lisp, it has to compile or interpret down to machine code ultimately. Likewise if the running software is a word processor, DOOM, or an LLM, at the end of the day it will be executed by the processor using the three operations. Lots of other fancy hardware and software may accelerate things but ultimately it is those ops that are the running code. The rest is many wonderful conveniences and abstractions.
  • Gigachad 3mo ago
    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.
  • gamblor956 3mo ago
    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.
• arthurjj 3mo ago
  > More than 30 percent of the US working-age population is using AI [meaning about 70% isn’t], an increase of 3 percentage points from the end of 2025 This makes me less bearish on the AI investments that are being made, if 70% of the working age population isn't using AI then there still is a lot of growth. The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed (yet)
  • FromTheFirstIn 3mo ago
    What if I told you that 100% have exposure but only 30% have adopted? You’re assuming the issue here is lack of access, not lack of interest.
    • arthurjj 3mo ago
      It might take a while for people to see how the model is useful to them, or to figure out how to make it useful or the capabilities weren't there ye. My mother tried ChatGPT in '23 and thought it was useless, she now uses it regularly, because it's improved and she knows how to use it better.
• jstummbillig 3mo ago
  I disagree. Everyone will be using AI for everything, but, increasingly, people won't think about whether they are using "AI" – just like they don't think about using databases. Nor should they! It's such a shit thing to be emotionally invested in. Imagine people would have been upset about databases. It's really fantastic software and we should be happy to have it, and now go and make the most of it, for all of us.
• spoaceman7777 3mo ago
  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 https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/2023/national_results.asp
  • layer8 3mo ago
    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.
    • spoaceman7777 3mo ago
      Just getting to the point of using a voice mode is a challenge at that level. Like, we're talking about "has trouble formulating a question to ask in the first place". There's a whole level of ignorance out there that is honestly dumbfounding to even comprehend. The numbers for numeracy and problem solving are even more horrifying. (It's for this reason that the most popular apps in the US are algorithmically generated feeds of photos, and often-non-verbal videos shorter than a TV advertisement.)
      • foxglacier 3mo ago
        I thought not needing words was because people often watch them on their phone in public without sound. Who are these people that can't enjoy listening to spoken words because of illiteracy or ignorance?
• monkaiju 3mo ago
  As a part of the "don't use won't use" crowd it has been exhausting explaining that we exist lol
• knightops_dev 3mo ago
  [flagged]
• rao-v 3mo ago
  Google search is AI by any definition now, and yes everyone is using google search and by a sort of transitive property …
  • FromTheFirstIn 3mo ago
    Search isn’t generative AI. There are a lot of people arguing in this thread that actually everyone is using generative AI without engaging with the source material at all. Why do you think that is?
    • __natty__ 3mo ago
      I disagree. Searching in google now IS using generative AI.
      • FromTheFirstIn 3mo ago
        Google has made searching also include a default LLM response. There are also search results. When you search with Google, an LLM is prompted, for sure. It’s also pretty clearly a separate feature that’s been tacked on to search.
• jheriko 3mo ago
  [dead]
• kaydub 3mo ago
  I'd honestly argue we're actually going the complete opposite direction. Everybody is using LLMs/AI. All the time. It's in every facet of your life. Just because you didn't input the prompt, doesn't mean you're not consuming the end product of LLMs all day, everyday, on websites like this one, reddit, tiktok, instagram, facebook, etc. Addressing the article, if you're hyperfocused on whether people are using AI and only consider AI use a chatbot... well, you're not honestly covering all the AI use out there. And reading the other stats, it seems like this article is trying to paint a narrative. Why is the Datos stat only considering "Desktop use" for instance. Not to mention their stats are actually astounding and DON'T show what the headline is trying to assert. 1/3 of people using AI regularly is a FUCK TON of people in a VERY short span of time to uptake a new technology.
• yndoendo 3mo ago
  AI is a tool in a toolbox. It is does not fit all solutions. Using AI everywhere would be the equivalent of using a screw driver to pick the piece of stuck broccoli out of your teeth. It will cost you more, to fix your teeth, than using a proper tool.
• why_at 3mo ago
  The comparison with meat consumption seems inapt. 70% of people report reducing meat consumption, but research has shown that these intentions have very little correlation with people's actual behavior.
• adham541 3mo ago
  Anyone doing a basic google search right now, is "technically" using Ai.
• paulcole 3mo ago
  I use it for closer to everything every day. Just realized recently it could clip my (virtual) Safeway coupons for me and make my grocery list.
• Lerc 3mo ago
  My initial response to reading this headline was to think that noone is saying that they were. Yet the author starts off with a link to a pretty good example of some dumb hyperbole. I guess that goes with the notion that for any really idiotic take you can think of, there's going to be someone out there confidently promoting it. In general, most claims of 'everyone is...' means "Most of the people around me that I observe are..." Which might mean they are not around other perspectives, or it might mean they just are not observing other perspectives.
• bjt 3mo ago
  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.
  • magistr4te 3mo ago
    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"
    • bjt 3mo ago
      People eating lead in their food don't know it's there. People engaging with the AI built into Google results pages can see it, and assumedly Google's A/B testing showed that they engaged with it.
      • rockskon 3mo ago
        Bait and switch user interfaces to insert AI into places AI did not previously exist and make sure you see an AI answer before anything else is not far divorced from the "lead in food" example - especially when paired with efforts to make the 10 Blue Links become irrelevant garbage on average by ignoring most of the words you type in. Maybe it's a better analogy to compare this to food-without-lead costing 10 times as much as food-with-lead in large part because of direct actions undertaken by lead manufacturers.
      • zamadatix 3mo ago
• __natty__ 3mo ago
  A year or two ago people were concerned that Google was losing its battle to OpenAI. Today Google puts heavy emphasis on AI search. Most common folks are now using them. I know in a minute or two many Kagi, DDG or other alternatives will reply, but these people were never a core part of Alphabet's user base. I'm an AI sceptic to some level, but it's hard to deny that "most" people are using AI (as an LLM or in other forms) to some extent today despite we like it or not.
• zzo38computer 3mo ago
  The list of concerns omits many things (although they do mention many valid concerns), such as concerns about control by the organizations that provide the AI services, power that is better used elsewhere (independently of whether it is "too much"), using too much space, effects on prices of things, excessive scraping, inappropriate use of AI, someone trying to force or insist strongly that you should use it even if you do not want to, etc. It might be potentially possible to mitigate some of these concerns (and in some circumstances, some of them are mitigated), but that still doesn't mean you should be required to use it. Software and services that make the AI features optional is one way to help (and is worth doing, if applicable for that software/service), but it does not solve everything; but, one way will not solve everything.
• bravetraveler 3mo ago
  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?
• rconti 3mo ago
  Holy crap. Solar energy is only considered a net positive on society by 65% of people??
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 3mo ago
  So far, I'm not using "AI" for anything Still haven't tried it
  • mike_hock 3mo ago
    Based.
    • oblio 3mo ago
      I find it baffling that someone with 21k karma, on <<Hacker>> News, posts such a ignorant comment, followed up by someone with 5k karma and a 10 year old account, with an equally "valuable" reply. At least use AI to know your enemy...
      • Drakexor 3mo ago
        "Enshitification" comes for us all, HN comments included.
  • 1vuio0pswjnm7 3mo ago
    https://web.archive.org/web/20260524104824if_/https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mike_hock https://web.archive.org/web/20260524104824if_/https://news.y... "followed up by someone with 5k karma" Incorrect. Maybe the reply was made in haste Anytime a comment of mine receives lots of upvoites thare will always be some snarky replies. It's almost guaranteed These will sometimes include personal attacks Note all I did here was relate a personal anecdote: I'm not using "AI". HN commenters do this every day, many times off-topic I expressed no opinion. I did not make any argument, prediction or "recommendation". All I did was state a fact, 100% on-topic
    • 1vuio0pswjnm7 3mo ago
      *upvotes *there
• matt_daemon 3mo ago
  It baffles me that Hard Fork is so popular when they regularly have such uninformed takes
  • roxolotl 3mo ago
    I swear the Sydney incident and the subsequent dislike of Kevin by LLMs caused Kevin to believe in Roko’s Basilisk and so he’s super pro AI now. But more likely it’s just that those who still listen to Hard Fork agree with the conclusions before listening to the podcast.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 3mo ago
  "This tracks with Microsoft's new United States AI Diffusion site, based on "anonymized, aggregated Microsoft telemetry."" Surreptitious surveillance, probably with dubious consent Is Redmond afraid to just ask users Then compare the data If no one asnwers when asked then maybe that means they don't wish to allow Microsoft collect that data "SearchLight asked about a range of technologies and to say "whether you believe the overall impact of each technology on society is positive or negative." AI only has an +8% net positive rating right now, right next to +7% for social media, which were only greater than crypto at -17%." LOL. This is what happens when people are asked for their opinions
  • 1vuio0pswjnm7 3mo ago
    *answers
• keeda 3mo ago
  Another data source showing the same trends consistently over the last couple of years: https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2025/nov/state-generative-ai-adoption-2025 https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2025/nov/state-gen... Interactive data tracker here: https://www.genaiadoptiontracker.com/ https://www.genaiadoptiontracker.com/ I'll note that despite this, most AI providers are very compute constrained (see: the skyrocketing backlogs of each cloud provier; Claude's 9's until a few weeks ago until Anthropic, along with Google -- of all companies -- renting capacity from Elon.) That could be a material reason for the overall low adoption. I think the big AI players are carefully balancing multiple conflicting priorities with their limited compute: acquiring and keeping users with free or heavily subsidized tokens, while ensuring they can satisfy their paying customers' SLAs. If there was more compute they would probably invest more in marketing and pushing adoption further (and indeed, a Google exec was quoted saying exactly that after a big Gemini launch.) Something else to consider: If only 10% of users use GenAI daily, that leaves a potential 45x growth minimum on the horizon (the remaining 90% of users x 5 weekdays, assuming everyone chills on weekends, and ignoring that agents use way more tokens.) Which is why every hyperscaler has been scrambling to build out more capacity. The typical question at this point is, where's the payoff? Two points: 1. Despite this relatively low level adoption, AI company revenues are already spiking at unprecedented rates. (Not just the frontier labs, even the smaller startups, as reported by investors, enterprise customers as well as Stripe, their payment processor: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46730182 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46730182) 2. The St. Louis Fed study above notes that there has been a ~1.89 percentage points increase in national labor productivity since 4th quarter 2022, which could be explained by their data on GenAI adoption. They are careful to call out that causation is impossible to prove, but the possibility that GenAI may already be having a noticeable impact on national-level economic indicators only 3+ years since launch is wild.
• maplethorpe 3mo ago
  I might be the only person at my job that doesn't use it, but it feels like I'll be found out by upper management sooner or later. Maybe I'll need to use a library I'm unfamiliar with, I'll take longer than expected to grasp it, and then people will start asking questions. Every time a manager puts a random call in my calendar, I'm worried it's going to be about this.
• irhs 3mo ago
  I've been using LLMs to write code that consists of too much boilerplate like writing flutter, anything else I enjoy writing by hand tbh.
• lynndotpy 3mo ago
  Almost everyone is using an app with a feed with an algorithm powered by a transformer. People spend hours a day feeding information into a model with the same architecture as an LLM which then spits out next-post recommendations. They call it "scrolling Reels/TikTok/Shorts". That has to count for something.
• rvz 3mo ago
  Turns out that the people screaming about using AI for everything were the investors who already invested in the AI tool they are trying to sell to you.
• zftnb666 3mo ago
  [flagged]
• egorfine 3mo ago
  The other day I have seen a developer calmly renaming a variable in his code. Manually. Like a psycho.
• alpineman 3mo ago
  At least using AI doesn't cause massive suffering of sentient beings like meat consumption does. I find it funny we talk so much about whether or not Claude's feelings are hurt and whether it has emotions, when we treat animals with real feelings, emotions, parental bonds, and personalities so badly.
• eventinbox 3mo ago
  [flagged]
• antonvs 3mo ago
  The numbers given in the article are actually consistent with what is usually meant by “everyone” in such statements. Sure, it’s not literally everyone. But it’s a very significant percentage, especially given how quick the adoption has been.
  • tanaykarnik 3mo ago
    yeah exactly my thoughts. everyone didn't mean literally everyone. and for the ones that are using it (especially the paid subs). the lure is undeniable.
  • jzemeocala 3mo ago
    Kinda like how quickly cellphones popped up and changed everything.
  • yegg 3mo ago
    I think what people mean by everyone varies a lot, which is why I wanted to draw attention to more specific numbers. For example, in the Datos data cited[1], on desktop 86% were using traditional search engines >10 visits/month vs. only 21% for AI chat tools. That is indeed a very significant percentage, but more than 4x less than search and (at least I) wouldn't say that ~1/5 is "everyone." [1] https://sparktoro.com/blog/new-research-20-of-americans-use-ai-tools-10x-month-but-growth-is-slowing-and-traditional-search-hasnt-dipped/ https://sparktoro.com/blog/new-research-20-of-americans-use-...
    • antonvs 3mo ago
      The numbers are interesting, I agree, as is the overall post. And as a clickbait headline, "not everyone" makes sense. But, realistically, the NYT obviously isn't talking about, say, the North Sentinelese islanders. Similarly, it's probably not really talking about people who don't do the kind of white collar work where AI is, so far, most prevalent. In fact, the group the NYT is most likely referring to as "everyone" is really "readers of the NYT". It might be hard to come up with numbers for that, but I suspect they'd be a lot higher. Anecdotally, at the company I'm at (late-stage venture-backed), everyone from software developers to people on the marketing, sales, and finance side are using AI. And we're not unique. This will make the statement ring true to many people, even if it's not globally true in an absolute sense. This all makes more sense once you've truly internalized the Yogi Berra quote about a certain popular restaurant: "No one goes there anymore. It's too crowded."
• variety8675 3mo ago
  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 added
  • mikert89 3mo ago
    models will get smarter, this wont be an issue
    • sfn42 3mo ago
      Come talk to me when it isn't an issue.
    • throwatdem12311 3mo ago
      They say this every time. Just wait for the NEXT model bro THEN everything will be be fixed. Ok wait maybe not the next one but surely the one after! Hasn’t happened yet and there is no evidence it will.
      • laichzeit0 3mo ago
        This all reminds me of in the 90s when the Borland C++ compilers and Turbo Pascal shit came out and everyone was still hand rolling assembler because the optimising compilers were so bad. I thought Opus 4.6 was pretty good, basically a step change. The stuff I got out of Fable before they blocked it was nearly alien. If things keep improving, I don’t see humans writing code in 2 to 3 years except maybe super niche areas. This will all go the way that optimising compilers did. No amount of resistance, anger or denialism will change that. I’d actually love it if LLMs could skip the slow high level lanaguages entirely and just churned out some weird LLM bytecode that was closer to the metal. I don’t want to read it or understand it at all. Here’s my spec, build it and notify when done. I want to ship stuff not build or dick around with code. Basically like when I go to a shop because I want a table, I don’t care if some carpenter “crafted” it or a machine mass produced and spat it out. It’s cute, but most people just want stuff and don’t care how it’s built.
• sriram_malhar 3mo ago
  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.
  • marking-time 3mo ago
    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.
    • sriram_malhar 3mo ago
      You still used AI, even if the results weren't correct.
  • NichoPaolucci 3mo ago
    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.
  • embedding-shape 3mo ago
    > 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 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.
• Kuyawa 3mo ago
  [flagged]
  • dgellow 3mo ago
    What prompts you from posting this?
  • witx 3mo ago
    Cant really understand if this is trolling or outright AI psychosis
    • xpct 3mo ago
      Neither, just an ad
    • z3c0 3mo ago
      They are a self-described 10x coder who moves AI slop, so almost certainly the latter. I think we might be facing a cultural reckoning on what being "productive" actually means. Creating more products doesn't mean more production.
      • witx 3mo ago
        Amen
  • embedding-shape 3mo ago
    Useful reminder to new developers, anyone who label themselves as a "10x programmer" and brags about that, is someone you probably want far away from any collaborative projects or organizations where long-term productivity actually matters.
  • Zetaphor 3mo ago
    I'm someone who uses tens of millions of tokens each month, almost exclusively with open weight models that I run on my own hardware. That said you are taking the wrong approach here, this type of mentality is only going to further radicalize those who have decided they're against this technology. Additionally when the finally bubble bursts and the executives wake up from psychosis and look to distance themselves from this because it's become a dirty word, you'll be one of the first to go. The nail that sticks out gets hammered down and all that. I do think there are real benefits and productivity gains with this technology, but it does not benefit everyone equally. It's great for the programming parts of my job, but useless in the other 40% of the work. I have coworkers for whom generative AI has no obvious practical application, and yet management is trying to find a way to shoehorn it in anyway. No doubt because they've also drank the kool-aid and are eager to reduce headcount. This attitude of it making everything more productive and anyone who doesn't follow will be left behind is not just false, it's cruel and myopic. You're talking about people's livelihood being taken away because a handful of executives decided this is how things should work despite the MASSIVE number of shortcomings and poor product market fit. Edit: I also almost missed where you're seemingly celebrating the devaluation of human labor as a result of this. Please stop and reflect on how your position may read to someone who is just trying to put food on the table.
• aocallaghan17 3mo ago
  Reminds me of this article: https://www.theverge.com/podcast/917029/software-brain-ai-backlash-databases-automation https://www.theverge.com/podcast/917029/software-brain-ai-ba... Software engineers are definitely in a bit of a bubble here. Are we just early adopters who see the value sooner, or does it uniquely benefit software engineering, or do we just like cool automation and we're deluding ourselves that this adds value beyond the cost?
  • targafarian 3mo ago
    Yes I believe software benefits uniquely, just like building tooling and automating software have long been easier in software than other domains. Humans defined all the rules of the world you live in, humans wrote strict rules in methodically parsable formats. The moment you have to interact with the physical world or humans (psychological, imaginative, aesthetic, etc), there are often undiscovered or changing rules—or no rules at all. Or systems are subject to perturbations beyond a defined scope. The other thing I believe is software developers are experts at doing the things that allow them to make doing those very things easier and more automated. And they do this in public, perfectly documented online. Both because of the things I described above and because software developers have created the largest machine-accessible training set for plying their trade of any trade, ML—that is ultimately interpolating massive datasets to do things—is unsurprisingly uniquely successful for software tasks.
    • demorro 3mo ago
      It surprises me when people think engineering, software or no, isn't about the physical world of humans, psychological, imaginative, aesthetic or otherwise. Everything I do uses "human stuff" as a base foundation of value. Engineering effort is malformed and invalid without such a thing, and I spend a lot of my time as a technical leader pushing back on people trying to "perform engineering" without connecting to these things.
  • gambiter 3mo ago
    That's a decent article. My only issue is it seems heavily biased at the end, or at least he seems to misunderstand what the 'A.I. types in Silicon Valley' are doing. > Computers should adapt to people. Asking people to make themselves more legible to software — to turn themselves into a database — is a doomed idea. I've been in software a long time, and I do sort of see this trend, but I think it's because these are tools that build other tools. The interface has always been a 'best I can do for now' thing, with the focus on doing things that are useful. Computers were just calculators in the beginning, which led to more complex calculators, instruction sets, programming languages, operating systems, GUIs, interconnectivity, etc. What people are doing today is experimenting, like they always have. They're putting their experiments out there so that others can use them and build on them. Some will use those tools to build other tools, and some won't. But over time, the experiments that work will get distilled and turn into real products that people who 'do not yearn for automation' will still want to use, so it seems like the value is there. I guess the real question is whether they will create value that offsets the near-term costs, because I don't think the billions in investments are sustainable, and I'm not convinced the centralized data center paradigm is the right way.
• simonw 3mo ago
  Bit of an odd decision to build an entire article around a clickbait headline from July 2025. Talk about a strawman. That aside, this piece is interesting and ties together some useful numbers and studies. I hadn't seen the recent Microsoft paper showing: > 30 percent of the US working-age population is using AI [...] with at least 90 minutes of usage time in a given month. I'm honestly impressed at how high that number is! That's a lot of adoption for a technology (LLM chatbots) that didn't exist four years ago.
  • z3c0 3mo ago
    It's a retrospective analysis of an assertion made by NYTimes. The original headline wasn't clickbait, just presumptive, and even so, it's a pretty significant publication that spends a lot of time on the HN front page (alongside you, I'll add). I think it's perfectly fair, and nowhere close to a strawman, to deconstruct that claim a year later.
    • simonw 3mo ago
      https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/16/magazine/using-ai-hard-fork.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/16/magazine/using-ai-hard-fo... "Everyone Is Using A.I. for Everything. Is That Bad?" - subheading: "Either way, let’s not be in denial about it." It's clearly intended as rhetorical hyperbole - like "everyone's on their phone at the movie theater" or "everyone's fed up with AI hype". If you read the actual transcript it makes it very clear that it's not claiming "Everyone is using AI" almost immediately: > ChatGPT is the sixth-biggest website on Earth. Something like 43 percent of Americans in the work force use generative A.I.
  • JCTheDenthog 3mo ago
    How much of that use is driven by corporate mandates to use AI anywhere and everywhere (even when it's a terrible fit)?
    • simonw 3mo ago
      I'd love to see credible numbers on that. I find it hard to believe that stupid corporate mandates are responsible for more than a small fraction of usage, but without data I have just my own instincts to go on there.
• nutjob2 3mo ago
  > AI has gotten so good Actually anything that is about 90% great and 10% disastrously wrong is utter crap given the way people want and do use AI models. They are great tools in the right hands and awful in the wrong.
  • acc_297 3mo ago
    It's funny lately I've been seeing the cursor advertisements all with some premise of regular young person wants to develop an app and the ads really do focus on the simplest of premises: the only ones I've seen in these skits are essentially variants on the "todo app" web app tutorial the tech is pretty good at helping identify simple bugs when they happen and to write short sections of code given very explicit instructions but yeah I have yet to see good examples of short one sentence ideas turned into a working product that looks better than anything that could be a UDemy tutorial app.
    • inigyou 3mo ago
      I keep saying it hasn't gotten smarter, just memorized more things
• ChrisMarshallNY 3mo ago
  > AI has gotten so good that despite any misgivings, “everyone is using A.I.” In my experience, it's a mixed bag. I wrote this comment[0], yesterday. It reflects my current work, and how I am integrating an LLM. I have used it for two parts of my project: 1) The backend (PHP), and 2) The frontend (Swift) It has been a huge help, in both, but #2 is a cautionary tale. It really needs adult supervision, in developing native UIKit Swift apps. I'm realizing how truly bad the code it wrote was. I mean, terrible. That's jarring, because it did a great job with #1. It made sound, reasonable design decisions, and provided code that is better than what I would write. With #2, it behaved exactly like an inexperienced engineer, panicking, when confronted with real-world problems. My rewrite is going to feature a much simpler, sound approach. All that said, it has been a net positive, and has increased my productivity by a large margin. I guess the lesson I needed to get from this, is that it is good at helping me to find problems, but maybe not so good at fixing them. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48515217 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48515217
  • ablob 3mo ago
    I'd like to add that there is almost no way of "running away" from it. If I search for anything on the internet I am almost guaranteed to be handed pages and pages of AI generated content. In lieu of that I found that directly prompting for an answer tends to yield better results nowadays. Not because it's good per-se, but because having control over the prompt beats having little to no control over it though search by proxy. It saddens me to see that high quality content is drowned in this sea of garbage to the point of being almost impossible to find.
    • gombosg 3mo ago
      I think this is where the circle closes with the "dead internet theory"... you go to Reddit, and see bots commenting on posts created by bots. Then you go on to search for something, and find only results that are clearly AI generated pages and come to the conclusion that directly prompting some LLM is better than reading an AI slop page that's output by the same AI for slightly less specific prompt. My concern is that this will only get worse over time - which is great for companies selling AI tokens and bad for society and whoever wants to interact with other humans over the internet.
• jdw64 3mo ago
  I only use AI for software development. For writing, I don't use it at all except to translate source materials. So yes, AI is only for software development in my case. The real question is whether I have any value outside of software development. Sometimes I get the feeling that AI is replacing the value I have in society.
  • bigstrat2003 3mo ago
    I don't think AI has any real value for software development, personally. The quality just isn't there, unless you invest so much effort that you may as well have written it yourself. But the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent, and even though I think the industry will get over the idiocy of having LLMs write software, there's no telling how long that will take. So it's a scary time to work in tech even if I think the trend will ultimately reverse.
    • jdw64 3mo ago
      I envy you. For me, AI is faster than the code I write myself in many, many cases. It might replace the average developer, but a talented developer like you probably won't be replaced
      • skydhash 3mo ago
        I was not hired to write code, but to solve problems (where often the end result is code, but it’s not the whole process). But the message from management is that our bottleneck was coding, and by using AI to code, we’ll be 10x faster and all the company problem will be solved. Essentially 1. Use AI everywhere 2. ??? 3. Profit.
    • leptons 3mo ago
      Where I work, the CTO drank a whole bunch of AI kool-aid recently, so now we're expected to "10x" our output with AI. I don't think he realizes this also means 10x more problems of all kinds. But I fully expect him to double-down and when AI costs skyrocket, he'd lay off more developers to pay for more AI. I am constantly looking for a new job, but all of them are also require AI coding experience.
• dismalaf 3mo ago
  I honestly just use it as a search engine to get around SEO garbage and ads. My wife uses it for a (non-computer related) business though and it's great for all sorts of normally tedious marketing/social media type jobs though. Stuff that doesn't really require accuracy just needs text on pictures that looks good quickly. I think everyone just has FOMO and doesn't want to lose to competitors. Eventually it'll die down.
• wamatt 3mo ago
  One thing I'd personally like to see a little more discussion of (at least within my social circles) is.. what exactly does "using AI" mean? How does this connect to everyone's high level ideas/thoughts about "tech", "AI" and "morals and feels" etc. These lines can start to seem a little blurry, at least for me. For example, would we say my partner is "using AI" (for all intents and purposes), if she's frequently using Google.com throughout the day, and then ends up picking and believing the AI generated answer overview at the top of the SERPs almost every time? Or do we feel "uses AI", is more along the lines of the vampire kids running 1000 sub-agents on a mattress floor in SF? I kind of find the whole spectrum really interesting because even basic phone use is now stuffed with AI, whether we choose to label it or not.
  • HappMacDonald 3mo ago
    My understanding is that the threshold people mean are that the vampire kids would be fired for not having 1/4 million spend in tokens per quarter. EG: That the entire conversation is juggled by the token selling shills, per usual.