Oil is a special commodity in the sense that it's as important to civilization as water is to humans. It's also special in the other sense that we have geopolitical strife over who gets to extract it, sell it and to which market...
I don't see how a chatbot meets any of those criteria
> I don't see how a chatbot meets any of those criteria
Calling these things "a chatbot" is likely limiting your vision: some of the stuff people build by fine-tuning LLMs, such as the ones OpenAI offer, use them to generate database queries matching their customers' database schemas.
"Chatbot" is simply a convenient UI for an LLM in the same way that a web browser is a conventional UI for email. (And in this analogy, anyone calling an LLM "autocomplete on steroids" would be making the same mistake as someone saying "Wikipedia is just TCP on steroids").
I expect LLMs to continue to be extremely generic in the same way that web browsers are (market history shows periods where one browser dominates the market despite open source) or like spreadsheets (where Microsoft Office is, or was last I looked, dominant despite free offerings being good enough for most people).
Society needs intelligence. We started using mechanical aids because it became impractical to perform census work by hand as the population increased, AI is a continuation of this process: we need it, it's a commodity, there may be a market opportunity despite free and/or open source competition, and (like Netscape, like Internet Explorer) there's no guarantee that the winner in one year will still be leading the next year or even existing a decade later.
Or another way to look at it, is that everyone and their mother has heard of them, and in 2 years they've only convinced that many people to pony up cash. Plus they have a massive churn problem with people quitting premium after 1-3 months.
> Plus they have a massive churn problem with people quitting premium after 1-3 months.
Because, tbf, the free version is really good. I feel like a lot of AI companies are in the stage where they're still trying to gain massive marketshare and convince people of it's value. The real test is going to be when they pull the plug to force people to transition to premium.
Pure anecdata, of course, but my impression so far was the opposite (same as with Gemini): The free version is so bad for me (gpt4o) that I really doubt the paid version can get meaningfully better.
* Text generation is really bad if said text is more niche than typical SEO stuff like "give me 300 words about soccer balls". Anything academic is usually wrong (i.e. full of hallucinations) or lacks/hallucinates proper sources. If I have to check everything anyway I can just use a search engine.
* Image generation is really bad if you don't just want deviantart-like content. Just yesterday I tried generating ideas for visualisations of a few topics (with quite a view different prompt approaches) and they almost all were unusable.
It is good at summing up longform content, though, but then again so am I - and I have to read it anyway to confirm there are no hallucinations...
Obviously many people use it for coding (which appears to be the low hanging fruit because code is so heavily formalized), but I can imagine that market is almost saturated by now.
They have a 180 million users who are contributing no net revenue but are probably costing them significant amounts.
The math comes down to the fact that they raised enough money to stay in business until they have to raise even more money.
And a 180 mil users might seem like a lot in two years, but with the free media coverage they have... even if their free to premium conversion rate is pretty dismal, the "have you heard about them" to "active free user" rate is also very bad!
It’s only got easier to run models locally though, if performance continues to improve on smaller models, something like running ollama locally might be ‘good enough’ for a lot of people.
It's the "open hand" model that every tech start-up follows.
1. Be extremely generous to customers. Give away incredible tech at bargain basement prices. Pamper your employees with extraordinary benefits. Everyone from all angles loves your business.
2. People integrate your product into their lives. They become dependent on it because the value is so good. They tell everyone else in their lives about it.
(2.5 IPO. This is where you make an exit, where those people who "love" your product that everyone else loves want to get in on the investment. Retail runs to buy up your shares. Also could be an acquisition.)
3. Close the hand. Competition has been ruined and people are addicted. Now it's time to raise prices and lower product quality. Initial investors are already out, so retail will carry the blame for the enshitification of your product.
I know, my point is that they have a platform and can develop more products in the future. 11mio paying users is for a single product right now - ChatGPT
No screen before bedtime/no screens in bed is like the easiest health improvement hack that anyone can implement.
With that said, anecdotally I can vouch for the "no screen in the first hour" suggestion the article is making. I've been working for home for the past few years, and I feel more sluggish since I just move to my laptop first thing in the morning, instead of having that preparation-breakfast-commute routine. Granted I live in a walkable city so commute doesn't mean what it means in SV, but it's the same idea.
When the pandemic forced me to work from home, incorporating a 20 minute morning walk in the neighborhood before work was one of the first things I added to my routine. It's great to make the 'transition' and also starts up the body faster.
I run market research as part of my job, and yeah, you'd be surprised. PH still has a lot of users and not just from the indie hacker community, but there are a quite a bit of people who look at it daily to see if something cool or relevant pops up that they can use in their jobs.
Bingo. All the small shops who were doing actual reviews got wiped out, and this blog is basically documenting the new age of parasite spam eating the web and raking in millions.
Online reviews are completely gamed IMO. My wife still looks at them, talks about the "highly rated" stuff she finds, and I tell her it's all fake she doesn't believe it.
I have been telling my mum the same thing and she don't listen. Googling for reviews used to work very well to like 3-10 years ago. I don't speak English nativly, and I suspect that it worked better in my native tongue for way longer then English. It is like it takes time for it to sink in for people, when they are trusting a process or institution.
I wanted to buy a ultra-sonic cleaner for my garage/workshop. I need it to clean out parts. I searched for reviews on Youtube, and I noticed that the big "ultrasonic cleaner on Amazon" manufacturer Vev[*123]or seem to more or less have donated a cleaner to about every workshop genre Youtuber in the last 1 to 3 years. Or paid them to shill. Dunno.
I mean I was flabbergasted to the extent of the manipulation. I didn't think it was this bad. And I did end up buying their cleaner ...
Same. I live in a poor neighborhood but it has two dope parks, a swimming pool, cool places. The map tells me I'll get murdered at the streets I cross literally every day and night
'dope park' might not be a clear term. I think you mean excellent parks, but my mind immediately went to parks where you might accidentally step on a hypodermic needle.
My town has both types of parks, with a little overlap in the venn diagram.
Has anybody used dope to mean drugs since the early 90s? Even then it could weirdly mean heroine or marijuana, which I'm guessing why it fell out of use.
No, but a lot of HN is (former) kids that had to sit through D.A.R.E for 12 years of school. "dope" immediately means "drugs" in my mind.
I was really sad when I learned what drugs actually were and it wasn't some guy in a trenchcoat and sunglasses giving you a flask filled with boiling pink stuff with smoke coming out the top. 12 years of drug education and they never really said what it was, what they did, what the side effects were, etc.
