This comment is really odd to see on HN. It’s like if a group of computer enthusiasts (in person) had a guy saying “I don’t understand what the big deal is with this so-called internet.”
The Internet was (is) a totally transformative technology which has changed how people work, play, shop, and interact worldwide. Your claim is that generative AI will do this? How? I recall a few months ago the Web 3.0 people saying a similar thing. Is it different this time?
That's a really myopic observation. They're very very different. ChatGPT Pro helps me learn new concepts in new languages much much faster than I did in the past.
Who would that put out of business? Does that replace anyone's job function? It sounds like you're describing something like "really good search for Wikipedia" which to be clear I think is great, but who's gonna be replaced by that in their workplace?
EDIT: actually, I overcommitted a little bit with "really good Wikipedia search". I can rely on Wikipedia search to not invent stuff from whole cloth and try to pass it off as results.
Do you understand the concept of individual productivity? If you have 5 people working for you, and a new technology makes each 25% more productive, you can fire one of them.
The idea here is that it won't stop at 25%. Even if you were to accept this premise, maybe you're just thinking about chat gpt 3.5 or 4. But it really doesn't take a lot more imagination to think about what version 7 or 30 might do.
The same goes for the image/video generation models. Smaller production studios might forgo several artist hires and just generate the stuff they need. Large ones will have an enormous pool of unemployed creatives and won't have to pay them much at all.
Has anyone been made measurably more productive with this stuff? Is even 25% achievable? I'm a software engineer, and I spend less than 25% of my time typing out code. So even if copilot could write every single line of code for me it could not improve my productivity by 25%. In order to make me 25% more productive it would also have to somehow speed up everything else I do at work as well. Has this been demonstrated?
Auto-completing function bodies with stack overflow content is cool! I'm not trying to say this technology isn't doing anything. It's clearly doing something "cool". But that doesn't necessarily actually make anyone more productive. That seems like an extraordinary claim (at least based on my own small experience working with it), so I'd expect to see some extraordinary evidence.
Yes, I wrote a small app in kotlin to scratch an itch. Chat gpt 3.5 gave me code that in the past would have taken me weeks to figure out from the mountain of verbiage in Google docs for the ever changing APIs. Normally googling for this stuff just leads to loads of things that don't work and I have to figure out why. With chat gpt I just pasted whatever error and it gave me the right answer the second or third time. I now have my (private) app that does what I need. Without gpt it would have taken me several weeks (real time, it's a hobby).
I've seen new colleagues use co-pilot at work and it definitely increases the amount of stuff they can now figure out for themselves within a given time.
