I don't know how to precisely quantify the value I get, but Im happily paying $20/mo for OpenAI tools. I'll never again "read documentation" directly nor will I sift through useless SEO optimized bog-spam to learn about a new hot thing. Between these 2 activities, thats pretty much all I use the internet for in the first place and AI has become a core part of my life/work process. If this works out to be all AI is ever good for its still a win for me. I don't remember the last time I used the standard Google search for something.
I am glad to see this as the top comment, it is basically exactly my position (except I pay for Claude dot AI).
Having an infinitely patient expert (who's occasionally fuzzy on the details) summarize absolutely any topic and answer questions about it is so overwhelmingly valuable to me it's a little nuts.
The article highlights several intriguing points. Notably, OpenAI reports that 75% of its revenue comes primarily from consumers, rather than corporate subscriptions—a telling statistic.
Additionally, one-third of American employees now use AI for work at least once a week, with even higher adoption rates in certain roles. A recent study reveals that 78% of software engineers in the U.S. utilize AI weekly, up from 40% in 2023, while 75% of HR professionals do the same, an increase from 35%.
I was skeptical at first, still am somewhat. However, I've been using OpenAI's app and its new search engine feature I can't see myself going back to traditional search engines.
I use copilot with Claude for software development, I cannot see myself going back to traditional autocomplete.
However, I do not see how else AI will revolutionize anything else especially now that they've hit the limits of what is currently possible with the technology of our time.
a lawyer next door to your right is sitting and saying “I am now using AI for million things I had to do manually, however I do not see how AI will revolutionize anything else now that we’ve ‘hit the limits on what is currently possible’ - feel bad for software devs who will never get any benefits of this cool new tech…”
a college teacher next door to your left is saying… :)
AI is really bad at law right now. Hallucinated legal citations build legal arguments on a foundation of mud. No lawyer should be using chat gpt or any of the common public models.
There might be a fine-tuned legal AI but I haven’t heard of it and I wouldn’t trust it till it has been thoroughly vetted.
The college teacher is saying “this is ridiculous, kids can’t think for themselves these days, I’m so sick of grading obviously ai generated slop.” (That’s a quote from a college teacher friend of mine)
It has growing influence in computational chemistry where heuristic approaches can give massive speedups. Mixing AI and theorem proofing together is going to be big.
Increasing use in customer service will be massive annoyance and great business success.
> Increasing use in customer service will be massive annoyance
I suspect that sometimes it will be a massive annoyance and sometimes it will be great.
I have been massively annoyed many times by conventional customer service, most of all when having to stay on the phone for a long time waiting for a human operator to answer a simple question. When such questions can be answered by an AI that responds immediately, I will be more than happy. And I will probably use customer service more; currently, I often hesitate to make phone calls to customer service because I don’t know how long the conversations will take.
Of course, there will also be times when the voice recognition fails or the bot can’t understand the problem. Those cases will indeed be massively annoying.
To quote William Gibson, ‘The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed.’ While AI is clearly making a big impact for you in software development, there are still many industries and areas of daily life where its full potential hasn’t been realized yet. For example, how much could it revolutionize how people handle taxes, navigate complex legal processes, or streamline personal and professional tasks? We’re seeing the early waves of change, but there’s so much room for growth in ways that might seem mundane but could make a huge difference for everyday users. Excited to hear your next update!
In the 1980's, managers at major corporations doubted (and sometimes actively fought) the use of personal computers by their professional employees. There was sunk cost in mainframes, terminals and business software--and PC's were thought to be just a sideshow. Even older UNIX engineers fought the use of PC's.
For a lot of the engineering profession, engineering design work was still being done on paper--CAD was not yet readily available--and everyone was familiar with those processes that had existed for decades. CAD was expensive and it didn't fit the workflow.
In the early 90's, things really started to change rapidly. Engineers had to completely change the way they worked. Those who didn't or couldn't moved to other jobs.
But even in 1995, a mix of economic, social and technology experts were doubtful that the Internet would ever have an impact on our economy or the way we live.
The stock markets didn't ignore the changes. The late 90's was a great time to be in the market.
But in 1999, the stock market bubble burst (the Dot-Com crash). The profit projections were just too optimistic. For those who got out, it was party time.
Despite the crash, it turned out that the technology (computers, networks , software, and then phones) was real and incredibly disruptive--just not as profitable as the market was predicting.
Nevertheless, companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon (and others) grew to become the backbone of our economy. The capability that grew out of that era killed a lot of jobs (e.g. mall jobs), but opened up entirely new economic opportunities, e.g. social media and software cybersecurity.
AI is just the next disruptive phase of this technology timeline. Jobs that were common 20 years ago will become less common, and professionals will need to learn to find new ways to work, make money and build careers--probably using some form of AI.
Yes, AI will be transformative and there is no reason to think it won't be if you pay attention to the history of the past 3 or 4 decades. Will the stock market bubble burst? Maybe...I am certainly paying attention.
The AI to look at is Waymo's computer driven cars. They're here, they work, but Uber and Lyft aren't going away in the cities that Waymo drives in. The same goes for everything an LLM can do today. Nevermind the possibility of GPT-5, 6 or 7. The systemic effects of where they're at today are going to take a while to iron out.
I don't know how to precisely quantify the value I get, but Im happily paying $20/mo for OpenAI tools. I'll never again "read documentation" directly nor will I sift through useless SEO optimized bog-spam to learn about a new hot thing. Between these 2 activities, thats pretty much all I use the internet for in the first place and AI has become a core part of my life/work process. If this works out to be all AI is ever good for its still a win for me. I don't remember the last time I used the standard Google search for something.
I am glad to see this as the top comment, it is basically exactly my position (except I pay for Claude dot AI).
Having an infinitely patient expert (who's occasionally fuzzy on the details) summarize absolutely any topic and answer questions about it is so overwhelmingly valuable to me it's a little nuts.
With the intensive energy and compute requirements, does $20 yield a profit for openAI, even cover the costs of an active user?
How much would you be willing to pay for this service as it is now?
Asking ChatGPT it seems to be about $0.10 a query? I guess if you only ask 10 questions a day it works out? Is OpenAI profitable now?
I would pay $300 a month for the time it saves me
The article highlights several intriguing points. Notably, OpenAI reports that 75% of its revenue comes primarily from consumers, rather than corporate subscriptions—a telling statistic.
Additionally, one-third of American employees now use AI for work at least once a week, with even higher adoption rates in certain roles. A recent study reveals that 78% of software engineers in the U.S. utilize AI weekly, up from 40% in 2023, while 75% of HR professionals do the same, an increase from 35%.
I was skeptical at first, still am somewhat. However, I've been using OpenAI's app and its new search engine feature I can't see myself going back to traditional search engines.
I use copilot with Claude for software development, I cannot see myself going back to traditional autocomplete.
However, I do not see how else AI will revolutionize anything else especially now that they've hit the limits of what is currently possible with the technology of our time.
a lawyer next door to your right is sitting and saying “I am now using AI for million things I had to do manually, however I do not see how AI will revolutionize anything else now that we’ve ‘hit the limits on what is currently possible’ - feel bad for software devs who will never get any benefits of this cool new tech…”
a college teacher next door to your left is saying… :)
AI is really bad at law right now. Hallucinated legal citations build legal arguments on a foundation of mud. No lawyer should be using chat gpt or any of the common public models. There might be a fine-tuned legal AI but I haven’t heard of it and I wouldn’t trust it till it has been thoroughly vetted.
The college teacher is saying “this is ridiculous, kids can’t think for themselves these days, I’m so sick of grading obviously ai generated slop.” (That’s a quote from a college teacher friend of mine)
It has growing influence in computational chemistry where heuristic approaches can give massive speedups. Mixing AI and theorem proofing together is going to be big.
Increasing use in customer service will be massive annoyance and great business success.
> Increasing use in customer service will be massive annoyance
I suspect that sometimes it will be a massive annoyance and sometimes it will be great.
I have been massively annoyed many times by conventional customer service, most of all when having to stay on the phone for a long time waiting for a human operator to answer a simple question. When such questions can be answered by an AI that responds immediately, I will be more than happy. And I will probably use customer service more; currently, I often hesitate to make phone calls to customer service because I don’t know how long the conversations will take.
Of course, there will also be times when the voice recognition fails or the bot can’t understand the problem. Those cases will indeed be massively annoying.
To quote William Gibson, ‘The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed.’ While AI is clearly making a big impact for you in software development, there are still many industries and areas of daily life where its full potential hasn’t been realized yet. For example, how much could it revolutionize how people handle taxes, navigate complex legal processes, or streamline personal and professional tasks? We’re seeing the early waves of change, but there’s so much room for growth in ways that might seem mundane but could make a huge difference for everyday users. Excited to hear your next update!
In the 1980's, managers at major corporations doubted (and sometimes actively fought) the use of personal computers by their professional employees. There was sunk cost in mainframes, terminals and business software--and PC's were thought to be just a sideshow. Even older UNIX engineers fought the use of PC's.
For a lot of the engineering profession, engineering design work was still being done on paper--CAD was not yet readily available--and everyone was familiar with those processes that had existed for decades. CAD was expensive and it didn't fit the workflow.
In the early 90's, things really started to change rapidly. Engineers had to completely change the way they worked. Those who didn't or couldn't moved to other jobs.
But even in 1995, a mix of economic, social and technology experts were doubtful that the Internet would ever have an impact on our economy or the way we live.
https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/2016/08/25-years-h...
The stock markets didn't ignore the changes. The late 90's was a great time to be in the market.
But in 1999, the stock market bubble burst (the Dot-Com crash). The profit projections were just too optimistic. For those who got out, it was party time.
Despite the crash, it turned out that the technology (computers, networks , software, and then phones) was real and incredibly disruptive--just not as profitable as the market was predicting.
Nevertheless, companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon (and others) grew to become the backbone of our economy. The capability that grew out of that era killed a lot of jobs (e.g. mall jobs), but opened up entirely new economic opportunities, e.g. social media and software cybersecurity.
AI is just the next disruptive phase of this technology timeline. Jobs that were common 20 years ago will become less common, and professionals will need to learn to find new ways to work, make money and build careers--probably using some form of AI.
Yes, AI will be transformative and there is no reason to think it won't be if you pay attention to the history of the past 3 or 4 decades. Will the stock market bubble burst? Maybe...I am certainly paying attention.
https://archive.is/KRtz2
The AI to look at is Waymo's computer driven cars. They're here, they work, but Uber and Lyft aren't going away in the cities that Waymo drives in. The same goes for everything an LLM can do today. Nevermind the possibility of GPT-5, 6 or 7. The systemic effects of where they're at today are going to take a while to iron out.