by windexh8er | 2025-08-09 00:53:27+00:00
I think the problem I see with this type of response is that it doesn't take into context the waste of resources involved. If the 700M users per week is legitimate then my question to you is: how many of those invocations are worth the cost of resources that are spent, in the name of things that are truly productive?

And if AI was truly the holy grail that it's being sold as then there wouldn't be 700M users per week wasting all of these resources as heavily as we are because generative AI would have already solved for something better. It really does seem like these platforms are, and won't be, anywhere as useful as they're continuously claimed to be.

Just like Tesla FSD, we keep hearing about a "breakaway" model and the broken record of AGI. Instead of getting anything exceptionally better we seem to be getting models tuned for benchmarks and only marginal improvements.

I really try to limit what I'm using an LLM for these days. And not simply because of the resource pigs they are, but because it's also often a time sink. I spent an hour today testing out GPT-5 and asking it about a specific problem I was solving for using only 2 well documented technologies. After that hour it had hallucinated about a half dozen assumptions that were completely incorrect. One so obvious that I couldn't understand how it had gotten it so wrong. This particular technology, by default, consumes raw SSE. But GPT-5, even after telling it that it was wrong, continued to give me examples that were in a lot of ways worse and kept resorting to telling me to validate my server responses were JSON formatted in a particularly odd way.

Instead of continuing to waste my time correcting the model I just went back to reading the docs and GitHub issues to figure out the problem I was solving for. And that led me down a dark chain of thought: so what happens when the "teaching" mode rethinks history, or math fundamentals?

I'm sure a lot of people think ChatGPT is incredibly useful. And a lot of people are bought into not wanting to miss the boat, especially those who don't have any clue to how it works and what it takes to execute any given prompt. I actually think LLMs have a trajectory that will be similar to social media. The curve is different and I, hopefully, don't think we've seen the most useful aspects of it come to fruition as of yet. But I do think that if OpenAI is serving 700M users per week then, once again, we are the product. Because if AI could actually displace workers en masse today you wouldn't have access to it for $20/month. And they wouldn't offer it to you at 50% off for the next 3 months when you go to hit the cancel button. In fact, if it could do most of the things executives are claiming then you wouldn't have access to it at all. But, again, the users are the product - in very much the same way social media played into.

Finally, I'd surmise that of those 700M weekly users less than 10% of those sessions are being used for anything productive that you've mentioned and I'd place a high wager that the 10% is wildly conservative. I could be wrong, but again - we'd know about that if it were the actual truth.