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451 points imartin2k | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.218s | source
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dang ◴[] No.44480332[source]
I also find these features annoying and useless and wish they would go away. But that's not because LLMs are useless, nor because the public isn't using them (as daishi55 pointed out here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44479578)

It's because the integrations with existing products are arbitrary and poorly thought through, the same way that software imposed by executive fiat in BigCo offices for trend-chasing reasons has always been.

petekoomen made this point recently in a creative way: AI Horseless Carriages - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43773813 - April 2025 (478 comments)

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ToucanLoucan ◴[] No.44480949[source]
> It's because the integrations with existing products are arbitrary and poorly thought through, the same way that software imposed by executive fiat in BigCo offices for trend-chasing reasons has always been.

It's just rent-seeking. Nobody wants to actually build products for market anymore; it's a long process with a lot of risk behind it, and there's a chance you won't make shit for actual profit. If however you can create a "do anything" product that can be integrated with huge software suites, you can make a LOT of money and take a lot of mind-share without really lifting a finger. That's been my read on the "AI Industry" for a long time.

And to be clear, the integration part is the only part they give a shit about. Arguably especially for AI, since operating the product is so expensive compared to the vast majority of startups trying to scale. Serving JPEGs was never nearly as expensive for Instagram as responding to ChatGPT inquiries is for OpenAI, so they have every reason to diminish the number coming their way. Being the hip new tech that every CEO needs to ram into their product, irrespective of it does... well, anything useful, while also being so frustrating or obtuse for users to actually want to use, is arguably an incredibly good needle to thread, if they can manage it.

And the best part is, if OpenAI's products do actually do what they say on the tin, there's a good chance many lower rungs of employment will be replaced with their stupid chatbots, again irrespective of whether or not they actually do the job. Businesses run on "good enough." So it's great, if OpenAI fails, we get tons of useless tech injected into software products already creaking under the weight of so much bullhockety, and if they succeed, huge swaths of employees will be let go from entry level jobs, flooding the market, cratering the salary of entire categories of professions, and you'll never be able to get a fucking problem resolved with a startup company again. Not that you probably could anyway but it'll be even more frustrating.

And either way, all the people responsible for making all your technology worse every day will continue to get richer.

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Peritract ◴[] No.44482893[source]
> if OpenAI fails, we get tons of useless tech injected into software products already creaking under the weight of so much bullhockety, and if they succeed, huge swaths of employees will be let go from entry level jobs

I think this is the key idea. Right now it doesn't work that well, but if it did work as advertised, that would also be bad.

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ryandrake ◴[] No.44483499[source]
That's the thing I hate most about the whole AI frenzy: If it doesn't work, it's horrible, and if it does work, it's also horrible but for different reasons. The whole thing is a giant shit sandwich, and the only upside is for the few already-rich people serving it to us.
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DrillShopper ◴[] No.44485655[source]
And regardless of whether or not it works - it's pumping giant amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere which isn't a strictly local problem.
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DocTomoe ◴[] No.44489382[source]
Any time a new technology makes people uncomfortable, someone pulls the CO₂ card. We've seen this with cryptocurrencies, electric cars, even the internet itself.

But curiously, the same people rarely question the CO₂ footprint of things like gaming, streaming, international sports, live concerts, political campaigns, or even large-scale scientific research. Methane-fueled rockets and the LHC don't exactly run on solar-powered calculators, yet they're culturally or intellectually "approved" forms of emission.

Yes, AI consumes energy. So does everything else we choose to value. If we're serious about CO₂, then we need consistent standards — not just selective outrage. Either we cut fairly across the board, or we focus on making electricity cleaner and more sustainable, instead of trying to shame specific technologies into nonexistence (which, by the way, never happens).

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1. ToucanLoucan ◴[] No.44491675[source]
> Any time a new technology makes people uncomfortable, someone pulls the CO₂ card. We've seen this with cryptocurrencies, electric cars, even the internet itself.

I actually don't recall people "pulling the CO2 card" for the Internet. I do recall people doing it for cryptocurrency; and they were correct to do so. Even proof of stake is still incredibly energy inefficient at handling transactions. VISA handles thousands for what a proof-of-stake chain takes to handle a handful, and they do it faster to boot.

Electric cars don't contribute much CO2, so I don't recall much of that either. They do however have high particulate pollution amounts due to weighing considerably more (especially American-centric models like Teslas and the EV Hummer/F-150 Lightning) which aren't nothing to consider, and more to the point, electric cars do not solve the ancillary issues with infrastructure, like traffic congestion and cars effectively being a tax on everyone in a car-centric society who wants to be able to live. The fact that we all have to spend thousands every year on metal boxes we don't much care about just to be able to get around and have that box sit idle the vast majority of the time is ludicrously inefficient.

> But curiously, the same people rarely question the CO₂ footprint of things like gaming, streaming, international sports, live concerts, political campaigns, or even large-scale scientific research.

I have to vehemently disagree here. All scientific research, for starters, has to take environmental impact into account. Among other things that's why nobody in Vegas is watching nuclear tests anymore.

For another, people have long criticized numerous pop celebrities for being incredibly cavalier with the logistics for their concerts, and political figures have received similar criticism.

International sports meanwhile have gotten TONS of bad press for how awful it is that we have to move the stupid olympics around each year, both in the environmental sense, and the financial one since hosting practically renders a non-western country destitute overnight. Not even going into Qatar's controversial labor practices in building theirs.

> If we're serious about CO₂, then we need consistent standards — not just selective outrage. Either we cut fairly across the board, or we focus on making electricity cleaner and more sustainable, instead of trying to shame specific technologies into nonexistence (which, by the way, never happens).

No we don't. We can say, collectively, that the cost of powering gaming PC's, while notable, is something we're okay with, and conversely, powering plagiarism machines is not. Or, as people are so fond of saying here, let the market decide. Charge for AI services what they actually cost to provide plus profit, and see if the market will bear it. A lot of the interest right now is based on the fact that most of it is completely free, or being bundled with existing software, which is not a stable long-term solution.