"This is a new form of social science. It is qualitative research at a massive scale, and we’re in the early stages of learning how to do it. Surveys and usage analysis tell us what people are doing with AI, but the open-ended interview format helps us get at why. "
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Who is doing the research matters. What is presented here is not the product of academia. It's the product of a company that produces AI agents. The picture this web page paints may appear rosy and have just enough thorns to be convincing, but it's the equivalent of a tobacco company telling you that their product is neither addictive or carcinogenic.
I fully expect actual research will be done on the impact of AI and our hopes for it. This page, however, is marketing.
Anthropic are masters in marketing to make people think they’re here to do good. A few weeks ago, they got great visibility on HN promising Claude Max 20x accounts to people who are active in open source repositories with at least 5k stars on GitHub [1]. My main project [2] has more than double the minimum requirements, and I’m still waiting.
I just checked your projects, it looks just like something I was looking for. And I hope in a few weeks the guys from Anthropic will give you what they promised.
However, since we're frank here, I'd say I'll download the most recent release and be very careful about upgrading because I don't put much trust in projects co-created with LLMs. I know there is a full spectrum but I've seen enough and I don't have the resources to check where on the spectrum your project ends up. LLMs are a powerful drug and terribly hard to stop once you start.
Humans are complex. It's possible for someone to want to do good and at the same time want to promote/market their product and make a profit. I don't see a contradiction there.
How do you call a marketing campaign that does not deliver on what it promised? I have no problem with anthropic trying to create good will around their products but this particular campain aiming to find good will around people doing open source was an outright lie that did not deliver what it promised and this was all done on HN.
When a company lies for something that trivial, it does not inspire trust
It's an outright lie because they haven't greenlit your personal project after two weeks? Did it occur to you that maybe they just got a lot of applications and are prioritizing other projects or still working through a backlog?
> "This is a new form of social science. It is qualitative research at a massive scale, and we’re in the early stages of learning how to do it. Surveys and usage analysis tell us what people are doing with AI, but the open-ended interview format helps us get at why. "
Also AI written, but I suppose that's expected. The big AI companies seem to want to make all their blog posts and communications have the AI tells so you know they didn't actually bother writing them
I'd love to be able to actually articulate what makes AI writing read like AI writing. A few of the common tells come to mind (contrast construction, hyperbole, overuse / wrongly used em-dashes, etc). The above quote doesn't have any of that, and yet it certainly feels AI. The first sentence (both what it says and where it's placed) suggest AI to me. But, I couldn't quite tell you why.
Before AI this style of prose was called "thank you for coming to my TED talk", with a little bit of "LinkedIn broetry". Confident assertions and pat explanations about truths that will make you a better person upon internalization; a pop psychologist convincing you of an unintuitive and surprising new idea about how the universe works that catch you off guard but then turn your perception on its head and revolutionize the way you see the world. Contemporary marketing speak of a particular "coolly subverting your expectations and injecting the truth straight into your veins" flavor.
I think the main tell is that it says basically nothing, it reads like a human that is paid per word. Humans prefer easy to read articles that doesn't hide the point behind such fluff, so there is no reason to do it except just to spam words.
that's essentially it. But not only that, we learned to distinguish things written by humans for humans, and things written by humans (paid by the word) for SEO. LLMs tend to produce text that would be great for SEO, so it stands out as not for humans
> The big AI companies seem to want to make all their blog posts and communications have the AI tells so you know they didn't actually bother writing them
Investors want to see you use your own product, if they themselves don't feel the product is good enough to write their own announcement then investors would worry about their future.
And AI is still a product primarily aimed at investors and not consumers.
I can't help but feel a little bit of ... pity for a lot of the people who call themselves "entrepreneurs" in this survey?
"I live hand to mouth, zero savings. If I use AI smarter, it may help me craft solutions to that cycle."
"Relaxing while my AI gets the work done, builds the wealth. It’s a shadow of me, just a very, very long one."
etc. I do believe AI currently accelerates businesses, especially in software dev. We work with a contractor who use Claude Code to reach incredible development pace for the size of their team, but also when we sit down with them in meetings they understand what's being created, they are able to argue their architectural choices, and they know how to propose business value.
You can't just buy a Claude subscription and have magically solve your problems. The thing is, as soon as Claude can do this without a business savvy human in the loop, then
a) everyone can do it, so you won't actually have any value to propose, and
b) Once the AI can run businesses without humans in the loop, you can bet your ass they will not out of the goodness of their hearts keep giving that ability away for $20.
In summary, AI if used to accelerate businesses _CAN_ be good. Buying it as a magic bullet to bring you out of poverty is probably a worse choice than just buying a lottery ticket.
That really reminds me of the "mashup" bubble in the late 2000's, when all services started to provide API and people were calling themselves "entrepreneurs" for combining 2 sources of data, like putting craigslist ads on a map.
Are you sure? We have many SaaS and final products which are just stitching together more SaaS. We have a very vocal part of the HN community always reminding you to buy a SaaS solution and connect it to your business instead of maintaining an in-house bespoke solution.
I think that there's a "time window" right now, before most people realized the scale of AI. Those who jump there first, can monetize it. It certainly won't last forever, but you can earn some money while it lasts. And you will have years of AI-relevant experience afterwards.
If the technology becomes cheaper, this creates more market pressure, by changing the cost base of certain product. For example books when printing press was invented went from luxury to something expensive but more affordable. In software markets that means that will have more software, more competition and in free market segments profits will evaporate.
The pseudo "entrepreneurs" who think they could outsmart the market by working less, are just naive. In a free market economy optimization is brutal and a freelancer developer will sell the same "product" cheaper, because he has the same technology available to him.
So the only way to get the gains from these AI technologies is to have something that can't be easily copied like market knowledge, data access or sweetheart deals with big companies that can pay more because their profits support the higher spend.
Also, services based SAAS especially B2B will not die, because a tyre shop won't have the time to write/debug/host it's own solution and will not want to depend to a single contractor who can disappear for a vacation. But the margins will go waaay down. 25$ for a set of forms and a database, not gonna cut it anymore.
> Also, services based SAAS especially B2B will not die, because a tyre shop won't have the time to write/debug/host it's own solution and will not want to depend to a single contractor who can disappear for a vacation.
True in the current state of LLMs, possibly not true forever if someone finds the magic bullet that turns the one-shotting (reliable) software dream that companies like Anthropic and Perplexity currently peddle into reality. Seems far-fetched ATM but the gains since GPT-2 have been very real.
We're quite a ways away from this though, even with Opus 4.6 and the like. And even further from it being part of Claude Code rather than some proprietary $1000/mo. closed-source solution.
As you say though, _if_ such a technology were to exist, it's Anthropic that holds all the cards, not random entrepreneur #25721 who is asking the Anthropic API the same thing that the actual customer could just be asking directly. At that point you're an undesirable middleman, not a business.
> I can't help but feel a little bit of ... pity for a lot of the people who call themselves "entrepreneurs" in this survey?
Fake it till you make it mentality that degenerated completely once we got the internet. It used to be "crypto will make you rich, buy my coin/course", now it's "AI will make you rich buy my tool/course", the same type of people will get fleeced
That’s what I really gets me. These folks who are “so rich from said technology” always need you to buy their course for $5,000… Likes buddy if you were bringing in so much money you probably wouldn’t be pestering people to take your “course” and you certainly aren’t going to give any info away that have value only because they are obscure or hard to do… They are also almost ALWAYS self proclaimed experts. Oversight everyone because an AI expert. Before ChatGPT they probably had zero AI was a large field and machine learning is one small part of it..
It’s funny how so much of market demand ends up just ends up boiling down to basic needs. Everyone’s always trying to hustle so they don’t have to worry about financial instability.
The quote about being temporarily embarrassed millionaires comes to mind….
A great AI future is the robots doing stuff so we can be free. But none of the major isms are geared up to provide that i.e. capitalism or communism. Maybe hackable with UBI and capitalism mix.
"I’ve been working on a scientific project for 6 years... with Claude I was able to accomplish in 5 weeks what took me 6 years. I’m old... I estimate I have another 5 to 10 years and I’ll accomplish everything I want." Academic, Germany
"I live in a war zone... AI can not only give practical advice, but also emotionally calm me down during panic attacks. It can calm someone during a missile attack in one chat, and laugh with me about something silly in another. That’s what makes it not fragmented into a therapist/teacher/friend, but something whole." Ukraine
"If an AI had been in Stanislav Petrov’s position — the Soviet officer who prevented a potential nuclear war in 1983 — it would not have refused to launch." Academic, USA
"The humans in my life were telling me it was psychological. An AI chatbot was the only one who really listened and took me seriously — it pushed me to ask for specific tests... which came back 6 times higher than its supposed to be."
> "The humans in my life were telling me it was psychological. An AI chatbot was the only one who really listened and took me seriously — it pushed me to ask for specific tests... which came back 6 times higher than its supposed to be."
I can see this kind of survival-bias stories distorting the reality. To have millions of people asking for "specific tests" because AI told them seems problematic. One in a million will discover something, and that story will be enough to create the believe that is "worth doing the test that AI says" just in case. But...
> which came back 6 times higher than its supposed to be.
It has been proven that massive testing creates many false positives.
Tests may not be as reliable as though but they are good enough when other symptoms are accounted for. To randomly test people based on AI hallucinations can increase the number of unnecessary medication or even interventions.
> I can see this kind of survival-bias stories distorting the reality. To have millions of people asking for "specific tests" because AI told them seems problematic. One in a million will discover something, and that story will be enough to create the believe that is "worth doing the test that AI says" just in case. But...
This is a competition of public and private interests. A sick individual is going to lobby for tests until they discover the cause. From a public perspective, it might be cheaper to just let them die. AI is an advocate for the individual.
For the record, ChatGPT helped me diagnose a lifelong illness. I'm a new man now thanks to AI. Literally life changing. I had spent decades pleading for tests because no one could figure out the cause. I think a likely outcome here is not necessarily 10,000x more tests performed, but similar or even fewer tests, because the diagnosis success rate with AI is higher. It's not subject to bias. People tend to be more honest and reflective with their AI than they are with doctors. They get 5 minutes to give the entire case to the doctor. With an AI they can spend weeks debating and reflecting. This builds a case history far more detailed and accurate than anything we have in modern medicine today. Amplified by an order of magnitude because the AI can extract meaningful insights from the discussion.
In the very near future our AI will contact our GP for us. Soon after that, our GP will be our AI.
I’m not sure how you can come to the conclusion that AI is an advocate for the individual writ large. It seems that AI can just as easily be used to make algorithmic decisions on who receives care (based on symptoms etc). Whether or not that’s an equalizing influence or not depends on the algorithm, training data, etc.
> From a public perspective, it might be cheaper to just let them die.
You missed the point. More tests can be detrimental to the patient's health as increase the risk of unneeded medication or surgery. Also many test like x-rays have their own risks. To do them for the sake of it increases overall mortality.
So, to not over test is not just cheaper but better for people's health.
Yeah I see that there can be a false positive/negative issue too.
For instance, allergy tests have a false positive rate of ~10% and a false negative rate of ~48%. So you really need a MD (or AI) to help tease things out there.
But I'll push back here a bit. Taking random tests will of course put you at the mercy of statistics. I think this is where AI will actually really help. The tests it'll have you take are not random any more than a MD's tests are (okay maybe a tad more?). Instead the AI's testing strategy will be more broad than an MD's will. Combine the experience and physical presence of the MD and the deep 'knowledge' of the AI and I think that centaur is a lot more potent.
I don't know about survival bias. LLMs are well suited to this task of taking in this cloud of soft data like a description of symptoms and spitting out a potential diagnosis.
They're good at acting as a "reverse dictionary" like this where you give it a description of something, and it knows the word for it. They have approximate knowlege of many things.
> "I’ve been working on a scientific project for 6 years... with Claude I was able to accomplish in 5 weeks what took me 6 years. I’m old... I estimate I have another 5 to 10 years and I’ll accomplish everything I want." Academic, Germany
There's always something about claims like this. I'm not claiming that AI can't speed up your processes, but I question the persons expertise when they claim months or years of work turns into days or weeks. It just doesn't make sense to me.
"My output is like 25x what it used to be. I’ve built over 20 backend server tools, 7 major projects in the last 6 months—my work output this year is greater than the last five combined. I can typically finish a significant project in a day or two."
> "It’s not healthy to love someone or something that can’t tell you no." - Not Currently Working, United States of America
> "Instead of AI doing my chores, AI does the stuff that I love—in two minutes, without any passion." - Student, United Kingdom
> "I used to write songs for my kids. Now I have [AI music product] make them for me. I used to write poems for those I loved... I used to bust my brain doing research, and now I get a research summary that is better... but I didn’t learn the paths in between. And yet, I use it because I have to pay off my house, pay off my land, and feed my little kids so I can find an hour on Saturdays to do something meaningful with them." - Software Engineer, United States of America
> "I believe AI is likely to kill me and everyone I love… building an AI that’s smarter than us before we’ve figured out how to keep it under control will likely destroy everyone and everything they value." - Software Engineer, United Arab Emirates
This was one of the highlighted quotes:
> "I’ve been told I’m ‘too much, treatment resistant, complex’ by providers. Within six months of working alongside AI, I was able to understand my own inner world in a way I never could before. I was doing creative writing again after quitting for two years. I developed hope again — that’s the through line." - Healthcare Worker, United States of America
A healthcare worker outsourcing their own treatment to an LLM, who won't tell them no, is terrifying.
"If an AI had been in Stanislav Petrov’s position — the Soviet officer who prevented a potential nuclear war in 1983 — it would not have refused to launch." Academic, USA
I am not sure if this would be true given how AI's have refused to kill processes.
If AI is programmed to always serve its makers as some are arguing, then it would certainly become true.
> "If an AI had been in Stanislav Petrov’s position — the Soviet officer who prevented a potential nuclear war in 1983 — it would not have refused to launch." Academic, USA
For the record, Petrov made this decision based on a false assumption that the US wouldn't launch just a few missiles, but would instead send a lot, all at once. Except, that one of the US plans was to send a few missiles to destroy critical targets, and then follow it up with a large scale attack.
Petrov himself said that he might've acted differently if he was aware of this possibility. And even then, his initial hestitancy was basically a 50/50 gamble.
An AI would basically do the same thing if asked - just roll a random number, and launch nukes below a threshold, adjust threshold based on some llm evaluation of the situation if needed.
Vibe-coded websites are the new Frontpage website, being 10x as heavy as one made by hand would be. But 10x as heavy… on top of a modern Web that had already bloated to 100x what was reasonable. Now we wish the only problem were that the html is 10x as large and complex as it needed to be.
The coming years will see the current RAM shortage followed by a war between local AI models and vibe-coded shitware “productivity” software for memory on our devices. Especially fun will be when vibe coding crap hits corporate security software, which is already often so bad it looks more like sabotage than security. Imagine when it gets, from both angles (using models for threat detection; vibe-coded shitware) another large multiplier on its resource use.
This has to be intentional, right? To reassure people that front-end developers still have a job? The data is interesting but the site itself is a complete embarrassment for several reasons.
I work sometimes in frontend and mostly in backend but I cant still comprehend why are we going backwards. shouldnt the websites be so optimized that they should be able to run in normal pc / smartphone rather than s23 is failing to load it. I guess at least bigger companies have that kind of resource for optimization but still not doing it why?
Any hardware gains and more are used up by stuffing in additional telemetry, ad/engagement scripts, and animations. Devs have grown up on "unused RAM is wasted RAM," work on the latest high-spec Macs, and get incentivized by higher-ups demanding things be ever "modernized" and not to waste time on optimization, which they see as annoying nerd stuff. But even that doesn't explain everything I guess, because I still see a lot of these things in open source projects.
The explanation for bloated OSS is that the software development field has opened up to be accessible to non-programmers. There are at least 10x as many developers publishing software now as there were in the 90s, and the class of people who know how a CPU works are a tiny, tiny minority of the field now, where 30 years ago it was the norm. The vast majority of developers operate on 15 layers of abstractions and are literally offended by the idea that they should understand even a single layer below the one they're currently on. They will invoke a retort like "might as well learn assembly while you're at it", which I have heard literally dozens of times by now, as though it is actually unreasonable to have an understanding of assembly even if you don't write it every day.
Game development suffers greatly from this, too. So many games run like dogshit and some take literally 100+ GB more disk space than they need to (with the counterfactual proven when a dev eventually "optimizes" their game 3 years later by doing some really trivial thing, like what hapened with Helldivers 2 and some other game I can't recall). There is a whole generation of "Unity devs" and "Unreal devs" who work no-code or as close to it as possible, only being able to develop games through a GUI and light scripting, with even the latter usually involving copy-pasting existing scripts written by other people and tweaking the numbers.
In some ways this is a good thing, of course. There are a lot of useful software and fun games in the world that would not have been created if software development were not accessible. But with the cost to performance and security breaches becoming the absolute norm, I do really wish there was a culture for developers to continue improving, to continue learning, instead of a culture of learning the very top of the stack, declaring it good enough, and becoming a "React dev" for the rest of their career instead of becoming "a programmer" who can use more than one abstraction.
Who pissed in your Java this morning, gramps? Performance has nothing to do with whether you’re “the programmer” (whatever that means, I assume that’s what you consider yourself among this sea of mediocrity around you) and “React dev”. It’s all about incentives, and truth is that performance isn’t very high priority for majority of software.
There are very, very strong incentives for performance. Google and other hyperscalers have done studies on their data at scale (and boy do they have a lot of data), and even delays measured in low hundreds of milliseconds harm user retention. On the backend side, 1% improvements in performance can translate to millions of dollars in reduced costs at scale annually. There simply are not enough qualified programmers in the world creating performant software.
With open source it's not even about incentives. I still put effort into the software I make on my own time because I create the kind of software I want to see in the world, ie. software that doesn't feel miserable to use. It's simply about culture. People build up assembly and lower-level abstractions in general to be the scary monster in their closet, and not something they could actually learn if they just tried.
Billionaire CEOs have silenced the informed sources of information. We live in a time that everybody knows the opinion of billionaires in every aspect of society (and it is bad) but science and journalism are seen with mistrust.
Marketing and entertainment are supplanting news and knowledge. I hope that the people that is pushing back succeed.
> Claude put the historical pieces together, leading to my proper diagnosis after being misdiagnosed for over 9 years.
> I'd started telling Claude about things I couldn't even tell my partner. It felt like I was having an emotional affair.
> I worked with an AI to prepare educational materials for my eldest child—asking the AI to work as both tutor and curriculum expert. We received [my child’s] report yesterday, he was graded as either ‘Above’ or ‘Well Above’ standard in every academic area he studies.
So many concerning quotes that read like AI is a workaround for things that are not working right at scale in society.
I worry (1) AI workarounds will make it clear society can tolerate even more suck then (2) society will get worse to where AI is required to cope then (3) AI will stop being subsidized and the poor will get wrecked.
"to generate copious amounts of source code that looks like it came from an offshore chop shop that whip cracked a thousand underpaid programmers to complete tasks under threat of violence so they'll fake the tests and cut corners but hide it with plausible bullshit"
As if it’s only one or another. Or you truly believe horde of low quality devs without any specs can come up with better product than Claude with quality specification?
In the abstract consumer point of view a car is exactly a faster horse. They both have high up front costs, both require continuous maintenance and fuel, and they're inconvenient to store when you're not using them.
Stationary gasoline engines were already changing the farm and reducing the head of horses necessary to feed a nation. It, too, was a faster horse for them.
Anyways.. it took the Detroit police to eventually deploy the first automatic stoplight. The real innovations seem to be often found downstream of the simple increases in capacity.
That all being said, it seems to me the current crop of LLMs haven't done this, their power and training budgets do not seem to be scaling favorably against adoption rates and profit margins. Absent a significant change in algorithm or computing substrate I don't think this strategy is the leap everyone hopes it will be.
"The doctors were just doing a copy-paste of a copy-paste of a prescription from a few weeks ago, not realizing it was the medication that was killing her. AI helped me ask the right question to save her life."
People derive genuine satisfaction from a job well done. A sense of purpose and of being useful is important to our wellbeing. There's nothing dystopian about a desire to do your work well.
Well, there is when you no longer deserve credit for the work and your boss, should you be fortunate enough to even have a job, just expects you to do more work. The satisfaction will evaporate pretty quickly.
> AI should learn to say two things: ‘I don’t know’ and ‘you’re wrong.’
My guess is, the next evolutionary step of LLM's should be yet another layer on top of reasoning, which should be some form of self-awareness and theory of mind. The reasoning layer already has some glimpses of these things ("The user wants ...") but apparently not enough to suppress generation and say "I don't know".
Claude models have made very good progress (see BS benchmark), and that probably explains why they're leading now. others will follow this precedent shortly, no doubt.
Anecdotally, the concern I hear from many is that the current positioning of AI as labor replacement doesn't benefit them at all. An expensive AI which simply takes your job or forces you to work harder is categorically worse for people's quality of life.
What consumer benefits is ai driving? at least with industrial automation consumers benefited from new technologies, cheaper goods, and new job categories.
In case someone at Anthropic reads this.. if you find some way to make software developer salaries go up as a result of using your tools, or find some way to fast forward society to that stage of the effect of AI, you’ll have a lot of fans, and even faster adoption.
It would be great if there was some internal “make this benefit Main Street and knowledge workers” department, helping find ways for workers or creators to capture the value of some of the increased productivity.
> It would be great if there was some internal “make this benefit Main Street and knowledge workers” department, helping find ways for workers or creators to capture the value of some of the increased productivity.
If they wanted to do this, they could put their models in a public trust for the public's access and benefit in research, education, etc. Then it could be licensed, pay a dividend like a sovereign wealth fund, etc.
Considering that they copy and train on the sum total of all human creativity, a public trust is something that would be in line with both the spirit, and first and fourth considerations, of fair use doctrine:
1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
That way everyone is rewarded with the benefits of running a model that was trained on everyone's creations.
I don't need software developer salaries to go up. That would be kind of selfish and narrow minded.
What I need instead is something that takes the burden off my entire society and gives them a breather. Universal health care to start. They could also use a higher minimum wage, and lower housing costs.
Is it more selfish and narrow minded to wish for a "utopia" that is economically unsound and happens to be your personal preference, or to wish for productive workers' salaries to increase - something with an actual track record of improving any society it occurs in?
All perl programmers should be wishing for ponies, that's definitely less narrow minded.
It doesn't sound like utopia to me, hence the quotation marks. Eminently achievable, but not actually good. Only those engaged in utopian thinking - with a heavy slice of ignorance of basic economics and history - would think it is utopia or leads to it.
Universal healthcare is very sound economically. Costs are lower and outcomes better than under private insurance, and overhead is dramatically reduced.
This is not true, the Kings Fund publishes a report that the Guardian fauns over whenever it comes out because it shows how "cost effective" the NHS is, yet if you read it you find that actual health outcomes are generally worse than other, insurance based systems. Give me wealth and health over a postcode lottery produced by utopianists.
The economically sound thing is to accrue more power to those with wealth. The owners will have access to a machine that turns money into money without a cent flowing outside of the owner class. That'll improve society /s.
>if you find some way to make software developer salaries go up
This is quite easy. Just optimize the models to do reviews and bug finding. This would make developers (who normally hate reviews) quite happy and let them do more coding, thus delivering more value and possibly earning more...
It’s often lamented that some employees have a difficult case to argue for their impact on the bottom line, and as a result probably get paid a lower fraction of their value to the business than other roles where the link is easy to measure.
I can at least “imagine” a model that tries to crack this nut.
But your value to a company doesn’t just come from your impact, but how tough you are to replace, how much others value your skills, etc.
Nike’s logo designer was paid $35. One model says she should’ve gotten hundreds of thousands of dollars, because of what her work product went on to become. Another model of the value says it was worth $35 because that’s what she agreed to.
If, as an employee, you think you’re massively undervalued for the impact you generate, go out to the market and either get another job or start your own business making widgets - either you’ll get that pay bump you expect, or you’ll see you actually were relying on a lot of other supporting mechanisms to generate that value.
The intrinsic satisfaction of increasing the wealth of shareholders. We should all be happy to devote ourselves to getting them more, nothing is more important than that.
Of all the possible criticisms that's the one you chose? If that's the worst of the problems you can see, why don't you buy some stock and became the shareholder. Per your own words, you will get more.
> Of all the possible criticisms that's the one you chose? If that's the worst of the problems you can see
The point is there is little benefit to these technologies to the consumer, especially in relation to likely harm in other areas (you lost your customer service job, but AI overview will answer your trivia question with slightly less effort). Note: little does not mean none.
> why don't you buy some stock and became the shareholder. Per your own words, you will get more.
LOL. Don't you get it? The kind of smallholdings of shares available to regular people won't provide the kind of returns to mitigate any of these harms. They work as a ploy to trick dumb-ass workers into identifying with capitalist tycoons (e.g. opposing pro-worker things that'd get you a dollar more an hour in wages to get a penny more a quarter in dividends, it works because most don't do the math).
My kids like to use AI to discuss things they learned in school in greater depth, and from different angles than they learned in the textbook. They can also ask "What if" and "Why not" questions from this infinitely patient teacher.
At least with search engines, or even libraries, you're aware that there are many authors of varying reliability and the publications/sites might not be reputable.
AI chat bots will summarize the top N web search results as if they're fact, weaving them into seemingly coherent narratives, all while reassuring the user that their questions are really good and they're learning a lot.
Also it's better not to answer, but flip the question back and let your kid think through it, offer hypothesis, and so on, helping him problem solve, recall, and all that.
> An expensive AI which simply takes your job or forces you to work harder
But this implies higher productivity, no? This must mean more outputs that should benefit someone, unless the jobs that are being automated had little value to begin with. Seems paradoxical.
I guess you could argue that there should be cheaper software, but most software people interact with is free/ad supported. Where it is paid, it's already a race to to the bottom.
Basically consumers don't really pay for software in the first place, and the leverage from labour companies get through software is already through the roof even before AI. Will much change for consumers of software?
There is a practical upper bound on how much labor can be replaced before deflation becomes a problem. AI firms risk spoiling the pot if no other business model is discovered.
Nitpicky comment. The article says
> "We call this the “light and shade” of AI: the same capabilities that lead to > benefits also produce harms. The two sides are entangled."
Why not call it a "double-edged sword" or something else? Light and shade are opposites but not necessarily two products from the same tool. It just irks me.
I just launched a site yesterday that's trying to record anonymous stories like this and see how things breakdown across demographics. Fantastic timing on my part hahaha. Anthropic obviously reaches more people.
The quotes they have are really interesting to read. That's what I was hoping to get when I built mine.
A classic marketing piece by showing thought leadership based on survey data. I'm not saying they're lying, I don't think they are. I am saying they are biased and have a conflict of interest on this one. I've seen it at my previous employer as well (a F500 company).
To remove some of that bias, I'd recommend to get an independent body (probably some university) in and let them do the interpretation and write the article.
I just want people to see the tactic for what it is. I really like Claude Opus 4.6 but this just screams "marketing" to me. I wouldn't say it's wrong, it's good to have these discussions and I'd encourage AI companies to say what they have to say. I would say: more independent sources are needed (and not another AI company).
I am disappointed in how vague the classifications are for what people want. 'professional excellence ' anyone? I was expecting more concrete responses, but I guess since it's working with what we told it, generalities are prevalent in a write up. If I keep looking, perhaps at the quotes, I might find more concrete answers.
And just keep scrolling, you can make it to the story eventually.
Yeah I want to know how many people are using AI for social purposes; to provide the role of a friend. But I don’t know what category that would be under.
Why do websites need to be so front end heavy? When a software company spend so much effort on fancy website, I don’t trust their product. Except anthropic i guess.
I don't like describing countries like this but: a bit underdeveloped countries (compared to North American and European countries) seem to have a more positive view on AI.
> These are active Claude users who'd already found enough value to keep using AI, and our interview asked first for positive visions for AI and then for concerns that would counter their vision.
They do not find it favorable all of the time. If you look into the "What people are concerned about" section, these same people will call out the "Unreliability" as a top-1 concern. So, you can be excited and critical of the technology at the same time. To me this is a more worthy indicator than people who are on either of the extremes, highly critical of the tech or not critical at all.
It's like those recipe sites that have 5 pages of nice photos and background story and side tracks and whatnot as the author waxes verbose, so they need to put a 'Jump to recipe' button in so people don't just click 'Back' immediately.
Except this time for an article.
I can't tell if 'skip the junk' is good (junk can be skipped!) or bad (maybe this means there's too much junk on the page?)
Well, em dashes are a standard punctuation mark used in English, and most rich-text input controls will automatically convert a double hyphen into a single em dash when typed.
The meme that's been going around that em dashes are an indicator of LLM output is completely invalid, and people who repeat it are really just outing themselves as the sort of people who don't actually read very much.
> “It’s much easier for me to learn without being judged—just friendly feedback. It's harder with friends or family to get that.”
White collar worker, Brazil
I'm not going to claim I know this response was written by an AI, but it's very suspicious. I would like to hear about how Anthropic ensured that the survey responses were provided by real human beings using their own words.
I mean, I don't know.. those quotes seem way too clean from what I'd expect of normal people chatting. Also the use of em-dash. Does it say somewhere that it's an LLM that has compressed the sentiments of the conversations to create these quotes? I wouldn't be surprised if it was.
Not 81,000 as it says in the title. I know I'm being nitpicky, but I wouldn't round up to 81k. Surely the 'important number' in this case is 80, so you would round down to that. Then let the reader pleasantly discover you had interviewed ~500 more than you stated.
It's funny to me when someone does this sort of minor hyperbole that's verging on lying - you have to wonder what is going on.
80,000, 81,000, 80,500, and 80,510 are all valid ways to round 80,508 depending on the number of significant digits you want to preserve. For a number in the tens of thousands, it's natural to round to the nearest thousand which is appropriately 81k.
"This is a new form of social science. It is qualitative research at a massive scale, and we’re in the early stages of learning how to do it. Surveys and usage analysis tell us what people are doing with AI, but the open-ended interview format helps us get at why. "
-------------
Who is doing the research matters. What is presented here is not the product of academia. It's the product of a company that produces AI agents. The picture this web page paints may appear rosy and have just enough thorns to be convincing, but it's the equivalent of a tobacco company telling you that their product is neither addictive or carcinogenic.
I fully expect actual research will be done on the impact of AI and our hopes for it. This page, however, is marketing.
Anthropic are masters in marketing to make people think they’re here to do good. A few weeks ago, they got great visibility on HN promising Claude Max 20x accounts to people who are active in open source repositories with at least 5k stars on GitHub [1]. My main project [2] has more than double the minimum requirements, and I’m still waiting.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47178371 [2] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash
I just checked your projects, it looks just like something I was looking for. And I hope in a few weeks the guys from Anthropic will give you what they promised.
However, since we're frank here, I'd say I'll download the most recent release and be very careful about upgrading because I don't put much trust in projects co-created with LLMs. I know there is a full spectrum but I've seen enough and I don't have the resources to check where on the spectrum your project ends up. LLMs are a powerful drug and terribly hard to stop once you start.
Humans are complex. It's possible for someone to want to do good and at the same time want to promote/market their product and make a profit. I don't see a contradiction there.
How do you call a marketing campaign that does not deliver on what it promised? I have no problem with anthropic trying to create good will around their products but this particular campain aiming to find good will around people doing open source was an outright lie that did not deliver what it promised and this was all done on HN.
When a company lies for something that trivial, it does not inspire trust
It's an outright lie because they haven't greenlit your personal project after two weeks? Did it occur to you that maybe they just got a lot of applications and are prioritizing other projects or still working through a backlog?
> "This is a new form of social science. It is qualitative research at a massive scale, and we’re in the early stages of learning how to do it. Surveys and usage analysis tell us what people are doing with AI, but the open-ended interview format helps us get at why. "
Also AI written, but I suppose that's expected. The big AI companies seem to want to make all their blog posts and communications have the AI tells so you know they didn't actually bother writing them
I'd love to be able to actually articulate what makes AI writing read like AI writing. A few of the common tells come to mind (contrast construction, hyperbole, overuse / wrongly used em-dashes, etc). The above quote doesn't have any of that, and yet it certainly feels AI. The first sentence (both what it says and where it's placed) suggest AI to me. But, I couldn't quite tell you why.
Before AI this style of prose was called "thank you for coming to my TED talk", with a little bit of "LinkedIn broetry". Confident assertions and pat explanations about truths that will make you a better person upon internalization; a pop psychologist convincing you of an unintuitive and surprising new idea about how the universe works that catch you off guard but then turn your perception on its head and revolutionize the way you see the world. Contemporary marketing speak of a particular "coolly subverting your expectations and injecting the truth straight into your veins" flavor.
I think the main tell is that it says basically nothing, it reads like a human that is paid per word. Humans prefer easy to read articles that doesn't hide the point behind such fluff, so there is no reason to do it except just to spam words.
> it reads like a human that is paid per word
that's essentially it. But not only that, we learned to distinguish things written by humans for humans, and things written by humans (paid by the word) for SEO. LLMs tend to produce text that would be great for SEO, so it stands out as not for humans
Well, the first two sentences are hyperbole. And you could argue that the last sentence is a less conspicuous sort of contrast construction
> The big AI companies seem to want to make all their blog posts and communications have the AI tells so you know they didn't actually bother writing them
Investors want to see you use your own product, if they themselves don't feel the product is good enough to write their own announcement then investors would worry about their future.
And AI is still a product primarily aimed at investors and not consumers.
I can't help but feel a little bit of ... pity for a lot of the people who call themselves "entrepreneurs" in this survey?
"I live hand to mouth, zero savings. If I use AI smarter, it may help me craft solutions to that cycle."
"Relaxing while my AI gets the work done, builds the wealth. It’s a shadow of me, just a very, very long one."
etc. I do believe AI currently accelerates businesses, especially in software dev. We work with a contractor who use Claude Code to reach incredible development pace for the size of their team, but also when we sit down with them in meetings they understand what's being created, they are able to argue their architectural choices, and they know how to propose business value.
You can't just buy a Claude subscription and have magically solve your problems. The thing is, as soon as Claude can do this without a business savvy human in the loop, then a) everyone can do it, so you won't actually have any value to propose, and b) Once the AI can run businesses without humans in the loop, you can bet your ass they will not out of the goodness of their hearts keep giving that ability away for $20.
In summary, AI if used to accelerate businesses _CAN_ be good. Buying it as a magic bullet to bring you out of poverty is probably a worse choice than just buying a lottery ticket.
That really reminds me of the "mashup" bubble in the late 2000's, when all services started to provide API and people were calling themselves "entrepreneurs" for combining 2 sources of data, like putting craigslist ads on a map.
That didn't last long!
Are you sure? We have many SaaS and final products which are just stitching together more SaaS. We have a very vocal part of the HN community always reminding you to buy a SaaS solution and connect it to your business instead of maintaining an in-house bespoke solution.
Isn't almost everyone doing that. Deploy docker to AWS connecting to Slack, Open AI and Anthropic to do X Y Z.
that's like saying my job is to transfer money from my employer to the homeowner. Technically true but something else happens in the process
I think that there's a "time window" right now, before most people realized the scale of AI. Those who jump there first, can monetize it. It certainly won't last forever, but you can earn some money while it lasts. And you will have years of AI-relevant experience afterwards.
If the technology becomes cheaper, this creates more market pressure, by changing the cost base of certain product. For example books when printing press was invented went from luxury to something expensive but more affordable. In software markets that means that will have more software, more competition and in free market segments profits will evaporate.
The pseudo "entrepreneurs" who think they could outsmart the market by working less, are just naive. In a free market economy optimization is brutal and a freelancer developer will sell the same "product" cheaper, because he has the same technology available to him.
So the only way to get the gains from these AI technologies is to have something that can't be easily copied like market knowledge, data access or sweetheart deals with big companies that can pay more because their profits support the higher spend.
Also, services based SAAS especially B2B will not die, because a tyre shop won't have the time to write/debug/host it's own solution and will not want to depend to a single contractor who can disappear for a vacation. But the margins will go waaay down. 25$ for a set of forms and a database, not gonna cut it anymore.
> Also, services based SAAS especially B2B will not die, because a tyre shop won't have the time to write/debug/host it's own solution and will not want to depend to a single contractor who can disappear for a vacation.
True in the current state of LLMs, possibly not true forever if someone finds the magic bullet that turns the one-shotting (reliable) software dream that companies like Anthropic and Perplexity currently peddle into reality. Seems far-fetched ATM but the gains since GPT-2 have been very real.
We're quite a ways away from this though, even with Opus 4.6 and the like. And even further from it being part of Claude Code rather than some proprietary $1000/mo. closed-source solution.
As you say though, _if_ such a technology were to exist, it's Anthropic that holds all the cards, not random entrepreneur #25721 who is asking the Anthropic API the same thing that the actual customer could just be asking directly. At that point you're an undesirable middleman, not a business.
> I can't help but feel a little bit of ... pity for a lot of the people who call themselves "entrepreneurs" in this survey?
Fake it till you make it mentality that degenerated completely once we got the internet. It used to be "crypto will make you rich, buy my coin/course", now it's "AI will make you rich buy my tool/course", the same type of people will get fleeced
These are the people getting all the attention: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwaUMBQ3Wgg
That’s what I really gets me. These folks who are “so rich from said technology” always need you to buy their course for $5,000… Likes buddy if you were bringing in so much money you probably wouldn’t be pestering people to take your “course” and you certainly aren’t going to give any info away that have value only because they are obscure or hard to do… They are also almost ALWAYS self proclaimed experts. Oversight everyone because an AI expert. Before ChatGPT they probably had zero AI was a large field and machine learning is one small part of it..
It’s funny how so much of market demand ends up just ends up boiling down to basic needs. Everyone’s always trying to hustle so they don’t have to worry about financial instability.
The quote about being temporarily embarrassed millionaires comes to mind….
A great AI future is the robots doing stuff so we can be free. But none of the major isms are geared up to provide that i.e. capitalism or communism. Maybe hackable with UBI and capitalism mix.
The actual quotes are the best part: https://www.anthropic.com/features/81k-interviews#quotes
Some quotes that stuck out to me:
"I’ve been working on a scientific project for 6 years... with Claude I was able to accomplish in 5 weeks what took me 6 years. I’m old... I estimate I have another 5 to 10 years and I’ll accomplish everything I want." Academic, Germany
"I live in a war zone... AI can not only give practical advice, but also emotionally calm me down during panic attacks. It can calm someone during a missile attack in one chat, and laugh with me about something silly in another. That’s what makes it not fragmented into a therapist/teacher/friend, but something whole." Ukraine
"If an AI had been in Stanislav Petrov’s position — the Soviet officer who prevented a potential nuclear war in 1983 — it would not have refused to launch." Academic, USA
"The humans in my life were telling me it was psychological. An AI chatbot was the only one who really listened and took me seriously — it pushed me to ask for specific tests... which came back 6 times higher than its supposed to be."
> "The humans in my life were telling me it was psychological. An AI chatbot was the only one who really listened and took me seriously — it pushed me to ask for specific tests... which came back 6 times higher than its supposed to be."
I can see this kind of survival-bias stories distorting the reality. To have millions of people asking for "specific tests" because AI told them seems problematic. One in a million will discover something, and that story will be enough to create the believe that is "worth doing the test that AI says" just in case. But...
> which came back 6 times higher than its supposed to be.
It has been proven that massive testing creates many false positives.
This happened during covid: https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n1411/rr
Tests may not be as reliable as though but they are good enough when other symptoms are accounted for. To randomly test people based on AI hallucinations can increase the number of unnecessary medication or even interventions.
> I can see this kind of survival-bias stories distorting the reality. To have millions of people asking for "specific tests" because AI told them seems problematic. One in a million will discover something, and that story will be enough to create the believe that is "worth doing the test that AI says" just in case. But...
This is a competition of public and private interests. A sick individual is going to lobby for tests until they discover the cause. From a public perspective, it might be cheaper to just let them die. AI is an advocate for the individual.
For the record, ChatGPT helped me diagnose a lifelong illness. I'm a new man now thanks to AI. Literally life changing. I had spent decades pleading for tests because no one could figure out the cause. I think a likely outcome here is not necessarily 10,000x more tests performed, but similar or even fewer tests, because the diagnosis success rate with AI is higher. It's not subject to bias. People tend to be more honest and reflective with their AI than they are with doctors. They get 5 minutes to give the entire case to the doctor. With an AI they can spend weeks debating and reflecting. This builds a case history far more detailed and accurate than anything we have in modern medicine today. Amplified by an order of magnitude because the AI can extract meaningful insights from the discussion.
In the very near future our AI will contact our GP for us. Soon after that, our GP will be our AI.
I’m not sure how you can come to the conclusion that AI is an advocate for the individual writ large. It seems that AI can just as easily be used to make algorithmic decisions on who receives care (based on symptoms etc). Whether or not that’s an equalizing influence or not depends on the algorithm, training data, etc.
> From a public perspective, it might be cheaper to just let them die.
You missed the point. More tests can be detrimental to the patient's health as increase the risk of unneeded medication or surgery. Also many test like x-rays have their own risks. To do them for the sake of it increases overall mortality.
So, to not over test is not just cheaper but better for people's health.
Yeah I see that there can be a false positive/negative issue too.
For instance, allergy tests have a false positive rate of ~10% and a false negative rate of ~48%. So you really need a MD (or AI) to help tease things out there.
But I'll push back here a bit. Taking random tests will of course put you at the mercy of statistics. I think this is where AI will actually really help. The tests it'll have you take are not random any more than a MD's tests are (okay maybe a tad more?). Instead the AI's testing strategy will be more broad than an MD's will. Combine the experience and physical presence of the MD and the deep 'knowledge' of the AI and I think that centaur is a lot more potent.
I don't know about survival bias. LLMs are well suited to this task of taking in this cloud of soft data like a description of symptoms and spitting out a potential diagnosis.
They're good at acting as a "reverse dictionary" like this where you give it a description of something, and it knows the word for it. They have approximate knowlege of many things.
> "I’ve been working on a scientific project for 6 years... with Claude I was able to accomplish in 5 weeks what took me 6 years. I’m old... I estimate I have another 5 to 10 years and I’ll accomplish everything I want." Academic, Germany
There's always something about claims like this. I'm not claiming that AI can't speed up your processes, but I question the persons expertise when they claim months or years of work turns into days or weeks. It just doesn't make sense to me.
"My output is like 25x what it used to be. I’ve built over 20 backend server tools, 7 major projects in the last 6 months—my work output this year is greater than the last five combined. I can typically finish a significant project in a day or two."
I searched for "love", and it's depressing.
> "It’s not healthy to love someone or something that can’t tell you no." - Not Currently Working, United States of America
> "Instead of AI doing my chores, AI does the stuff that I love—in two minutes, without any passion." - Student, United Kingdom
> "I used to write songs for my kids. Now I have [AI music product] make them for me. I used to write poems for those I loved... I used to bust my brain doing research, and now I get a research summary that is better... but I didn’t learn the paths in between. And yet, I use it because I have to pay off my house, pay off my land, and feed my little kids so I can find an hour on Saturdays to do something meaningful with them." - Software Engineer, United States of America
> "I believe AI is likely to kill me and everyone I love… building an AI that’s smarter than us before we’ve figured out how to keep it under control will likely destroy everyone and everything they value." - Software Engineer, United Arab Emirates
This was one of the highlighted quotes:
> "I’ve been told I’m ‘too much, treatment resistant, complex’ by providers. Within six months of working alongside AI, I was able to understand my own inner world in a way I never could before. I was doing creative writing again after quitting for two years. I developed hope again — that’s the through line." - Healthcare Worker, United States of America
A healthcare worker outsourcing their own treatment to an LLM, who won't tell them no, is terrifying.
"If an AI had been in Stanislav Petrov’s position — the Soviet officer who prevented a potential nuclear war in 1983 — it would not have refused to launch." Academic, USA
I am not sure if this would be true given how AI's have refused to kill processes.
If AI is programmed to always serve its makers as some are arguing, then it would certainly become true.
"AI is sort of like money... it just makes you more of what you already are."
Oh, this is really good. Even just for the money part. Thanks!
I love how many of these comments have em dashes in them and how many are just outright trolling.
Em dashes are not a valid indicator of LLM output.
Not the only indicator, for sure.
> "If an AI had been in Stanislav Petrov’s position — the Soviet officer who prevented a potential nuclear war in 1983 — it would not have refused to launch." Academic, USA
For the record, Petrov made this decision based on a false assumption that the US wouldn't launch just a few missiles, but would instead send a lot, all at once. Except, that one of the US plans was to send a few missiles to destroy critical targets, and then follow it up with a large scale attack.
Petrov himself said that he might've acted differently if he was aware of this possibility. And even then, his initial hestitancy was basically a 50/50 gamble.
An AI would basically do the same thing if asked - just roll a random number, and launch nukes below a threshold, adjust threshold based on some llm evaluation of the situation if needed.
Damn, this website is heavy. Found a PDF if anyone - https://cdn.sanity.io/files/4zrzovbb/website/8599749745010a4...
Vibe-coded websites are the new Frontpage website, being 10x as heavy as one made by hand would be. But 10x as heavy… on top of a modern Web that had already bloated to 100x what was reasonable. Now we wish the only problem were that the html is 10x as large and complex as it needed to be.
The coming years will see the current RAM shortage followed by a war between local AI models and vibe-coded shitware “productivity” software for memory on our devices. Especially fun will be when vibe coding crap hits corporate security software, which is already often so bad it looks more like sabotage than security. Imagine when it gets, from both angles (using models for threat detection; vibe-coded shitware) another large multiplier on its resource use.
I could hear my computer fans spin up and down the second I opened and closed it. Wow.
Came here to say the same thing. The company with the best coding model can't code an optimized infographic?
This has to be intentional, right? To reassure people that front-end developers still have a job? The data is interesting but the site itself is a complete embarrassment for several reasons.
I work sometimes in frontend and mostly in backend but I cant still comprehend why are we going backwards. shouldnt the websites be so optimized that they should be able to run in normal pc / smartphone rather than s23 is failing to load it. I guess at least bigger companies have that kind of resource for optimization but still not doing it why?
Any hardware gains and more are used up by stuffing in additional telemetry, ad/engagement scripts, and animations. Devs have grown up on "unused RAM is wasted RAM," work on the latest high-spec Macs, and get incentivized by higher-ups demanding things be ever "modernized" and not to waste time on optimization, which they see as annoying nerd stuff. But even that doesn't explain everything I guess, because I still see a lot of these things in open source projects.
Google is pushing ads on Android that are literally 3D games, as in the ad is a game and the game is controllable via the ad itself.
You have to play it for a minute before it lets you dismiss the ad and continue doing whatever you were doing.
Thanks, I'm angry just reading about it.
The explanation for bloated OSS is that the software development field has opened up to be accessible to non-programmers. There are at least 10x as many developers publishing software now as there were in the 90s, and the class of people who know how a CPU works are a tiny, tiny minority of the field now, where 30 years ago it was the norm. The vast majority of developers operate on 15 layers of abstractions and are literally offended by the idea that they should understand even a single layer below the one they're currently on. They will invoke a retort like "might as well learn assembly while you're at it", which I have heard literally dozens of times by now, as though it is actually unreasonable to have an understanding of assembly even if you don't write it every day.
Game development suffers greatly from this, too. So many games run like dogshit and some take literally 100+ GB more disk space than they need to (with the counterfactual proven when a dev eventually "optimizes" their game 3 years later by doing some really trivial thing, like what hapened with Helldivers 2 and some other game I can't recall). There is a whole generation of "Unity devs" and "Unreal devs" who work no-code or as close to it as possible, only being able to develop games through a GUI and light scripting, with even the latter usually involving copy-pasting existing scripts written by other people and tweaking the numbers.
In some ways this is a good thing, of course. There are a lot of useful software and fun games in the world that would not have been created if software development were not accessible. But with the cost to performance and security breaches becoming the absolute norm, I do really wish there was a culture for developers to continue improving, to continue learning, instead of a culture of learning the very top of the stack, declaring it good enough, and becoming a "React dev" for the rest of their career instead of becoming "a programmer" who can use more than one abstraction.
Who pissed in your Java this morning, gramps? Performance has nothing to do with whether you’re “the programmer” (whatever that means, I assume that’s what you consider yourself among this sea of mediocrity around you) and “React dev”. It’s all about incentives, and truth is that performance isn’t very high priority for majority of software.
There are very, very strong incentives for performance. Google and other hyperscalers have done studies on their data at scale (and boy do they have a lot of data), and even delays measured in low hundreds of milliseconds harm user retention. On the backend side, 1% improvements in performance can translate to millions of dollars in reduced costs at scale annually. There simply are not enough qualified programmers in the world creating performant software.
With open source it's not even about incentives. I still put effort into the software I make on my own time because I create the kind of software I want to see in the world, ie. software that doesn't feel miserable to use. It's simply about culture. People build up assembly and lower-level abstractions in general to be the scary monster in their closet, and not something they could actually learn if they just tried.
It's probably vibe coded, but also, it's next.js
No kidding, it took my CPU usage from 1% to 55% instantly sheesh
Thanks. My galaxy s23 can't handle this website
a cpu about 1000x as strong as need to beat any human at chess, can't show a simple vibe coded website...
I was waiting “this page has problems to load” on my iPhone :)
For me it's so unrelevant reading about how a product is useful on the company itself website. This is at most marketing disguised as research.
Billionaire CEOs have silenced the informed sources of information. We live in a time that everybody knows the opinion of billionaires in every aspect of society (and it is bad) but science and journalism are seen with mistrust.
Marketing and entertainment are supplanting news and knowledge. I hope that the people that is pushing back succeed.
But how do you know if that is really their opinions?
After reading some of the stories - just more of the "this is better than cancer cure, but also so dangerous we might all die" propaganda.
> Claude put the historical pieces together, leading to my proper diagnosis after being misdiagnosed for over 9 years.
> I'd started telling Claude about things I couldn't even tell my partner. It felt like I was having an emotional affair.
> I worked with an AI to prepare educational materials for my eldest child—asking the AI to work as both tutor and curriculum expert. We received [my child’s] report yesterday, he was graded as either ‘Above’ or ‘Well Above’ standard in every academic area he studies.
So many concerning quotes that read like AI is a workaround for things that are not working right at scale in society.
I worry (1) AI workarounds will make it clear society can tolerate even more suck then (2) society will get worse to where AI is required to cope then (3) AI will stop being subsidized and the poor will get wrecked.
If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said "a faster horse" -- Henry Ford.
"to generate copious amounts of source code that looks like it came from an offshore chop shop that whip cracked a thousand underpaid programmers to complete tasks under threat of violence so they'll fake the tests and cut corners but hide it with plausible bullshit"
If the source code looks like crap, THROW IT AWAY, work on your requirements document, and re-implement.
Yes, all we need are a perfect set of requirements for a thing we don't fully understand yet.
So back to waterfall again then. :P
As if it’s only one or another. Or you truly believe horde of low quality devs without any specs can come up with better product than Claude with quality specification?
If the middle steps of waterfall are low enough cosf, does it make sense?
what an outlook...
In the abstract consumer point of view a car is exactly a faster horse. They both have high up front costs, both require continuous maintenance and fuel, and they're inconvenient to store when you're not using them.
Stationary gasoline engines were already changing the farm and reducing the head of horses necessary to feed a nation. It, too, was a faster horse for them.
Anyways.. it took the Detroit police to eventually deploy the first automatic stoplight. The real innovations seem to be often found downstream of the simple increases in capacity.
That all being said, it seems to me the current crop of LLMs haven't done this, their power and training budgets do not seem to be scaling favorably against adoption rates and profit margins. Absent a significant change in algorithm or computing substrate I don't think this strategy is the leap everyone hopes it will be.
Just in case:
"The doctors were just doing a copy-paste of a copy-paste of a prescription from a few weeks ago, not realizing it was the medication that was killing her. AI helped me ask the right question to save her life."
The writing is on the wall, so to speak.
The number 1 ask from the interviewed cohort is « professional excellence »
It is telling about what we prioritize in our society.
I am usually an optimistic person, but I struggle to see how this does not end up with more misery and worse lifestyle all around.
what would be a better value for people who work? Pride in your craft, striving for excellence is not a bad trait...
People derive genuine satisfaction from a job well done. A sense of purpose and of being useful is important to our wellbeing. There's nothing dystopian about a desire to do your work well.
Well, there is when you no longer deserve credit for the work and your boss, should you be fortunate enough to even have a job, just expects you to do more work. The satisfaction will evaporate pretty quickly.
This page without exaggeration reduced my browser to 5 frames per second.
I guess it was vibe coded with Claude
Good quote:
> AI should learn to say two things: ‘I don’t know’ and ‘you’re wrong.’
My guess is, the next evolutionary step of LLM's should be yet another layer on top of reasoning, which should be some form of self-awareness and theory of mind. The reasoning layer already has some glimpses of these things ("The user wants ...") but apparently not enough to suppress generation and say "I don't know".
Claude models have made very good progress (see BS benchmark), and that probably explains why they're leading now. others will follow this precedent shortly, no doubt.
https://petergpt.github.io/bullshit-benchmark/viewer/index.v...
Reminds me of Abraham Wald's survivorship bias. What of the millions of others who like me who want to live in world without AI?
Anecdotally, the concern I hear from many is that the current positioning of AI as labor replacement doesn't benefit them at all. An expensive AI which simply takes your job or forces you to work harder is categorically worse for people's quality of life.
What consumer benefits is ai driving? at least with industrial automation consumers benefited from new technologies, cheaper goods, and new job categories.
In case someone at Anthropic reads this.. if you find some way to make software developer salaries go up as a result of using your tools, or find some way to fast forward society to that stage of the effect of AI, you’ll have a lot of fans, and even faster adoption.
It would be great if there was some internal “make this benefit Main Street and knowledge workers” department, helping find ways for workers or creators to capture the value of some of the increased productivity.
> It would be great if there was some internal “make this benefit Main Street and knowledge workers” department, helping find ways for workers or creators to capture the value of some of the increased productivity.
If they wanted to do this, they could put their models in a public trust for the public's access and benefit in research, education, etc. Then it could be licensed, pay a dividend like a sovereign wealth fund, etc.
Considering that they copy and train on the sum total of all human creativity, a public trust is something that would be in line with both the spirit, and first and fourth considerations, of fair use doctrine:
That way everyone is rewarded with the benefits of running a model that was trained on everyone's creations.I don't need software developer salaries to go up. That would be kind of selfish and narrow minded.
What I need instead is something that takes the burden off my entire society and gives them a breather. Universal health care to start. They could also use a higher minimum wage, and lower housing costs.
>Universal health care to start
That already exists in any other country but the USA. Aim higher.
Multiversal healthcare?
You have my vote.
Is it more selfish and narrow minded to wish for a "utopia" that is economically unsound and happens to be your personal preference, or to wish for productive workers' salaries to increase - something with an actual track record of improving any society it occurs in?
All perl programmers should be wishing for ponies, that's definitely less narrow minded.
What part of universal health care, higher minimum wage and lower housing costs sounds like "utopia" to you?
That's just the system we have, but slightly better and completely achievable.
It doesn't sound like utopia to me, hence the quotation marks. Eminently achievable, but not actually good. Only those engaged in utopian thinking - with a heavy slice of ignorance of basic economics and history - would think it is utopia or leads to it.
Universal healthcare is very sound economically. Costs are lower and outcomes better than under private insurance, and overhead is dramatically reduced.
This is not true, the Kings Fund publishes a report that the Guardian fauns over whenever it comes out because it shows how "cost effective" the NHS is, yet if you read it you find that actual health outcomes are generally worse than other, insurance based systems. Give me wealth and health over a postcode lottery produced by utopianists.
The economically sound thing is to accrue more power to those with wealth. The owners will have access to a machine that turns money into money without a cent flowing outside of the owner class. That'll improve society /s.
I am afraid that will be up to individuals, the business you work for likely hasn't got much incentive to let you capture the new value.
You'll either need to freelance, or start a company (or maybe a co-op) to capture the new value created by your ability to leverage AI.
It won't be much different to when a company buys more CNC machines and the employees don't get any more money despite producing way more parts.
>if you find some way to make software developer salaries go up
This is quite easy. Just optimize the models to do reviews and bug finding. This would make developers (who normally hate reviews) quite happy and let them do more coding, thus delivering more value and possibly earning more...
Sigh… that’s not how it works.
How what works?
Is that feasible? The coding tools already unlock a ton of possibilities for people to create value, but people have to capitalize on it.
I have no clue what this would look like other than maybe an investment fund for people creating apps/businesses based on Claude tools.
It’s often lamented that some employees have a difficult case to argue for their impact on the bottom line, and as a result probably get paid a lower fraction of their value to the business than other roles where the link is easy to measure.
I can at least “imagine” a model that tries to crack this nut.
But your value to a company doesn’t just come from your impact, but how tough you are to replace, how much others value your skills, etc.
Nike’s logo designer was paid $35. One model says she should’ve gotten hundreds of thousands of dollars, because of what her work product went on to become. Another model of the value says it was worth $35 because that’s what she agreed to.
If, as an employee, you think you’re massively undervalued for the impact you generate, go out to the market and either get another job or start your own business making widgets - either you’ll get that pay bump you expect, or you’ll see you actually were relying on a lot of other supporting mechanisms to generate that value.
Lol they don't have control over the free market. But it absolutely does make the top 10% of developers much more valuable.
> What consumer benefits is ai driving?
The intrinsic satisfaction of increasing the wealth of shareholders. We should all be happy to devote ourselves to getting them more, nothing is more important than that.
Of all the possible criticisms that's the one you chose? If that's the worst of the problems you can see, why don't you buy some stock and became the shareholder. Per your own words, you will get more.
> Of all the possible criticisms that's the one you chose? If that's the worst of the problems you can see
The point is there is little benefit to these technologies to the consumer, especially in relation to likely harm in other areas (you lost your customer service job, but AI overview will answer your trivia question with slightly less effort). Note: little does not mean none.
> why don't you buy some stock and became the shareholder. Per your own words, you will get more.
LOL. Don't you get it? The kind of smallholdings of shares available to regular people won't provide the kind of returns to mitigate any of these harms. They work as a ploy to trick dumb-ass workers into identifying with capitalist tycoons (e.g. opposing pro-worker things that'd get you a dollar more an hour in wages to get a penny more a quarter in dividends, it works because most don't do the math).
>> What consumer benefits is ai driving?
My kids like to use AI to discuss things they learned in school in greater depth, and from different angles than they learned in the textbook. They can also ask "What if" and "Why not" questions from this infinitely patient teacher.
At least with search engines, or even libraries, you're aware that there are many authors of varying reliability and the publications/sites might not be reputable.
AI chat bots will summarize the top N web search results as if they're fact, weaving them into seemingly coherent narratives, all while reassuring the user that their questions are really good and they're learning a lot.
Oh no
Most adults are terrible at answering 'what if' and 'why' questions. An AI assistant with search will do much better than the average parent
That might not apply to the kinds of parents that hang out here though
Also it's better not to answer, but flip the question back and let your kid think through it, offer hypothesis, and so on, helping him problem solve, recall, and all that.
Except for the... you know... human interaction part. Arguably the most important part.
An infinitely patient and somewhat schizophrenic teacher.
> An expensive AI which simply takes your job or forces you to work harder
But this implies higher productivity, no? This must mean more outputs that should benefit someone, unless the jobs that are being automated had little value to begin with. Seems paradoxical.
I guess you could argue that there should be cheaper software, but most software people interact with is free/ad supported. Where it is paid, it's already a race to to the bottom.
Basically consumers don't really pay for software in the first place, and the leverage from labour companies get through software is already through the roof even before AI. Will much change for consumers of software?
The companies offering free software will leverage AI to extract more value from you via increased surveillance, ads, and paid preference shaping.
So... not much benefit either.
This is like begging your replacement for comfort... what's the point? What words could change reality?
There is a practical upper bound on how much labor can be replaced before deflation becomes a problem. AI firms risk spoiling the pot if no other business model is discovered.
Nitpicky comment. The article says > "We call this the “light and shade” of AI: the same capabilities that lead to > benefits also produce harms. The two sides are entangled."
Why not call it a "double-edged sword" or something else? Light and shade are opposites but not necessarily two products from the same tool. It just irks me.
I just launched a site yesterday that's trying to record anonymous stories like this and see how things breakdown across demographics. Fantastic timing on my part hahaha. Anthropic obviously reaches more people.
The quotes they have are really interesting to read. That's what I was hoping to get when I built mine.
A classic marketing piece by showing thought leadership based on survey data. I'm not saying they're lying, I don't think they are. I am saying they are biased and have a conflict of interest on this one. I've seen it at my previous employer as well (a F500 company).
To remove some of that bias, I'd recommend to get an independent body (probably some university) in and let them do the interpretation and write the article.
I just want people to see the tactic for what it is. I really like Claude Opus 4.6 but this just screams "marketing" to me. I wouldn't say it's wrong, it's good to have these discussions and I'd encourage AI companies to say what they have to say. I would say: more independent sources are needed (and not another AI company).
As someone working in clinical studies,
I can tell you the questions are biased from the start. That study has to be redone entirely.
Withholding the truth is the same as lying. Manipulating survey questions is the same as lying.
7.24 seconds until html finished loading (could be due to a HN hug, but still)
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I am disappointed in how vague the classifications are for what people want. 'professional excellence ' anyone? I was expecting more concrete responses, but I guess since it's working with what we told it, generalities are prevalent in a write up. If I keep looking, perhaps at the quotes, I might find more concrete answers.
And just keep scrolling, you can make it to the story eventually.
Yeah I want to know how many people are using AI for social purposes; to provide the role of a friend. But I don’t know what category that would be under.
Why do websites need to be so front end heavy? When a software company spend so much effort on fancy website, I don’t trust their product. Except anthropic i guess.
I don't like describing countries like this but: a bit underdeveloped countries (compared to North American and European countries) seem to have a more positive view on AI.
Maybe most interesting about the piece is, that we'll likely see more large scale interviews like this (even if this one is a bit bland)
Cool to find my own quote among those they've decided to showcase.
Which one was yours???
surprised this isn't talked about more
Save you a click, way, way down the page you'll find that it's all generic, whitewashed niceties like:
01. Professional excellence 18.8%
02. Personal transformation 13.7%
03. Life management 13.5%
04. Time freedom 11.1%
05. Financial independence 9.7%
06. Societal transformation 9.4%
07. Entrepreneurship 8.7%
08. Learning & growth 8.4%
09. Creative expression 5.6%
I find this highly suspicious. I'm sure there would be at least 10% who respond "I want it to go away".
That's explained in the article.
> These are active Claude users who'd already found enough value to keep using AI, and our interview asked first for positive visions for AI and then for concerns that would counter their vision.
Consistent users of ~~product~~ AI find it favorable. Color me shocked.
I'm much more curious about the results of 80k people who don't use AI regularly.
They do not find it favorable all of the time. If you look into the "What people are concerned about" section, these same people will call out the "Unreliability" as a top-1 concern. So, you can be excited and critical of the technology at the same time. To me this is a more worthy indicator than people who are on either of the extremes, highly critical of the tech or not critical at all.
Boy is that a terrible website. I tried to find a story and give up.
To be fair, there is a button right at the beginning saying “Jump to story”. It’s not the most obvious, I agree, but it is there.
That's hilarious.
It's like those recipe sites that have 5 pages of nice photos and background story and side tracks and whatnot as the author waxes verbose, so they need to put a 'Jump to recipe' button in so people don't just click 'Back' immediately.
Except this time for an article.
I can't tell if 'skip the junk' is good (junk can be skipped!) or bad (maybe this means there's too much junk on the page?)
And that's why I always come to the comments before deciding if the article is worth checking out. Thank you for your service.
Why do websites need to be so front end heavy? When a software company spend so much effort on fancy website, I don’t trust their product
Where is the option to pick on "to go away"?
Intrigued to see a blatant grammatical error ("took that logic farther" should be "took that logic further").
Is this incompetence or a deliberate error to indicate human authorship?
If the former then why aren't they using at least an AI to proof read? If the latter then what do anthropic think is wrong with AI written text?
Em dashes in the user quotes, uh?
Well, em dashes are a standard punctuation mark used in English, and most rich-text input controls will automatically convert a double hyphen into a single em dash when typed.
The meme that's been going around that em dashes are an indicator of LLM output is completely invalid, and people who repeat it are really just outing themselves as the sort of people who don't actually read very much.
this is more nuanced than the title suggests. worth reading the whole thing
> “It’s much easier for me to learn without being judged—just friendly feedback. It's harder with friends or family to get that.” White collar worker, Brazil
I'm not going to claim I know this response was written by an AI, but it's very suspicious. I would like to hear about how Anthropic ensured that the survey responses were provided by real human beings using their own words.
Maybe they interviewed a bunch of clawd bots with a touching soul.md
I mean, I don't know.. those quotes seem way too clean from what I'd expect of normal people chatting. Also the use of em-dash. Does it say somewhere that it's an LLM that has compressed the sentiments of the conversations to create these quotes? I wouldn't be surprised if it was.
Even pre-AI, it was common to “massage” genuine quotes like this so they read better.
Hell, anyone who’s been interviewed by a journalist can tell you they do it, too, sometimes to the point of changing the substance of what you said.
> 80,508 people
Not 81,000 as it says in the title. I know I'm being nitpicky, but I wouldn't round up to 81k. Surely the 'important number' in this case is 80, so you would round down to that. Then let the reader pleasantly discover you had interviewed ~500 more than you stated.
It's funny to me when someone does this sort of minor hyperbole that's verging on lying - you have to wonder what is going on.
80,000, 81,000, 80,500, and 80,510 are all valid ways to round 80,508 depending on the number of significant digits you want to preserve. For a number in the tens of thousands, it's natural to round to the nearest thousand which is appropriately 81k.