But there are a ton of LLM powered products in the market.

I have a friend in finance that uses LLM powered products for financial analysis, he works in a big bank. Just now anthropic released a product to compete in this space.

Another friend in real estate uses LLM powered lead qualifications products, he runs marketing campaigns and the AI handles the initial interaction via email or phone and then ranks the lead in their crm.

I have a few friends that run small businesses and use LLM powered assistants to manage all their email comms and agendas.

I've also talked with startups in legal and marketing doing very well.

Coding is the theme that's talked about the most in HN but there are a ton of startups and big companies creating value with LLMs

Yup. Lots of products in the education space. Even doctors are using LLMs, while talking with patients. All sorts of teams are using the adjacent products for image and (increasingly) video generation. Translation freelancers have been hit somewhat hard because LLMs do "good enough" quite a bit better than old google translate.

Coding is relevant to the HN bubble, and as tech is the biggest driver of the economy it's no surprise that tech-related AI usages will also be the biggest causes of investment, but it really is used in quite a lot of places out there already that aren't coding related at all.

LLMs are amazing at anything requiring text analysis (go figure). Everyone I know doing equity or economic research in finance is using it extensively for that, and from what I hear from doctors the LLMs are as good as that in their space if not better

It feels like there's a lot of shifting goalposts. A year ago, the hype was that knowledge work would cease to exist by 2027.

Now we are trying to hype up enhanced email autocomplete and data analysis as revolutionary?

I agree that those things are useful. But it's not really addressing the criticism. I would have zero criticisms of AI marketing if it was "hey, look at this new technology that can assist your employees and make them 20% more productive".

I think there's also a healthy dose of skepticism after the internet and social media age. Those were also society altering technologies that purported to democratize the political and economic system. I don't think those goals were accomplished, although without a doubt many workers and industries were made more productive. That effect is definitely real and I'm not denying that.

But in other areas, the last 3 decades of technological advancement have been a resounding failure. We haven't made a dent in educational outcomes or intergenerational poverty, for instance.