Most people I know, blue and white collar up to and including surgeons and IT folks, use it as better search.

My wife is a GP, and all she would ever need is a reliable speech to voice recognition of medical jargon, in french. Not 98%, not almost there, just there.

Most people don't live in IT echo chambers like HN. For them, chatgpts are just another online gimmick that saves a bit of time vs googling things, or puts together some paperwork quicker, and thats it.

For me, I can see potential beyond but are largely unmoved by it. The price to pay, in fucking up our environment, losing skills and/or losing skills to build skills, making large swaths of population unemployed with no replacement in sight, seems much more like devolution and net loss. Extremely few winners and big bunch of losers. Very happy to be wrong here of course, but only time will tell and neither you nor me know for sure.

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roel_v a day ago | parent [-]

How can it be at the same time "a better search" and also "making large swaths of population unemployed with no replacement in sight" ?

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stevepotter a day ago | parent [-]

Because it’s so powerful and versatile. The other day my wife took a picture of our living room and chathgpt picked out the perfect rug. That’s both a better search and avoided, say, an interior decorator. In that scenario it’s kinda both.

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roel_v a day ago | parent [-]

But only a small part of AI applications are that search-like. I mean we could even argue if this is still only search, but that's semantics and boring. But even if we would, there are a lot more applications than pure search. So the GP's original claim that it's just an improved form of something that doesn't put people out of a job, and also puts large amounts of people out of a job, doesn't make sense. Framing tax advise as "yeah it's just a better way to search tax codes" is in the same boat. It's such a massive improvement of both searching and synthesizing that it's a bit weird to call it that. Like saying a 2026 car is just an improvement of a Model T.

	▲	stevepotter 20 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think we agree. I think we’ve barely touched the surface on its applications. It’s digitized reasoning. That’s hard to wrap one’s head around. My hope is that the vertical applications that gain traction aren’t from a handful of companies.