azizam

"an incredibly sophisticated tool" it's matmuls that generate logits

"Direct3D 12 is Vulkan under the hood" please don't speak on topics you have no knowledge of

one is generated slop and the other is a mature community project

Great, no issue that a bit of LLM slop can't fix. Why even say "I built X"? I'd respect it more if you just said "Claude built X" or something.

Sounds a lot like this entire website!

You have once again conflated individualistic values with real world values, and shown bias to personal anecdotes. I am afraid you are simply incapable of understanding so there is no point to discussing this further.

Incorrect, I'm afraid. The "plain real world value" does not necessarily have any correlation to the number of users, so your argument again fails to hold water.

Simply consider the users that use generative AI in order to perform some unimportant work (as I hope is the case, for generative AI cannot produce anything of novelty, by design). If such work held no value to begin with, then through simple deduction you can conclude that the generative AI contributed nothing of value.

The only outcome worthy of consideration was the time reclaimed by the user not performing such mundane tasks (so that they can move on to perform... more mundane work?), in which case one must question the larger scope of process at hand.

This is just one counterexample to your underlying premise for your argument - that you know nothing of how the users use such tools, or whether their use even brings anything of value to the real world.

The point being, the number of users is a number with no meaning. It is a number used to inflate the faux excitement surrounding AI and nothing more. "Falling for the hype", if you like.

Extrapolating your faulty logic, I could say a pornography website is of extreme value to humanity. After all, literal billions of people visit such websites very frequently. This must bring real world value, no? Or cigarettes? Or TikTok?

If your definition of value is derived from self-indulgence, e.g., how much time one can spend away from work with AI, or how much one can smoke because it feels nice in the moment, i.e., the hedonistic evaluation, then by all means, spoil yourself. After all, I don't stand to revoke those liberties anyway.

But understand, that this definition of value is not the same as "plain real world value" by necessity, and as such, the "number of users" is no guarantee.

As the article mentions, the number of users is wholly irrelevant to the discussion of how much positive value a tool brings to society (also factoring in the costs and negative impacts of the tool). This is a weak argument.