I’m not much of an AI skeptic compared to most on Lemmy. I think the technology is incredibly useful and probably beneficial to society if we can remove the control of the ruling class.

That said I truly don’t understand how the AI business model is supposed to work. I’m sure there is some market for businesses, governments, etc., basically people who have too much money who may want to pay for the latest and greatest models.

But I don’t really see the average consumer doing this when slightly less good versions will almost certainly be available for free. And the above customers will not be able to support the level of investment that’s going on right now.

How is the technology useful?

For the love of Asimov, someone please explain.

It is useful for programming, I know a lot of people here don’t want to hear that, but denying it now is being willfully ignorant. No it isn’t good enough that you can tell it “just go do the thing” and then accept what it gives you without checking it, but using it as a tool as a professional can very much improve your work and how quickly you do things. For me recently I used it to unpick a nasty race condition that was occasionally causing a program I was working on to lock up and couldn’t figure out why. It took some back and forth with it but it did help me figure it out when before I had been stumped.

but using it as a tool as a professional can very much improve your work and how quickly you do things.

Maybe it’s just my 20 yoe, but that has so far not been my experience with it. It is improving, but definitely not there yet. Even standard boiler plate I can typically bang out faster than asking the AI to do it and then needing to double check it’s work because it somehow still manages to screw that up occasionally. Sometimes it does manage to be better than one of the juniors, but using it that way also cuts the legs out from under the career development pipeline which will result in an intermediate and senior dev drought down the road.

Even standard boiler plate I can typically bang out faster than asking the AI to do it

The people that claim it helps with boilerplate clearly never took the time to learn how to sed/awk, mustache templates, write a perl/python/etc script, use the regex find/replace in their editor, use the keyboard macro in their editor, use snippets in their editor and I’m sure offer ways that aren’t immediately coming to mind that have existed forever and won’t hallucinate. They’re the ones that were not highly skilled in the first place and they’re vexingly successful at convincing newbies and laymen to listen to them about LLMs instead of the actual skilled people that actually know what they’re talking about.