Let’s not forget to count all the people who use a MS office product at work, and are therefore opted into counting for copilot numbers, which almost _certainly_ counts towards ChatGPT numbers by default!
I’ve been wondering for a while if these ludicrously high numbers are just MAU and count people running 16 free accounts load balanced for more access without paying.
I can believe it. I've seen how popular it is in the general population. You just say something and the computer answers it? No need to learn how to use it? Of course it's popular! And the only well-known one is ChatGPT.
Anecdotally:
I have 3 coworkers (4 if you include me) out of a dozen who have used it at least twice in the past year.
I was queuing at a return desk a month ago and the employee used an AI to try and help someone who didn't quite know what fitting or some-such that they needed.
Out of my friends, about a quarter of them get some kind of light use out of the various AIs.
I have no idea. Doesn't seem implausible to me. Apparently, ≈75% of the world population has internet access now. And if a person has internet access, is it that unlikely that he was successfully targeted by at least one of these idiotic marketing campaigns (turn your photo into a barbie doll or whatever)? 10% sounds plausible to me, more or less. So maybe not really literally a 1B, but doesn't need to be very far from the real numbers, IMO.
If it is, it's a horrible ad. My main takeaway is that all of them were god awful at image generation and Fable was 20x more expensive and still awful.
It's hilarious how bad image generation is. I just tried this out and I gave it two actual logos, a full design language spec, and three screenshots of the actual application and it spat out three absolutely awful images, none of which had the same logo as the one I sent.
After 18+ months of this, LLMs are incredible for getting rid of the work I hated most: Updating JIRA tickets, tedious little cleanup jobs, refactoring, etc. They are great at finding infosec issues.
They are also GREAT at writing code based on standards and patterns established by an actual human engineers. They are STILL trash at anything meaningfully complex from the ground up. I will go through hours of planning where I have to kick the hell out of its plans in ways that I don't think someone without a ton of real world experience could do. Even in the fancy new Fable models that remains true. They are not creative and any engineering worth doing requires creativity.
> I have to kick the hell out of its plans in ways that I don't think someone without a ton of real world experience could do
I think that’s the real point the article’s making. Unless you already know the ropes, you can’t tell if a plan is actually any good. I use LLMs all the time for work, but only because I get the system well enough to spot the nonsense or catch when a plan duplicates something that already exists. They really do keep rewriting the same functions over and over in the code.
Are you implying that a tech billionaire, who moved to a private South American compound, who looks like a man that microdoses ayahuasca daily, might just a rich kid tinkering to stay relevant without the incentive or context to actually BE relevant anymore?
I originally was passionate about Slack simply because it was "IRC but with modern quality of life improvements". Ever since they got fucked by MSFT and sold out to Salesforce, it's basically been dead in the water and the only changes have largely made it worse.
Interesting idea. I think the "multiplayer mode for AI development" bit resonates somewhat. Biggest problem is that I do think most companies have a ton of key contributors that find git/code intimidating, so part of me thinks the real answer here will be stuff like Surfboard, Town, etc. that can work with git AND the work tools in a more user friendly, browser-first way.
To Grok's credit I think it's fairly good as a creative writing tool because it can be very "spontaneous" and it naturally seems to use an informal style. It also lacks a lot of the words and phrasing Claude and OpenAI get hyper-fixated on.
IDK if this is emergent from being trained on an endless trough of Twitter shitposts but compared to how stiff the rest are, I consider it a feature. I wouldn't use it for anything important though, heh.
Ah creative writing - the domain where AI is failing to actually generate any economic value while absolutely devastating the ways in which people have traditionally found artistic expression.
Even that is kind tbh. The company is so poorly run and the leader so controversial that it makes it irresponsible to build anything serious that relies on their products. Other than the rocket part of the business, everything else under the SpaceX umbrella is a nonstarter.
Starlink arguably is not the rocket part and its the most profitable piece, it held together the rocket side of SpaceX and he expanded research and development.
It's so bizarrely run that it's hard to decide what counts as a "comparable outfit"? It's a Space company crammed together with several deeply unprofitable and embarrassing investment companies the founder bought as a part of a transparent grift to cover his mistakes and his only argument is a vague promise of "data centers in space", after over a decade of promising similarly ambitious things that have never happened.
Compared to the other AI companies? It's got even less revenue and product/branding decisions that have it fundamentally incompatible with any of the customers that would result in it becoming a leader.
Compared to other companies of similar revenue? That would be like... uh... Carnival Cruises? lol the fact that it has a valuation where it does is only due to corruption and politics. Oh, sorry Carnival Cruises had actual revenue last year, SpaceX was -$1.9B.
Maybe I'm just in my media bubble, care to share the experts out there explaining how it's a great company whose valuation makes any sort of sense?
Who cares what leaders say, they all lie, it's about what they actually get done and Musk has gotten a lot done even if he promised much and more. Words don't matter, only outcomes do.
> leader who has been lying to his customers for a decade
Over Tesla Autopilot/FSD? Or something else?
If autopilot/FSD, not only is yours a false description, even if it weren’t it would not have bearing on the overall conclusion about whether or not SpaceX is run well.
Grok 4.5 is Opus (perhaps 4.6 or 4.7 or so) class at coding, at a very high speed and a fraction of the cost. It beats Gemini models, even the latest 3.6 Flash, at every metric.
