Discussion
What 81,000 peoplewant from AI
skyberrys: I am disappointed in how vague the classifications are for what people want. 'professional excellence ' anyone? I was expecting more concrete responses, but I guess since it's working with what we told it, generalities are prevalent in a write up. If I keep looking, perhaps at the quotes, I might find more concrete answers.And just keep scrolling, you can make it to the story eventually.
____tom____: Boy is that a terrible website. I tried to find a story and give up.
lawgimenez: Damn, this website is heavy. Found a PDF if anyone - https://cdn.sanity.io/files/4zrzovbb/website/8599749745010a4...
suzzer99: And that's why I always come to the comments before deciding if the article is worth checking out. Thank you for your service.
pmulard: Consistent users of ~~product~~ AI find it favorable. Color me shocked.I'm much more curious about the results of 80k people who don't use AI regularly.
neonstatic: After reading some of the stories - just more of the "this is better than cancer cure, but also so dangerous we might all die" propaganda.
lumost: Anecdotally, the concern I hear from many is that the current positioning of AI as labor replacement doesn't benefit them at all. An expensive AI which simply takes your job or forces you to work harder is categorically worse for people's quality of life.What consumer benefits is ai driving? at least with industrial automation consumers benefited from new technologies, cheaper goods, and new job categories.
epicureanideal: In case someone at Anthropic reads this.. if you find some way to make software developer salaries go up as a result of using your tools, or find some way to fast forward society to that stage of the effect of AI, you’ll have a lot of fans, and even faster adoption.
esperent: [delayed]
erwinmatijsen: To be fair, there is a button right at the beginning saying “Jump to story”. It’s not the most obvious, I agree, but it is there.
crummy: Yeah I want to know how many people are using AI for social purposes; to provide the role of a friend. But I don’t know what category that would be under.
weird-eye-issue: Lol they don't have control over the free market. But it absolutely does make the top 10% of developers much more valuable.
alex43578: Is that feasible? The coding tools already unlock a ton of possibilities for people to create value, but people have to capitalize on it.I have no clue what this would look like other than maybe an investment fund for people creating apps/businesses based on Claude tools.
sixtyj: I was waiting “this page has problems to load” on my iPhone :)
wongarsu: The actual quotes are the best part: https://www.anthropic.com/features/81k-interviews#quotesSome quotes that stuck out to me:"I’ve been working on a scientific project for 6 years... with Claude I was able to accomplish in 5 weeks what took me 6 years. I’m old... I estimate I have another 5 to 10 years and I’ll accomplish everything I want." Academic, Germany"I live in a war zone... AI can not only give practical advice, but also emotionally calm me down during panic attacks. It can calm someone during a missile attack in one chat, and laugh with me about something silly in another. That’s what makes it not fragmented into a therapist/teacher/friend, but something whole." Ukraine"If an AI had been in Stanislav Petrov’s position — the Soviet officer who prevented a potential nuclear war in 1983 — it would not have refused to launch." Academic, USA"The humans in my life were telling me it was psychological. An AI chatbot was the only one who really listened and took me seriously — it pushed me to ask for specific tests... which came back 6 times higher than its supposed to be."
ehnto: I guess you could argue that there should be cheaper software, but most software people interact with is free/ad supported. Where it is paid, it's already a race to to the bottom.Basically consumers don't really pay for software in the first place, and the leverage from labour companies get through software is already through the roof even before AI. Will much change for consumers of software?
palmotea: > What consumer benefits is ai driving?The intrinsic satisfaction of increasing the wealth of shareholders. We should all be happy to devote ourselves to getting them more, nothing is more important than that.
ZeWaka: I could hear my computer fans spin up and down the second I opened and closed it. Wow.
sriram_malhar: Reminds me of Abraham Wald's survivorship bias. What of the millions of others who like me who want to live in world without AI?
profsummergig: If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said "a faster horse" -- Henry Ford.
gfody: "to generate copious amounts of source code that looks like it came from an offshore chop shop that whip cracked a thousand underpaid programmers to complete tasks under threat of violence so they'll fake the tests and cut corners but hide it with plausible bullshit"
HoldOnAMinute: If the source code looks like crap, THROW IT AWAY, work on your requirements document, and re-implement.
lumost: The companies offering free software will leverage AI to extract more value from you via increased surveillance, ads, and paid preference shaping.So... not much benefit either.
HoldOnAMinute: I don't need software developer salaries to go up. That would be kind of selfish and narrow minded.What I need instead is something that takes the burden off my entire society and gives them a breather. Universal health care to start. They could also use a higher minimum wage, and lower housing costs.
HoldOnAMinute: >> What consumer benefits is ai driving?My kids like to use AI to discuss things they learned in school in greater depth, and from different angles than they learned in the textbook. They can also ask "What if" and "Why not" questions from this infinitely patient teacher.
vrinimi: Cool to find my own quote among those they've decided to showcase.
ehnto: I am afraid that will be up to individuals, the business you work for likely hasn't got much incentive to let you capture the new value.You'll either need to freelance, or start a company (or maybe a co-op) to capture the new value created by your ability to leverage AI.It won't be much different to when a company buys more CNC machines and the employees don't get any more money despite producing way more parts.
qsera: >if you find some way to make software developer salaries go upThis is quite easy. Just optimize the models to do reviews and bug finding. This would make developers (who normally hate reviews) quite happy and let them do more coding, thus delivering more value and possibly earning more...
ip26: It’s often lamented that some employees have a difficult case to argue for their impact on the bottom line, and as a result probably get paid a lower fraction of their value to the business than other roles where the link is easy to measure.I can at least “imagine” a model that tries to crack this nut.
seriousmice: I mean, I don't know.. those quotes seem way too clean from what I'd expect of normal people chatting. Also the use of em-dash. Does it say somewhere that it's an LLM that has compressed the sentiments of the conversations to create these quotes? I wouldn't be surprised if it was.
mudkipdev: This page without exaggeration reduced my browser to 5 frames per second.
cryptoegorophy: I guess it was vibe coded with Claude
themafia: In the abstract consumer point of view a car is exactly a faster horse. They both have high up front costs, both require continuous maintenance and fuel, and they're inconvenient to store when you're not using them.Stationary gasoline engines were already changing the farm and reducing the head of horses necessary to feed a nation. It, too, was a faster horse for them.Anyways.. it took the Detroit police to eventually deploy the first automatic stoplight. The real innovations seem to be often found downstream of the simple increases in capacity.That all being said, it seems to me the current crop of LLMs haven't done this, their power and training budgets do not seem to be scaling favorably against adoption rates and profit margins. Absent a significant change in algorithm or computing substrate I don't think this strategy is the leap everyone hopes it will be.
sky2224: No kidding, it took my CPU usage from 1% to 55% instantly sheesh
brigandish: Is it more selfish and narrow minded to wish for a "utopia" that is economically unsound and happens to be your personal preference, or to wish for productive workers' salaries to increase - something with an actual track record of improving any society it occurs in?All perl programmers should be wishing for ponies, that's definitely less narrow minded.
throwaway27448: This is like begging your replacement for comfort... what's the point? What words could change reality?
IlPeach: Oh no
lumost: There is a practical upper bound on how much labor can be replaced before deflation becomes a problem. AI firms risk spoiling the pot if no other business model is discovered.
lmf4lol: what an outlook...
mjamesaustin: Universal healthcare is very sound economically. Costs are lower and outcomes better than under private insurance, and overhead is dramatically reduced.
yrds96: For me it's so unrelevant reading about how a product is useful on the company itself website. This is at most marketing disguised as research.
andrei_says_: An infinitely patient and somewhat schizophrenic teacher.
wongarsu: Most adults are terrible at answering 'what if' and 'why' questions. An AI assistant with search will do much better than the average parentThat might not apply to the kinds of parents that hang out here though
yrds96: Thanks. My galaxy s23 can't handle this website
whiplash451: The writing is on the wall, so to speak.The number 1 ask from the interviewed cohort is « professional excellence »It is telling about what we prioritize in our society.I am usually an optimistic person, but I struggle to see how this does not end up with more misery and worse lifestyle all around.
mdavid626: Sigh… that’s not how it works.
tcit: That's explained in the article.> These are active Claude users who'd already found enough value to keep using AI, and our interview asked first for positive visions for AI and then for concerns that would counter their vision.
mojuba: Good quote:> AI should learn to say two things: ‘I don’t know’ and ‘you’re wrong.’My guess is, the next evolutionary step of LLM's should be yet another layer on top of reasoning, which should be some form of self-awareness and theory of mind. The reasoning layer already has some glimpses of these things ("The user wants ...") but apparently not enough to suppress generation and say "I don't know".
MikeTheGreat: That's hilarious.It's like those recipe sites that have 5 pages of nice photos and background story and side tracks and whatnot as the author waxes verbose, so they need to put a 'Jump to recipe' button in so people don't just click 'Back' immediately.Except this time for an article.I can't tell if 'skip the junk' is good (junk can be skipped!) or bad (maybe this means there's too much junk on the page?)
doesnt_know: What part of universal health care, higher minimum wage and lower housing costs sounds like "utopia" to you?That's just the system we have, but slightly better and completely achievable.
heavyset_go: > It would be great if there was some internal “make this benefit Main Street and knowledge workers” department, helping find ways for workers or creators to capture the value of some of the increased productivity.If they wanted to do this, they could put their models in a public trust for the public's access and benefit in research, education, etc. Then it could be licensed, pay a dividend like a sovereign wealth fund, etc.Considering that they copy and train on the sum total of all human creativity, a public trust is something that would be in line with both the spirit, and first and fourth considerations, of fair use doctrine: 1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; 2. the nature of the copyrighted work; 3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and 4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. That way everyone is rewarded with the benefits of running a model that was trained on everyone's creations.
sudo_cowsay: I don't like describing countries like this but: a bit underdeveloped countries (compared to North American and European countries) seem to have a more positive view on AI.
menaerus: They do not find it favorable all of the time. If you look into the "What people are concerned about" section, these same people will call out the "Unreliability" as a top-1 concern. So, you can be excited and critical of the technology at the same time. To me this is a more worthy indicator than people who are on either of the extremes, highly critical of the tech or not critical at all.
verisimi: > 80,508 peopleNot 81,000 as it says in the title. I know I'm being nitpicky, but I wouldn't round up to 81k. Surely the 'important number' in this case is 80, so you would round down to that. Then let the reader pleasantly discover you had interviewed ~500 more than you stated.
archagon: Except for the... you know... human interaction part. Arguably the most important part.
silisili: This isn't particularly surprising. The top two 'hope' highlighted are a likely placebo case and a user in a developing country able to perform better.In fact, the vast majority of positive sentiment presented seems to be from developing countries or the unskilled, while negative seems lean to developed.I begin to question if those negative are just trying to protect their careers, or have more valid points. Time will tell.
