>So is this really a productivity win or is it just good feels?
Fairly recent study on this: LLM's made developers slightly less productive, but the developers themselves felt more productive with them: https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/11/ai_code_tools_slow_do...
There is definitely this pain point that some people talk about (even in this thread) on how "well at least AI doesn't berate me or reject my answer for bureaucratic reasons". And I find that intriguing in a community like this. Even some extremely techy people (or especially?) just something just want to at best feel respected, or at worst want to have their own notions confirmed by someone they deem to be "smart".
>I don't question the potential of the tech, but I do question the direction that Big Tech may take it, because they're literal repeat offenders at this point.
And that indeed is my biggest reservation here. Even if AI can do great things, I don't trust the incentive models OpenAI has. Instead of potentially being this bastion of knowledge, it may be yet another vector of trying to sell you ads and steal your data. My BOTD is long gone now.
Yeah I mean at this point, the tech industry is not new, nor is its playbook. At least within B2C, sooner or later everything seems to degenerate into an adtech model. I think it's because the marginal cost of software distribution is so low - you may as well give it away for free all the way up to the 8 billion population cap, and then monetize them once they're hooked, which inevitably seems to mean showing them ads, reselling what you know about them, or both.
What I have seen nobody come even NEAR to talking about is, why would OpenAI not follow this exact same direction? Sooner or later they will.
Things might pan out differently if you're a business - OpenAI already doesn't train its models on enterprise accounts, I imagine enterprise will take a dim view to being shown ads constantly as well, but who knows.
But B2C will be a cesspit. Just like it always ends up a cesspit.