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I'm not actually sure they are widely useful. So far the primary use case for them is coding, right? But not very many people are coders, it's a niche field, and as Freddie has argued (disclaimer: I do not wholly agree with him), very little has actually come of this supposed improvement to coding. We haven't seen a flowering of new programs, and neither have existing programs gotten better.
But even if we grant that LLMs are very useful in the handful of niche fields where they are currently used, the problems remain that 1) most members of the public do not understand or care about those uses, and 2) most members of the public do not think those uses are worth the costs they are being asked to bear.
Also, don't forget that there are plenty of programmers who do not find LLMs useful for programming either. To be fair I will say that there are those who do, but anyone who tells you that LLMs have revolutionized the industry is not telling you the truth. The truth is that the level of benefit they bring is controversial and not settled, even among programmers.
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So besides coding, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, images, translation, proofreading, analysing contracts, tech support, playing Minecraft with, ERP, military targeting analysis, cybersecurity (defensive/offensive), drafting emails, summarizing documents, explaining history/science, doing everything that a search engine can do and more, writing and analysing spreadsheet functions, making charts and dashboards, sales research, writing fanfiction, earnings call analysis, document dump analysis, home repair/DIY fixes, recipes for cooking, car diagnostics from symptoms, real-time captioning for the deaf and literally lifesaving medical diagnoses...
Besides this handful of niche fields, what have LLMs ever done for us?
Doesn't it surprise you that Google is planning to spend $200 billion on AI this year? Mysteriously they don't seem to think it's a niche use-case but vital to their whole company's future since their core business of 'search' is another word for AI. And LLMs are at the heart of AI.
When I have issues with a piece of software not working and spitting out some incomprehensible error message I can now ask an AI and get a much better answer compared to trawling through forum posts from 8 years ago. Or get it to directly analyse and fix the code. Most programs have gotten much better in useability.
There are strong arguments against AI but 'it's mostly useless' is extremely silly. If it were useless nobody would care much about it, mostly useless is Siri-tier AI in the 2010s. Nobody cared much about Siri.
Furthermore, the general public's opinions don't really matter much. Concentrated, wealthy lobby groups like big tech and the military-industrial base have much more of a say.
That's a long list you've got there, but it includes things that LLMs have not made any useful contributions to (e.g. teaching, physics, chemistry), things that are obviously frivolous (e.g. cybersex, playing video games), things that LLMs are fundamentally untrustworthy with (e.g. legal contracts, most analyses), and things that LLMs are just plain terrible at (e.g. fiction, image generation), so... yes, besides those things. I think that was a long list of nonsense intended to overawe, rather than a serious discussion of what these bots are able to do.
I think there are some use cases for LLMs, but overall much less than their boosters think. When the general public rejects this technology as not useful for them, the general public is mostly correct.
This is exactly the problem. What we are talking about is public opposition to data centres, which, as Sun discusses, is predicated at least in part on the judgement that bots are not particularly useful. If 'AI' companies want to earn the public trust, they need to demonstrate both their trustworthiness and the usefulness of their products, and thus far they are failing at both those tasks. Sneering at the peasants is certainly not going to help them in these tasks.
Fiction is middling at best but LLMs (or adjacent technologies) are now pretty great at image generation. perhaps a bit narrow but the six-fingered hand is a thing of the past, and text is more or less solved on top models.
I agree that they're pretty great at image generation but I'd say issues with things like hands are still pretty common, even if it isn't as egregious and almost omnipresent as it used to be.
I think the battle against AI for things that people don't look too closely at is well and truly lost at the technical level, and culture is just lagging behind. I don't think Normies will give a shit about most of the things complained about online about this.
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Partly it's happening, just slower than you think and concentrated on business-to-business because these days building software for users has very high expectations for ease of use and frankly it's not worth it.
But the main issue is regulation and incumbents sitting on top of the bottlenecks. Want an app on your phone to point out you've missed an email that's urgent? Tough, only Apple gets to see your emails. Want it to be able to point out when you're doomscrolling? Tough, Apple doesn't let apps see what you're doing. Want your phone to take care of some trivial tasks without you? Tough, Apple definitely doesn't allow apps to use other apps. There's good security reasons for this but it means massive swathes of AI use cases can literally only be looked at by Apple and Google, who are slow-moving and mostly uninterested because they already own the market.
And this extends all over the place. Want to help people with something medical? I hope you've got a twenty person compliance team and you're friends with the regulators, and that's before you have a clue if your putative product will be popular or profitable. Similar for legal, similar for finance.
In short, the number of people who can do interesting things that you @OliveTapenade might notice in your personal life are limited to about 1-10 companies, who mostly have other priorities.
I also think this is too narrow. I've had a dispute with my employer and having something that can not only go through thirty pages of legal documents immediately and spot traps but also provide a legal fix so I don't have to rely purely on their drafting has been incredibly useful.
This is always the case with technology: it can take a surprising amount of time to replace existing infrastructure even when new technology is clearly better. Existing equipment was expensive and still works, teaching staff new workflows has overhead, and the impetus to actually change things is often low. OPM was still processing paper records for employee retirement until very recently. How many industrial machines are still running DOS out there?
I can imagine AI being both transformative and seemingly-ubiquitous, but still not reaching all the dark corners of the workforce for a generation or two.
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This may still be overly optimistic. I think many people's main impression of modern software is negative experiences like ubiquitous data harvesting, addictive social media algorithms, and frustrating experiences with confusing or buggy new technology.
Promising to deliver more of these faster won't be considered a positive effect of AI.
This is kind of where I'm at. Sure, my phone has some cool new toys that let me edit my photos and identify bird calls, but by and large my experience with tech is significantly worse now than it was 10 or 20 years ago. It seems like most recent advances have mostly just ennabled increasing enshittification by making it easier to track me and engage in variable pricing. About 10 years ago, things stopped getting better and just started getting more expensive.
There is real value in the ~10% of my time it saves in researching and drafting emails. But I'd trade that 10% efficiency gain for no more AI ads/scams, no flock cameras, less bot spam, no more people using screenshots of AI hallucinations as evidence for stupid arguments, etc. in a heartbeat. I'm not even convinced AI is worth the price of free, let alone using my tax dollars to build a windowless concrete box in the middle of town.
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As far as I can tell, most Americans think that AI is making society worse. More and more Americans have encountered and used the technology, but it is the most widely-despised technological advance in a generation.
For this story I think the key part there is Pew's point 10. Experts are vastly more optimistic about LLMs than the population in general. That divergence is what drives this conflict. If many members of the public believe that the situation is that a small, wealthy elite are forcing a technology on the country that the country does not want... well, those members of the public are correct.
I mean, good? I do not want members of the public to have veto power over what smart engineers are permitted to develop (as long as they're paying for it, of course). Imagine if we'd held a plebiscite on whether universities should continue spending money on this "Internet" thing in friggin' 1973, 4 years after ARPANET began. Imagine if journalists were publishing articles in 1907 asking for the government to shut down research on these new-fangled planes because they're flimsy and dangerous and nobody they know has seen any benefits from them.
Experts have, well, expertise in the subject. They know the technology has a ridiculous number of use cases. But it takes time for it to percolate through society.
This exact mentality has had disastrous effects in economics.
The experts had expertise. They had intelligence, learning, fierce debate about the correct way to organize and run a market economy. Then when their theories turned out to be wrong and their experiments catastrophically failed, received little to no ill consequences. Although you could say they didn't 'fail', as many of them saw great personal benefit.
Huh? How did you and @OliveTapenade both make the same mistake when replying to me? We're not talking about experts running a command economy, which I completely agree has been historically disastrous. The "experts" being quoted aren't government stooges, they're techbros working at the AI companies, who want to be allowed to be capitalists and spend/risk their own money.
The people trying to involve the government - to shut down data center projects - are the other side, the one I'm arguing against.
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If it helps, if you held this retroactively today, I'm still not sure how I'd personally vote. I get a lot out of the Internet, but I do sometimes wonder if it's worth all the downsides.
That's fair. And the same could be said for AI, of course! There's at least an honest debate to be had there. Not like this highly-motivated special scrutiny of datacenters.
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I don't think it would be good to have a social system where 'smart engineers' get to appropriate or make decisions about the use of public resources without the consent of the public who are most affected.
Arpanet or early aeronautics aren't affected by this principle because they didn't involve resources that same way. A university working on computer networks in 1973 was not building giant facilities in small towns against the expressed wishes of those towns' inhabitants.
They're not "appropriating" resources. They're negotiating with authorities to be graciously permitted to pay for them. Water, electricity, chips, land, buildings, employees. None of these are free.
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If software is a niche field, then the US is a niche economy. And, although the public might think math and software is pointless stuff for nerds, they do care about cratering the economy.
Do the majority of software developers do math? I don’t do software so I don’t know, but my guess is software developers doing math stuff was a niche.
Obviously, 50 years ago every software engineer did math.
I don't know how you can do software development without doing math. Maybe they aren't doing the kind of math that people usually recognize as math, because we never bother to teach things like algorithms or automata as "math", but they are very much doing math.
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No, not typically. But it's one of "the handful of niche fields" where AI has proven very powerful and successful.
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There are 1.84 million software developers in the U.S., so roughly half a percent of the population. I suspect most of these are heavily concentrated on the coasts, rather than scattered throughout the areas of the country most of these data centers are going.
Joe Six-Pack probably knows umpteen different welders, heavy equipment operators, machinists, and he certainly knows plenty of people who drive cars. He's probably never met a software developer, nor does he see any reason to. In his mind (and many others), AI might as well be fictitious.
Joe Sixpack may not know any software developers, but he uses the Internet, including some kind of search engine... which probably includes AI prominently now. If he doesn't live near Detroit or one of the few other centers of car manufacture, he probably doesn't know any automotive engineers either, but he damn sure knows about automobiles.
If there's an enormous car factory in his town, he either works at it or knows scores of people who do. It's easy to see the benefit.
The benefit to an enormous loud data center that employs next to no one, and potentially triples your electric bill? Yeah obviously that's not gonna go over as well.
Enough with the CCP propaganda; data centers don't triple your electric bill. In fact, if they're "loud", it certainly means they're on independent power.
Independent power or not, the fuel source has to come from somewhere, and these things have enormous power requirements; like, potentially more than your entire state currently generates. Given the laws of supply and demand, there is no earthly way they won't increase energy costs for consumers (barring government intervention).
They're industrial facilities. Yes, they use a lot of power. Though not more than "my entire state"; Google Lenoir, for instance, is estimated to have the capacity to use 133MW, compared to North Carolina's generating capacity of 36,000MW. This is about the same as a single line at an aluminum smelter. The Texas numbers you linked for are the total for 1800 separate projects.
The aggregate demand is what affects prices and impact; one single facility is irrelevant.
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There are only 350k machinists, I propose a moratorium on building tooling for this niche field of which I personally know no practitioners.
You seem to be, perhaps, missing my point. It's not a matter of whether a given field of expertise is more or less important; it's a matter of "can I see the value of this in my day-to-day life".
Obviously (I think), the average person in 2026 can identify the value of a machining factory moreso than he can a data center.
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