Only 3% of American households are paying for an AI subscription. If LLMs make it so much faster and easier to get work done, why isn’t everyone using them?
This X post from Sam Altman sums it up nicely:
chatgpt work is remarkable, and “work” undersells it.
from my phone i sent:
“use all my chat history to figure out ideas for a long weekend trip with 8 friends, plan the best three options, make a full-stack site where the 9 of us can coordinate on what we would want to do in each place and decide where to go, and then after we get to group agreement make reservations. draft an email in my gmail i can send out to my friends when the site is ready.”
it…just worked.
I’m sure it did work. I’ve made so many personal utilities that are either single-use (i.e., throwaway) or that I use every week. I’m struck by the prompt.
Sam had to think through his plans, the range of options he wanted, the output he wanted, whether he needed coordination, and how he wanted to get the results. In other words, he thought like a builder. This is a mindset that, in my experience, is pretty uncommon.
When judging whether a product or service is techie, builder-oriented, or non-mainstream, I usually check with my wife. She is super smart, high-agency, and can generally look at something and immediately tell whether it will help her in life or work. I’ve been trying to teach her how to use ChatGPT Work to get things done for the past week or so. She has used ChatGPT for quick answers, brainstorming, and similar queries for some time now. But she hasn’t really used it to produce work yet.
I convinced her to try making a series of presentations for a course she is teaching. The process has been relatively bumpy, I must say. First, her prompt was too vague, and the LLM dutifully made everything in one go, with predictably middling results. Then I recommended that she start with one slide deck and, once she was happy with the result, ask ChatGPT to use it as a guide for the others. That worked better, but it took 30 minutes to make a single slide deck because of all the checks. It worked, but she was pretty underwhelmed. In her mind, she could have done a better job herself in maybe 45 minutes, so why wait 30? After making it herself, she would also understand the thought process behind the slides and be better able to present them. Fair point.
I think a better, chunkier, and more specific prompt at the beginning would have gotten her 90% of the way there, with perhaps 10 minutes spent writing out what she specifically wanted. But then I realized that she didn’t exactly know what she wanted until she started doing it. Well, I should say that she knew what she wanted, but she didn’t know how to articulate it as a series of instructions an LLM would understand.
Without a lot of coaching, I just can’t see more than a small percentage of people thinking this way. It’s weird. When they want to pay their bills, most people don’t think about the mechanics of finding the bills, paying them through a payment system, and recording that each bill was paid. Builders think about those things.
Until LLMs can do that builder-style thinking for ordinary users, I don’t see my wife, or people like her, choosing to turn to one most of the time.
