This seems to be biased heavily towards products that look like an LLM. And yes, only a small number of those work. But that's because if your product is a thing I chat with, it immediately is in competition with ChatGPT/Claude/Grok/etc, leading to everything the article expressed. But those are hardly the only use cases for LLMs, let alone AI (whatever people nowadays mean by AI)
To name some of the obvious counter-examples, Grammarly and Deepl are both AI (and now partially LLM-based) products that don't fit any of the categories in the post, but seem pretty successful to me. Lots of successful applications of Vison-LLMs in document scanning too, whether you are deciphering handwritten text or just trying to get structured data out of pdfs.
Grammarly and DeepL are great examples of successful AI products, I agree. What's most interesting is that they became successful long before the LLM hype. They didn't try to be "universal intelligence", they just wanted to help people write and translate better. Maybe the next big breakthrough won't be in creating another chatbot, but in finding more of these "boring" but critically important niches
So the only AI products that work is a chat bot you can talk to, or a chat bot that can perform tasks for you. Next thing you'll tell me is that the only businesses that work are ones where you can ask somebody to do something for you in exchange for money.
I’ve been working on a learning / incremental reading tool for a while, and I’ve found LLM and LLM adjacent tech useful, but as ways of resolving ambiguity within a product that doesn’t otherwise show any use of LLM. It’s like LLM-as-parser.
The classic problem that online commenters face is that they only know products that are on Hacker News and Reddit. And I get why. Not being plugged into anything the only way to get information is social media so you only know social media.
B2B AI company, 2 years in sold for hundreds of millions, not an agent, chatbot, or completion. Do you know it exists? No. You only read Hacker News. How could you know?
Chatbot is the only one I agree with (human in the loop).
Agents are essentially the chatbot, but without the human in the loop. Chatbot without human in the loop is a slop factory. Things like "multi-agent systems" are a clever ploy to get you to burn tokens and ideally justify all this madness.
Copilot/completion does not work in business terms for me. It looks like it works and it might feel like it's working in some localized technical sense, but it does not actually work on strategic timescales with complex domains in such a way that a customer would eventually be willing to pay you money for the results. The hypothesis that work/jobs will be created due to sloppy AI is proving itself out very quickly. I think "completion" tools like classic IntelliSense are still at the peak of efficiency.
Well, the elephant in the room here is that the generic AI product that is being promised, i.e. "you get into your car in the morning, and on your drive to the office dictate your requirements for one of the apps that is going to guarantee your retirement, in order to find it completely done, rolled out to all the app stores and making money already once you arrive" isn't happening anytime soon, if ever, yet everyone pretty much is acting like it's already there.
Can "AI" in its current form deliver value? Sure, and it absolutely does but it's more in the form of "several hours saved per FTE per week" than "several FTEs saved per week".
The way I currently frame it: I have a Claude 1/2-way-to-the-Max subscription that costs me 90 Euros a month. And it's absolutely worth it! Just today, it helped me debug and enhance my iSCSI target in new and novel ways. But is it worth double the price? Not sure yet...
> Users simply do not want to type out “hey, can you increase the font size for me” when they could simply hit “ctrl-plus” or click a single button3.
I would def challenge this. “Turn off private relay”, “send this photo to X”, “Add a pit stop at a coffee shop along the way” are all voice commands I would love to use
Very obviously missing the mundane agentic work. I think the following things are basically already solved, and are just waiting for the right harness:
- Call this government service center, wait on hold for 45 minutes, then when they finally answer, tell them to reactivate my insurance marketplace account that got wrongly deleted.
- Find a good dentist within 2mi from my house, call them to make sure they take my insurance, and book an appointment sometime in the next two weeks no earlier than 11am
- Figure out how I'm going to get from Baltimore to Boston next Thursday, here's $100 and if you need more, ask me.
- I want to apply a posterizing filter in photoshop, take control of my mouse for the next 10sec and show me where it is in the menu
- Call that gym I never go to and cancel my membership
I have doubts the nontechnical users/general public will be able to articulate what they need at this level of detail. Things like "account that got wrongly deleted" still implies that the person making the call understands the internals/bad implementation of healthcare or has the capability to discover it.
The HN audience has argued with LLMs enough to know the level of detail they need to make meaningful progress (or when too many details leads it down rabbit holes).
seem like data analysis would be a good one. Company ingests massive amounts of disparate business data. Ask AI to clean and normalize it, visualize it and give recommendations.
Well, considering that the long term idea is to have AGI, general intelligence, it seems that the goal as also to only have a single product in the end.
There may be different ways to access it, but the product is always the same.
> This doesn’t work well because savvy users can manipulate the chatbot into calling tools. So you can never give a support chatbot real support powers like “refund this customer”, ...
I would disagree with this.
Part of how security is handled in current agentic systems is to not let the LLM have any access to how the underlying tools work. At best it's like hitting "inspect" in your browser and changing the web page.
Of course, that assumes that the agentic chatbot has been built correctly.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 52.6 ms ] threadThis is actually a low bar, when the agent wrote those tests.
> Summary
By my count, there are three successful types of language model product:
- Chatbots like ChatGPT, which are used by hundreds of millions of people for a huge variety of tasks
- Completions coding products like Copilot or Cursor Tab, which are very niche but easy to get immediate value from
- Agentic products like Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and Copilot Agent mode, which have only really started working in the last six months
On top of that, there are two kinds of LLM-based product that don’t work yet but may soon:
- LLM-generated feeds
- Video games that are based on AI-generated content
To name some of the obvious counter-examples, Grammarly and Deepl are both AI (and now partially LLM-based) products that don't fit any of the categories in the post, but seem pretty successful to me. Lots of successful applications of Vison-LLMs in document scanning too, whether you are deciphering handwritten text or just trying to get structured data out of pdfs.
Personally I’m waiting for better O365 and SharePoint agents. I think there’s a lot of automation and helper potential there.
At the level of granularity selected, maybe true. But too coarse to make any interesting distinctions or predictions.
Claude 3.5 was released in june 2024.
Maybe he has been writing this article for a while, maybe he meant Claude Code or Claude 4.0
Yep. Looking forward to the future where you can eat plastic pop-corn while watching the AI-generated video feeds.
- human language translation
- summarization
- basic content generation
- spoken language transcription
E.g. https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en/press-releases/2025/septem...
B2B AI company, 2 years in sold for hundreds of millions, not an agent, chatbot, or completion. Do you know it exists? No. You only read Hacker News. How could you know?
Unless there are serious ethical problems with people generating arbitrary text ie. Writing - then no there isn't
Agents are essentially the chatbot, but without the human in the loop. Chatbot without human in the loop is a slop factory. Things like "multi-agent systems" are a clever ploy to get you to burn tokens and ideally justify all this madness.
Copilot/completion does not work in business terms for me. It looks like it works and it might feel like it's working in some localized technical sense, but it does not actually work on strategic timescales with complex domains in such a way that a customer would eventually be willing to pay you money for the results. The hypothesis that work/jobs will be created due to sloppy AI is proving itself out very quickly. I think "completion" tools like classic IntelliSense are still at the peak of efficiency.
Can "AI" in its current form deliver value? Sure, and it absolutely does but it's more in the form of "several hours saved per FTE per week" than "several FTEs saved per week".
The way I currently frame it: I have a Claude 1/2-way-to-the-Max subscription that costs me 90 Euros a month. And it's absolutely worth it! Just today, it helped me debug and enhance my iSCSI target in new and novel ways. But is it worth double the price? Not sure yet...
I would def challenge this. “Turn off private relay”, “send this photo to X”, “Add a pit stop at a coffee shop along the way” are all voice commands I would love to use
- Call this government service center, wait on hold for 45 minutes, then when they finally answer, tell them to reactivate my insurance marketplace account that got wrongly deleted.
- Find a good dentist within 2mi from my house, call them to make sure they take my insurance, and book an appointment sometime in the next two weeks no earlier than 11am
- Figure out how I'm going to get from Baltimore to Boston next Thursday, here's $100 and if you need more, ask me.
- I want to apply a posterizing filter in photoshop, take control of my mouse for the next 10sec and show me where it is in the menu
- Call that gym I never go to and cancel my membership
The HN audience has argued with LLMs enough to know the level of detail they need to make meaningful progress (or when too many details leads it down rabbit holes).
Thing is, there is no library for it to work in.
There may be different ways to access it, but the product is always the same.
I would disagree with this.
Part of how security is handled in current agentic systems is to not let the LLM have any access to how the underlying tools work. At best it's like hitting "inspect" in your browser and changing the web page.
Of course, that assumes that the agentic chatbot has been built correctly.