Two kinds of AI users are emerging
martinalderson.com
Two kinds of AI users are emerging
1–10 of 358 posts
Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging
#2Terrifying that people are creating financial models with AI when they don’t have the skills to verify the model does what they expect
Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging
#3The argument seems to be that having a corporation restrict your ability to present arbitrary text directly to the model and only being able to go through their abstract interface which will integrate your text into theirs (hopefully) is more productive than fully controlling the input text to a model. I don't think that's true generally. I think it can be true when you're talking about non-technical users like the article is.
Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging
#4Terrifying that people are creating financial models with AI when they don’t have the skills to verify the model does what they expect
They have an excel sheet next to it - they can test it against that. Plus they can ask questions if something seems off and have it explain the code.
Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging
#5The copilot button in excel at my work can’t access the excel file of the window it’s in. As in “what’s in cell A1” and it says I can’t read this file. Not even sure what the point is then frankly.
I’m happily vibe coding at work but yeah article is right. MS has enterprise market share by default not by merit. Stunning contrast between what’s possible and what’s happening in big corp
Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging
#6Terrifying that people are creating financial models with AI when they don’t have the skills to verify the model does what they expect
They have an excel sheet next to it - they can test it against that. Plus they can ask questions if something seems off and have it explain the code.
[flagged]
Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging
#7Terrifying that people are creating financial models with AI when they don’t have the skills to verify the model does what they expect
[dead]
Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging
#8The argument seems to be that having a corporation restrict your ability to present arbitrary text directly to the model and only being able to go through their abstract interface which will integrate your text into theirs (hopefully) is more productive than fully controlling the input text to a model. I don't think that's true generally. I think it can be true when you're talking about non-technical users like the a…
The use of specialization of interfaces is apparent if you compare Photoshop with Gemini Pro/Nano Banana for targeted image editing.
I can select exactly where I want changes and have targeted element removal in Photoshop. If I submit the image and try to describe my desired changes textually, I get less easily-controllable output. (And I might still get scrambled text, for instance, in parts of the image that it didn't even need to touch.)
I think this sort of task-specific specialization will have a long future, hard to imagine pure-text once again being the dominant information transfer method for 90% of the things we do with computers after 40 years of building specialized non-text interfaces.
Re: Two kinds of AI users are emerging
#9I don't see a divergence, from what I can tell a lot of people have only just started using agents in the past 3-4 months when they got good enough that it was hard to say otherwise. Then there's stuff like MCP, which never seemed good and was entirely driven by people who talked more about it than used it. There also used to be stuff like langchain or vector databases that nobody talks about anymore, maybe they're still used but they're not trendy anymore.
It seems way too soon to really narrow down any kind of trends after a few months. Most people aren't breathlessly following the next twitter trend, give it at least a year. Nobody is really going to be left behind if they pick up agents now instead of 3 months ago.