The companies that stuck with paper and didn't adopt computers, the web and mobile went out of business. The same will happen in the near future with the companies that are unwilling or unable to adopt AI/ML in their business.
Similarly, lots of companies spent thousands of dollars on a website or a mobile app that no one looks at because they're a small town landscaping business that really doesn't need those things.
The same goes for AI. There are definitely use cases where it will improve how we do things. For some businesses that will make them more profitable and more competitive. A lot of businesses won't adopt it for decades. Some will adopt it when it brings them no real benefits.
AI is a tool. People will often use it poorly, just like every other tool.
If you look at the past HN comments there were users who predicted the raise of OpenAI, the war in Ukraine and so on.
But this is not at all the same kind of "predicting future events" as accurately saying where e.g. the CryptoCurrency or VR industry will be in a decade or so.
I think language models will become a commodity, like a spell checker is today. They might open up the market for translations into more exotic languages (but I don't know how the quality is for such languages and by definition, the market ain't big) and I think every author will use one as part of their workflow (think of technical writers using a language model for the textual parts). Computer games might profit massively in terms of immersion.
No, I don't think that new applications will become that important with language models. I think it's the other way around. There are so many applications that we simply don't need any longer. Language models and image recognition models together will take over the user interface industry. Why bother with web design and user experience if you can just throw the chatbot at your client? That's going to become the real value here.
If I was a junior web developer, I would begin to seek out new programming languages and stacks.
The former are going to mostly be successful, particularly in the place of companies that don't adapt, but the latter are mostly going to be obsolete by the time they'll be several years into it.
AI as a product is a TERRIBLE play. But AI as part of a solution is going to be necessary for nearly every business vertical.
What about all those technologies that just died? Companies that did not embrace Minitel, blockchain or the metaverse seem just fine right now.
So even if they make money AND hire 'data scientists', there is a higher chance that they will run out of money quicker since they are competing against Google, Microsoft and OpenAI which they all can afford to run everything at a loss for free and raise their prices which eats these startup's revenue.
Either way, they are locked into these APIs and they aren't focused on profitability to even begin building their own models at this stage. If they are not profitable by the time the price increases come in, they are going to be struggling for survival.