Hacker News Reader

Comment by shanebellone | Hacker News Reader

You've also lived through many technologies that failed to achieve mainstream adoption despite demonstrating comparable levels of hype.

View on HN

I'm constantly resisting the urge to write "MongoDB is webscale" whenever these threads show up.

For the uninitiated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1636198. The original video is gone but it lives on YouTube: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs.

MongoDB is still around.

This is how you know it is different. Because the people that were not treating mongo, graphql, microservices, the block chain, and web 3 as miracles are impressed by llm. Just like people that are not tech saavy.

There's hype and then there's overhype. We are clearly in the overhype category for LLMs, but there's absolutely no doubt they are going to change things.

In the 90s, the web was overhyped in the short run and under-hyped in the long run. We wrongly predicted 100% of people would do their shopping on the internet by 2005, but never dreamed Somali market traders would use it to discuss the price of fish, or that foreign hackers would use it to influence US elections.

I guess it’s the same with generative AI.

Different marketing appeals to different people.

I do think there is a lot of overlap with people promoting self driving predictions that haven't panned out.

It's funny you mention that because one of many concerns I can see with OpenAI might be, "... but is it web scale?" in that I could envision tight rate limits being imposed and then businesses having to pay exponentially more to get higher limits and passing those costs on to someone and these costs climb over time on some scale. New tech often operate at a loss until they get businesses dependent on their service.

12 years later and I feel like the dream of being a farmer isn't so bad (I know - farming isn't easy).

Segway enters the chat

https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-DGB-18306

It was only a few years ago that fully self-driving cars were only a few years away.

Not sure why this was downvoted.

I mean, it's true that we still don't know whether self-driving cars are a few years away, but the analogy with "LLMs are the beginning of AGI" is apt.

Like cryptocurrency.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com