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Comment by rvense | Hacker News Reader

On October 17th, 1979, VisiCalc was released.

I'm sure pretty much every accountant in the world got up and went to work that day exactly like they'd been doing all of their career. It probably didn't feel different for that many of them. Most of them had probably never used a computer then, and a lot of them probably didn't feel any particular need to, at least until they tried it. There were probably more than a few who were near the end of the career managed to keep doing their job the old way for another half or whole decade or so, because even when the future moves fast it's never evenly distributed.

There were probably also more than a few who saw VisiCalc and bought an Apple II to start doing their own books and ended up regretting it. I don't know where we are and how things will pan out, but I think there's a parallel.

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Agreed. On my Twitter timeline lots of people are saying "the world will be completely different in 6-12 months' time". On October 17th, 1980, most accountants' work day still looked the same as a year before. It took decades for spreadsheets to get widespread adoption. I think LLMs are revolutionary, but the (r)evolution will take decades to materialize. Our work days will look completely different... in 2043.

> I think LLMs are revolutionary, but the (r)evolution will take decades to materialize.

1980s was a different world. Today, the distribution that BigTech has, enabled by this thing called the Internet, changes the dynamic completely.

Given the investment, I believe LLMs will change some of the industries within 5 years, simply because it is a new but natural way to interact with Computers; and Google/Apple already put an Internet-connected Computer in everyone's hands.

This LLM hype is very real and is nothing like web3 (which lacked 10x utility over web2, imo).

When low/no-code started its hype? 5-10 years ago? Or something like that. First release dates:

Mendix 2005 Outsystems 2001 Appian 2004 (no info before) Quickbase 2000 Zoho Creator 2006

~20 years ago. I agree with the idea that it’s a new cool way of interaction with systems, but I also think you trust too much in our development cycles. Five years is nothing. Companies will try and fail, try and pivot, try and barely swim for years. Few of them will arrive alive at stage 2 where the real deal starts.

If it were easy, it would hit frontpages last week, because small companies and single developers can prototype things 10-100x faster than any bigcorp.

The primary issue that I see here is that as a natural language interface to a computer, I don’t know that there’s enough profit to support the hardware and training costs. Also, there are copyright questions involved. There also issues of hallucination, and limiting these neuters the creative aspect of the LLMs.

Personally, I truly hope that this technology gets cheaper and cheaper, and that it can be run on a device the size of a pager in pocket with a pair of AirPods on. If that were my computing environment 90% of the time, I’d be thrilled.

I hate and am terrified of what LLMs will do to society, and I do think they're overhyped, but the revolution won't take years.

They can already fully replace human proofreaders and content marketers. They're very close to being able to replace graphic designers, voice actors, and commercial photographers. I expect we'll see many more unsexy jobs like those being replaced within 5 years.

Throwing out the hot take (for HN) that computer intuition is about to be a much stronger destabilizing force than spreadsheets were. And that’s really where change comes from, IMO - the status quo showing cracks

A young man in his 20's starting his career will never know understand how things worked without the tech. A man in his 30's see's an opportunity to boost his career, and an older man in his 50's see's a long fought career's worth of expertise being thrown away.

You don't need to put an apostrophe before every s that ends a word. Only ones that are possessive, like "career's"

It's 20s, not 20's. It's sees, not see's.

This might be an autocorrect issue. My iphone 7 would do this rampantly with the swipe keyboard to the point where i concluded that no one at apple actually used it.

You have to go back a whole lot further if you're making an analogy between chatGPT and spreadsheets. Back to Ada Lovelace, probably. VisiCalc did already useful and already transformative, the only things missing was better user experience and adoption. ChatGPT is a nice thought provoking toy, but not really useful other than as a novel search engine interface.

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