Whenever I hear about AI craze, I remind myself of the 3D printers craze from 10-15 years ago. "Death blow to factories", "We will print our own cars", "We will print our own food". I imagine LLM AI will follow the same fate - yes, but not really.
The craze is that all combined breakthroughs across all types of AI/ML, including techniques that have not yet been imagined, represent a theoretical near-future technology that changes everything.
Besides, 10-15 years is nothing. I don't think 3D printers are a truly transformative technology compared to AI, however let's remember that WW2 aside, it took both airplanes and computers about 30-40 years until they had a broad societal/consumer impact (excluding military uses)
3D printers may radically transform all manufacturing eventually but it will take many iterations to get there. Right now it would theoretically be possible to 3D print quite a lot of what we make but traditional manufacturing methods are still cheaper and work fine, so there's no forcing function. If we tried to do something like build a self-sufficient settlement in space, that would be a place where you'd see 3D printing taken a lot further. You would not have large amounts of human labor or big supply chains, so you'd need portable self-contained versatile manufacturing.
LLMs are not going to replace human writers, programmers, etc. any time soon for anything but the most menial work. They will augment them. For programming they're basically a smarter more versatile version of autocomplete. I've also found them useful to look up concepts, do research, and summarize and document both code and text. None of those things replace me but they let me get more done a little faster.
In the very long term you could see LLMs becoming powerful enough to actually synthesize whole applications outside of contrived examples, but like 3D printing replacing all manufacturing it will take many iterations and may require a forcing function.
You can't really beat injection molding in term of throughput and cost at the large scale.
Certainly 3D printing will become more common, and bigger 3D print farms will open up, driving down costs, but will never reach injection molding in term of being cheap on a large scale. What 3D print farms can do is the ability to change what get produced on the fly allowing responsiveness to market demand.
Really, a lot of the amazing stuff in 3D printing are things people designed. If you know CAD, the world is your oyster.
Strong disagree here.
I remember that craze, especially since I had heard of it often before joining a company working on 3d printing in a fairly serious way (Autodesk).
And the thing is, I had no prior experience with 3d printing, but it took me about 2 months to realize that everything talked about in the press was bullshit. It just made zero sense - from a technical perspective, we were nowhere close to getting anything like what some articles claimed (printing our own cars). From a business sense, there were stunningly few places where using 3d printing instead of traditional manufacturing made any kind of improvement.
(I don't mean to overstate this - 3d printing is awesome and has plenty of real use cases. It was the media around it that was overhyped.)
Most people who actually knew anything about 3d printing realized the media were... overly enthusiastic, to put it mildly. And you can see that many years later, none of those grand visions materialized.
With AI, on the other hand, we have two huge differences:
1. It's already proven massively useful, and has already had 100 times the impact that 3d printing ever had.
Seriously, when was the last time you found a product that was effectively launched 4 years ago, and that has achieved such stunning market penetration? ChatGPT is legit the fastest growing product in history in terms of users.
2. Insiders are, mostly, incredibly enthusiastic about the technology, and think both that it can get much better, and that the current potential is as yet untapped. That's my view, for sure.
Misleading. Fastest 1 million users is not a meaningful metric to compare products over a time when population itself is exploding.
(If anything, better criticisms are that the amount of people with access to the internet has grown a lot, which is far more true. Or that what counts as a user can be very different for different services.
I still think it's a good-enough metric to be able to say that ChatGPT has achieved some pretty serious level of success and adoption, enough to put ideas that AI is just a lot of hot air to rest.)