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Comment by n2d4 | Hacker News Reader

I think that's an unfair comparison. If the IBM Simon disappeared in 1994, I'm pretty sure you wouldn't have cared. If search engines disappeared in 1992, you'd have felt the same. Also, (what later became) AWS probably didn't interface much with you in 2003.

It takes some time for technology to mature, usually at least a decade or two. Even once the iPhone was released it took a few years until it became indispensable.

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If IBM had been spending hundreds of billions on its phone thing in 1994, though, well, there would probably have been no IBM by the early-noughties when smartphones that people wanted to use started to become practical.

"It may or may not produce something useful, in a few decades" cannot justify the present level of spending; that's just not going to fly. Without concrete results _soon_, the whole thing is in very big trouble.

Also, it takes time for people to forget what it was before so when their current status quo is taken away, they don’t know what to replace it with.

I remember when people commented here that the blockchain was the same as early google search or early aws or early iPhone.

Everyone thinks their new thing is the T-1.

That's always been true. We went through PDAs, 3D TVs, smart cities, cyberspace, but some of those actually did become our iPhones. "Nothing ever happens" is just hindsight/survivorship bias.

That doesn’t mean they were a good use of our energy and hype. A lot of those also didn’t in my way or cost billions.

I spent a moment with my brain froze up apparently trying to remember when the first Terminator was supposedly deployed in one of the timelines.

Then I realized the reference was to the "Model T" car. Somehow in my brain the token for "Model" is actually necessary for the correct lookup.

And yet many, many people - including me - were shouting from the rafters that this is nonsense, that Blockchain has no real use case (aside from cryptocurrencies), and that this was all a massive bubble.

Most of those some people - again, including me - are saying the opposite about AI.

The lesson to draw isn't "there's a lot of hype, means there's nothing there", nor is it "there's a lot of hype, means there something there". It's "we need to actually think about the technology we're discussing and make object-level decisions, not meta-level decisions".

But the AI-public Internet timeline is more like 1995. if all web search disappeared in 1995 it would've been a massive loss, despite how primitive search engines were back then.

reminding me that ~1995 for a couple of years it was practical to print listings of web sites:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2868341-the-internet-yel...

Chat right now is search in 99. Highly functional

Did you read the article? The author spends a LONG time going over why it's not early days for LLMs.

Here: https://www.wheresyoured.at/longcon/#:~:text=Also%2C%20uhm%2...

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