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Comment by PessimalDecimal | Hacker News Reader

If the analogy is LLMs are today's equivalent of the web, I'm skeptical. Internet-based communication replaced technology like telephones and fax machines for synchronous and asynchronous telecommunication. People like and need to talk to other people. It was clearly valuable from day 1. What is the equivalent value proposition for LLMs? They make for really cool and splashy demos. But practical usage doesn't seem to keep pace with the hype. Why is it such a safe assumption that this is just like the invention of the Internet (or, as Sundar Pichai put it, the invention of fire)?

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I have personally written VBA macros (or hell - just a decent Excel spreadsheet...) that have put people out of their jobs. I didn't know this at the time, I was just a young gun able to see how to make some slow repetitive jobs, faster.

Later moved to Oracle / SQL Server / C# / microservices / CICD etc etc) but hell, that was my whole career 2002-2012 across various companies. Making cool tools for smart people, things the accelerated the company in smal;l but measurable ways, that unbeknownst to me would absolutely have directly resulted in a team of 3-5 being reduced to a team of 1, or a team of 1 not being expanded to be a team of 3-5.

The same will happen (IS happening) with LLM's.

"Hence there is immanent in capital an inclination and constant tendency, to heighten the productiveness of labour, in order to cheapen commodities, and by such cheapening to cheapen the labourer himself. "

"No doubt, in turning them out of this “temporal” world, the machinery caused them no more than “a temporary inconvenience.” For the rest, since machinery is continually seizing upon new fields of production, its temporary effect is really permanent. Hence, the character of independence and estrangement which the capitalist mode of production as a whole gives to the instruments of labour and to the product, as against the workman, is developed by means of machinery into a thorough antagonism. Therefore, it is with the advent of machinery, that the workman for the first time brutally revolts against the instruments of labour."

soon we'll see if the old man was wrong and short-sighted, or if what has happened since the internet revolution is just an abnormal period in centuries

> It was clearly valuable from day 1

I’m not sure that’s the case even if in retrospect we can clearly argue this

In 1998, Paul Krugman, winner of the Nobel memorial prize in economic sciences, infamously predicted that “the growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s” [1] and even though that turned out to be spectacularly wrong it shows the attitude in the early days wasn’t one of absolute certainty.

And certainly the current AI boom is most visibly known for LLMs but there is a lot more happening beyond chatbots.

[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/paul-krugman-internets-eff...

He was correct about Metcalfe's law though. He correctly refuted a bad argument, but making a bad argument for a position doesn't make it false.

Krugman was very much in the minority in that. There was tremendous hype at that time.

Never heard of him. But I'm more surprised that someone who saw the Internet in 1998 would say that!

there was a lot of skepticism, and from some heavy hitters.

Sears famously laughing at online orders is a great example. They already had the mail over market owned, and already had the distribution, sourcing, and utterly dominant brand recognition in that space. People used to order homes from Sears!

They just needed the online catalog. But the CEO was a psychopath Randian who thought the internet was a fad and now Amazon runs things.

Same with Toy R Us, and Radioshack, which did a lot of mail order.

Sears HQ walkthrough near Chicago before its demolition:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yX9D3h2F_0

Ironic that Sears back in the day got started with mail order.

Seems like bad management is a cancer on a lot of organizations. Their size protects them for a while, but eventually they get outcompeted.

Why does n choose 2 have a law named after it?

Because Bob Metcalfe was a hell of a salesman.

Like half of software jobs are Doing Something so that management feels like they are innovative thought leaders of the tech community, while the other half of the software jobs are keeping the unsexy business critical software working.

Even if everything being done with LLMs is useless, if you can do the same amount of useless with half as many developers, it's bad news for us.

But this sounds like the TAM here is roughly "SWE compensation" versus the value of moving all business and social interaction onto the Internet.

It seems to me that I can research and study much faster as a result of using ChatGPT's Deep Research, FWIW.

It depends. If fed with high quality content (e.g. publications) results are decent and mostly on the positive side of time savings/value. Try to ask it a simple question, such as "pros and cons of these two smartphones" and it will suck up marketing bullshit from the internet and give you a convincing, but useless answer. I was really surprised to find this out, because I've been mostly living in the "scientific research" bubble, where it performs good to excellent and really saves time.

Only for information available on the Internet…

Which is most information...

That really depends on the domain. In fields like manufacturing, resources extraction, and pharmaceuticals most of the valuable information is locked behind corporate firewalls.

Even just general knowledge tends not to be on the internet if it was produced before that would have been expected.

Why do you think that? I collect books, mainly published from 1850s to 1980s, and it's not uncommon that they only occur in library listings and sometimes Goodreads when I search for information about their authors and history. This holds for some english language literature as well, but more so for books in other languages.

The Internet is basically a young, small portion of writings in english, as far as I can tell.

I have not found this to be the case, at all. An incredible amount is still locked up in paper, even in 2025.

Do you think all of the industry expertise for niche markets is published on the internet for free? Why would any company do that?

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