You mean... two years in? Where was the internet 2 years into it?
You may be intending to refer to 1971 (about two years after the creation of ARPANet) but really the more accurate comparison would be to 1995 (about two years since ISPs started offering SLIP/PPP dialup to the general public for $50/month or less).
And I think the comparison to 1995, the year of the Netscape IPO and URLs starting to appear in commercials and on packaging for consumer products, is apt: LLMs have been a research technology for a while, it’s their availability to the general public that’s new in the last couple of years. Yet while the scale of hype is comparable, the products aren’t: LLMs still don’t anything remotely like what their boosters claim, and have done nothing to justify the insane amounts of money being poured into them. With the Internet, however, there were already plenty of retailers starting to make real money doing electronic commerce by 1995, not just by providing infrastructure and related services.
It’s worth really paying attention to Ed Zitron’s arguments here: The numbers in the real world just don’t support the continued amount of investment in LLMs. They’re a perfectly fine area of advanced research but they’re not a product, much less a world-changing one, and they won’t be any time soon due to their inherent limitations.
I think it's pretty fair to say that they have close to doubled my productivity as a programmer. My girlfriend uses ChatGPT daily for her work, which is not "tech" at all. It's fair to be skeptical of exactly how far they can go but a claim like this is pretty wild.
It remains to be seen how viable this casual usage actually is once this money dries up and you actually need to pay per prompt. We'll just have to see where the pricing will eventually settle, before that we're all just speculating.
My grandfather didn’t care about these and you don’t care about LLMs, we get it
> They’re a perfectly fine area of advanced research but they’re not a product
lol come on man