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Comment by exe34 | Hacker News Reader

> If LLMs are going to "eat the world" they need to either be a lot better in the median case (bad prompts, bad model selection) or they need to be so cost-effective that you can farm out your query to an ensemble and choose the result dialogue-tree-style.

LLMs have been around for two years. it took decades before the PC really took hold.

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Segways existed for a long time and they never took off. Zeppelins too. Not every technology automatically gets good just because time passes.

> LLMs have been around for two years. it took decades before the PC really took hold.

But virtually everybody has been using LLMs already. How long would it have taken for the PC if everybody had had the opportunity to use one for more than a year?

so everybody is using it and it's not good enough for everybody to use yet? why is everybody using it?

I guess "everybody is using it" is not the same as "everybody depends on it" or "it would be economically viable for everybody to pay for what it costs"?

Whereas the PC was clearly economically viable.

It was clearly so in hindsight. at the time it was a toy for affluent people. it didn't really start affecting people's everyday lives until the 90s.

1) Chat GPT is nearly 3 years old, and LLMs were around before that.

2) Yes, they still have some time to fit the market better, but that doesn't change what they'll need to do to fit the market better.

The IBM PC was an overnight success. It was less than a decade after the first “PCs” and it was the hockey stick moment. I remember x86 clones being seemingly everywhere in just a year or two

Pretty much everybody I know is using an LLM for something. some are even using it for things they shouldn't be using it for.

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