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Comment by partyficial | Hacker News Reader

Early stages of any major disruptive technology will have hype due to get-rich-quick folks. Dot-com boom & bust of 2000 is similar. But the underlying technology (internet) defined our lives forever.

I don't know why people are comparing the Day-1 of one technology with the Day-1000 of another. Yes, AI is useless in many fields - NOW. But you can't imagine doing any work without in a couple years.

Like the kids used to ask - 'How did they build Google without Google?'

Now their kids will ask - 'How did they build chatGPT without chatGPT'?

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ChatGPT has been around for 4 years at this point. Not very long, but I’ve heard of the ‘imagine what it’ll do in one year’ spiel quite a few times by now.

How long was the internet around before it became essential for every day life?

The “Internet” was a DARPA-funded research curiosity initially. It was not crammed down people’s throats like a roll of Oreos while advocates screamed that, “You like this, right‽ This is the future! You have to like this, what is wrong with you?”

Transformers were treated like any other ML technique until Sutskever decided to just go big on training it. That it can look like a compelling simulacrum, I am not arguing, but this thing left the ivory tower of research prematurely and recklessly. We are all going to pay for it.

2 things - it’s not day 1 for AI, and it’s also not dot-com (which dropped the nasdaq 80% btw). It’s the entire American economy right now. When it can’t deliver anything approaching its hype, just like all the data centers that can’t deliver on power, the profit margins that can’t deliver, and the promises of massive 500% revenue increases this fiscal year… sorry, I was raised in a cult and know what the fuck I’m seeing, sadly among a lot of otherwise intelligent people here.

I expect I’ll be using LLMs now and in the future, but the public is far more right about the companies and the people running them than the tech “insiders” here.

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