To me there are cool things but nothing so great where if LLMs were deleted I’d cry about it. To contrast mRNA vaccines, gene therapy and crispr seem more impactful in reality, just to mention things from 2020.
Even considering that it’s sometimes wrong or hallucinating, it’s doing an important job by beginning to eliminate gate keeping, be it centered on cost or access.
Considering that ChatGPT has 900 million users I suspect the average person finds value in the technology.
A funny story that happened the other day: A friend knew he had to be at dinner at a place across town but he forgot why he had to be at that dinner. While we were waiting for his rideshare to come, he was flipping through every kind of app trying to reconstruct the original context for his appointment.
In theory, this is where AI should shine. He should have been able to say "Hey Siri, pull up all of the info that references tonight's dinner appointment" and AI should be the unified interface into a bunch of app-specific data pools.
But of course he's never in 1 million years would have thought about using Siri to do that because of how bad Siri is.
Coding adjacent, but my small town's small businesses have all dramatically improved their websites with LLMs. Folks who didn't have them before can now build them. Folks who had to rely on a web designer no longer have to.
Yes. Code looks intimidating if you aren't used to it (and don't have an IDE). And there are lots of steps between having a file of code and having a hosted website.
* It's lovely to have the opportunity to disagree with both Gruber and the "the whole thing smacks of politics" HN commentariat, pulled daily between "it's just a tool, like a hammer, which also kills people, stay with me here" and "AI puts an expert in your pocket; soon, the expert will live in your eyes"
I do like certain other aspects of projects like that, which is why it’s great to have LLMs to collaborate with on it.
> they'll pay a monthly fee for a machine to tell them it's ok
Why would I outsource that decision to an LLM? I can look at the result myself and decide if I like it.
"Folks who didn't have them before can now build them. Folks who had to rely on a web designer no longer have to."
You ever heard of squarespace?
Clifford Stoll had used the internet for two decades before writting his infamous 1995 essay in Time saying the internet was overhyped, and "normal" people would never e-mail because they can just fax.
CRISPR was first observed in 1987, and the gene-editing breakthrough came in 2012.
It's really, really unclear why you think LLMs would have faster adoption, when they are already that being adopted faster that anything other tech, ever.
Do you honestly know of no non-technical person who use LLMs? Because an absurd number of people report on surveys that they use it every week.
LLM apps are regularly the top downloads on the iPhone.
But you specified America, so I guess no.
Internet
- made the communication possible, all the information diffusing was only possible because of internet
- all sorts of small interactions and serendipitous communication through social media was due to the internet
- computation and simulation required was possible with the internet
Sometimes things make other things possible in subtle but real ways which are overdetermined. You can't articulate how AI will help a person materially in first order effects. But it will.