I'm giving away which side I'm on now, but most of the TAM have experienced the product at this point, and trillions of dollars have been invested. I would wager most other revolutionary technologies found their game changing, broad reaching applications by this point.
Funnily, none of that mattered. What mattered is that enough ordinary people on the street found it useful, both for personal and business reasons. Ask yourself: are regular people using this tech, either as producers or consumers? And remember that this is the least powerful that it will ever be.
Broad economic impact due to Internet boom in the the US came from 2 main categories: 1) New huge internet enabled tech companies appeared(Amazon, Google, Meta etc.), all created their own products, all were build on reliable foundational technology. LLMs is not a reliable foundational technology. 2) Existing legacy companies could utilize internet to connect their teams/departments/offices though a bunch of new software which were build on reliable foundational technology. LLMs is not a reliable foundational technology.
> And remember that this is the least powerful that it will ever be.
This mantra is being repeated but "serious LLMs's issues" I described are still there and will be there because they are part of how LLMs are built and work. Without addressing those you can't build products but LLMs's capability as a personal productivity tool will keep rising, yes.
The "best" possible outcome of LLMs to a broader economy might be that a smaller group of experts will be able to do the job in companies due to boost of their personal productivity and a bunch of people will be freed up(laid off) and they will have to go and work on something else and thus a boost of productivity in the economy. But it seems it won't be any low hanging fruits(problems to solve) this time as it was during the internet era. It is not like we out of problems: new cancer treatments, self driving cars, nuclear fusion, modular nuclear reactors etc. There is a huge value to capture there, here is the thing though, those are hard problems, it is not a new TikTok, gmail, netflix etc. Yes, people will have LLMs now but can we actually start solving hard problems with them? Because it might be the case that a gravy train of the last few decades for Silicon Valley is over, no more useless internet enabled services, no more billion dollar companies built on just applying internet to yet another thing and producing another digital product. People's free time is limited, its redistribution across digital services will not grow the economy, global internet penetration is already pretty high and won't grow that much, so there might not be much value to capture there.
I don't know that the average regular person is using this tech as a producer, and while it's hard not to consume it - I don't know if anybody consuming it really wants to. I'm in a bubble of people where we give it a lot more mindshare, but e.g my electrician is aware of the tech, knows what it does, and doesn't really care. I think you're right that if it could manage his books, help him rewire a switchboard, order inventory for him etc that would be very different.
You don't know of people who ask LLMs questions? Or just chat with it for fun and to learn?
Maybe your electrician isn't interested. A pharmacist and a nurse I talk to are. Virtually everybody I've talked to uses it to some degree or another. I think it'll soon replace Alexa/Siri for most people, as well as google search.
That's pretty far from nobody.
If people use it to replace voice assistants or search engines, you can see how this new invention is not really adding anything you already hadn't.
AIs in general are very useful, but apart from the campaign they did to change everything's name into AI (also well known algorithms and "old" machine learning), if you look at all the possible applications, LLMs are possibly the least useful of them.
Especially if you take into account how much money they spent, and how much effort they put to shove it in your throat.
If a technology is convenient for people, you shouldn't need to insist to make people use it. If it is convenient, people will use it in a natural way.
This is like the railroads, and the tracks have been laid. Because of the enormous cost, it can't be left to "hope they'll find it useful," and has to be pushed like crazy, or we're going to be left with a train system with no goods or passengers, and no path into the future.
Personally, having AI as an intelligence I can call like it's a library from apps I build... and to help build those apps... I feel that the future is as bright as the sun. I've always believed in software, but I feel like a chef that's just discovered salt and butter.
I don't know what it means for the world stage, but I believe that software is the highest art, and it's just had an incalculably massive buff. As an artist, I am stoked. The possibilities for creation of good things are limitless, and if you can't see that, I can't help you.
However, I wouldn't necessarily invest in AI companies. I don't know how this all fits into the rest of the world, except that I believe in my own ability to make products, same as I ever did, but now with AI.
Except that for railroads I don't need people to convince me about how/when/why it can be useful.
Railroads came out to solve an issue we had (and then it evolved). LLMs are not giving us any new solution, just different speed (better) and quality (worse) to solve things we co&ld already solve.
It's basically the same concept as fast fashion. Worse quality, more speed, possibly more economic. You can change your wardrobe possibly every year, but you will never wear good quality clothes.
Now you can write code at impressive speed, but it is worse in quality, and you need to review it more often than "normal" code.
AI code should always be fully reviewed and put into the correct context to make it useful, otherwise long term problems will void short term benefits
It's clear from your words you lack experience and skill in this area - you've only got opinions.
Only because I do not share your point of view it doesn't mean I lack experience or skills.
You are pretty fast at jumping at conclusions.
Yeah, because I can see some of my own thoughts and experience from a long time ago in your words, and my experience tells me loud and clear that they're outdated and wrong.
They basically invented teleportation for sear catalogs and paper mail, can you see how this is different? Also, Internet was built to solve a problem we had, and it solved it beautifully and at reasonable prices.
I for sure can understand it introduced different issues, buy this is another topic.
I understand exactly what the Internet of the 90s did and did not do, because I was there to witness it myself. I had these same types of conversations with naysayers back then. Guess who was right?
The fact the you were right in a previous topic, doesn't grant you objective truth. You have your strong opinions on AI, and that's ok. Fortunately not everyone has to share the same idea.
If you think LLMs can do better than you, feel free to use them in production and bring them to work with you, it's your choice. Do not force others do the same, tho.
In the early phase of the Internet envelope, we all wanted to build the real Internet and destroy the AOL's and Compuserves' .. but now the Internet has turned into a mass of AOL's and Compuserves.
I think the same thing is happening with the silo'ization of LLM's. People don't want to have to use the "AOL of LLM's" for things - they want to build out their own infrastructure and have a pool of local LLM's (where once it was the company's own modem pool, etc.)
It is, oddly enough, parallel with the original arguments in the 70's and 80's regarding supercomputers versus personal computers, or the cloud versus locally managed resources, etc. We are still fighting this battle, just with higher bandwidth.
Do we operate a terminal with a fixed window into a bigger computer, or do we operate a heavier local computer with a proper interface?
My wife is a GP, and all she would ever need is a reliable speech to voice recognition of medical jargon, in french. Not 98%, not almost there, just there.
Most people don't live in IT echo chambers like HN. For them, chatgpts are just another online gimmick that saves a bit of time vs googling things, or puts together some paperwork quicker, and thats it.
For me, I can see potential beyond but are largely unmoved by it. The price to pay, in fucking up our environment, losing skills and/or losing skills to build skills, making large swaths of population unemployed with no replacement in sight, seems much more like devolution and net loss. Extremely few winners and big bunch of losers. Very happy to be wrong here of course, but only time will tell and neither you nor me know for sure.
A farmer may have seen an LLM answering their questions about how to make a less dry chicken sandwich, but he hasn't seen a specifically designed and tested harness that autonomously manages a crop harvester. There is not a lot of work in this space right now, because programming and math are infinitely more verifiable, and the capabilities of never models would probably invalidate any usecases, but if the model progress slows down, all attention will go towards making them work for any aspect of production.
I want to believe there is big bucks in this technology - my employer is tied up in it and so is my compensation. I just find it personally very unremarkable in a way that I never did with phones or the internet. When I got my first phone, or first started using Dogpile for research - I saw immediate value, and would have paid big bucks to keep it in my life. AI has had a few years and a huge amount of investment (time and money) and if it disappeared overnight I wouldn't pay $10 to get it back. I keep trying it, there's just something missing in my brain where it should be clicking for me :(
As you say, that is a weak counter point. I do get what you're saying, but crypto flaws were built in from the start:
- Deflationary currency isn't going to be spent, it is going to be hoarded, if it would have any value at all. The design was self defeating from the very start.
- Technical limits of PoW. Obvious right from the start, which led to the block wars. PoS "solves" that but with other costs. And it still doesn't solve the first point.
Despite these, crypto did get adopted, just not in any way that crypto maximalists said it would. It got hoarded, as expected.
But the real test is: If crypto disappeared tomorrow, would the world notice or really care? I would argue, apart from people losing money, most of the world wouldn't even notice it was gone.
There is no way you could say that for LLMs.
Eh, I'd say there is a lot more stuff like this being developed these days. Autonomous seeders are becoming more common and (semi-)autonomous tractors are in use.
I'd say a very large part of the in field work can be done now, and is using enhancements like vision models to identify potential problems that crop up to notify humans. It's when the machines have to interact in tight busy spaces or with non-farm traffic that control is handed over to a human.
Electricity took about half that time, 50 years, to go from “hey look a motor” to “why don’t we put them everywhere and build power grids?”
TV took 25 years from patent to mass market adoption.
The internet, 15 years from lynx to iPhone.
Google published the transformer architecture in 2017. We are currently at “oh hey a talking computer”.
> most other revolutionary technologies found their game changing, broad reaching applications by this point.
I think your timeline expectations are miscalibrated. The steam engine goes back centuries. Even in the mid 1700s to 1800s, advances in engine design were decades apart, and the logistics of building and deploying steam engines mandated an uptake in years, even in perfectly-fitted applications.
Like these applications where there were existing manual-labor solutions that not only fought the technology but were still competitive, AI and LLMs weren't born in a vacuum. In order to revolutionize, it must displace, and people are rightly finding ways to do their jobs in more productive ways that moderate adoption speed.
Can you name some other technologies that have exploded from 0 to billions of users in just 3 years?
This is comparable.
While I dislike the bonkers valuations, and "were building Agi so it tells us how to be profitable" is onion worthy statement LLMs are an absolutely revolutionary technology.
Even with all the hallucinations.
Imagine telling someone 15 years ago Internet/Google is useless because people sometimes do not tell the truth online... It's like that.
I also hate the fact AI is being used as justification to grab all compute in the world and lock it up in one country's datacenters.
I hope this endeavour fails, but sadly being realistic I have to admit I think the so called "AI bubble" will not pop. Instead the companies will be bailed out with printed money.
I recently looked up there are approximately $20Trillion in circulation. Even if they print extra $2T it will dilute existing money supply by 10%. So everyone that uses USD as a currency will pay for the datacenter build out wether we want it or not.
All the compute will be slurped from the market for this and companies like nvidia that get used to 50bln deals will never go back to making consumer stuff.
I never thought I'll live to see the PC revolution reverse, but that is what seems to be happening.