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Comment by cemkum | Hacker News Reader

The TAM of electricity is 99.999% of humanity, yet there was 82 years between Alessandro Volta's Voltaic Pile experiments and the first electrical grid in the world, Pearl Street Station, New York City.

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.

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Fair points (and I appreciate very much that they read like a human wrote them). As a counter point - and I know it's a weak one - a few years ago people were telling me that crypto was going to replace currency, and soon every person on the planet would be using it for every transaction. Many people believe that will still happen, but I don't think many serious people do.

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 :(

> a few years ago people were telling me that crypto was going to replace currency, and soon every person on the planet would be using it for every transaction. Many people believe that will still happen, but I don't think many serious people do.

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.

Nitpick or two. Holborn in London was a little earlier. Also neither was really a grid. That took another ~45 years. Maybe that's better for your argument - but I'm not quite sure that the analogy fully holds - as it's a different class of infrastructure problem.

>but he hasn't seen a specifically designed and tested harness that autonomously manages a crop harvester.

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.

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