zlacker

>>simonw+(OP)
Indeed. I don't understand why Hacker News is so dismissive about the coming of LLMs, maybe HN readers are going through 5 stages of grief?

But LLM is certainly a game changer, I can see it delivering impact bigger than the internet itself. Both require a lot of investments.

>>didip+Th
The internet and smartphones were immediately useful in a million different ways for almost every person. AI is not even close to that level. Very to somewhat useful in some fields (like programming) but the average person will easily be able to go through their day without using AI.

The most wide-appeal possibility is people loving 100%-AI-slop entertainment like that AI Instagram Reels product. Maybe I'm just too disconnected with normies but I don't see this taking off. Fun as a novelty like those Ring cam vids but I would never spend all day watching AI generated media.

>>snigsn+dj
The early internet and smartphones (the Japanese ones, not iPhone) were definitely not "immediately" adopted by the mass, unlike LLM.

If "immediate" usefulness is the metric we measure, then the internet and smartphones are pretty insignificant inventions compared to LLM.

(of course it's not a meaningful metric, as there is no clear line between a dumb phone and a smart phone, or a moderately sized language model and a LLM)

>>rainco+Ln
Yeah the internet kind of started with ARPANET in 1969 and didn't really get going with the public till around 1999 so thirty years on.

Here's a graph of internet takeoff with Krugman's famous quote of 1998 that it wouldn't amount to much being maybe the end of the skepticism https://www.contextualize.ai/mpereira/paul-krugmans-poor-pre...

In common with AI there was probably a long period when the hardware wasn't really good enough for it to be useful to most people. I remember 300 baud modems and rubber things to try to connect to your telephone handset back in the 80s.

>>tim333+EH2
Thats all irrelevant. Is/was there tremendous value to be had by being able to transport data? Of course. No doubt about it. Everything else got figured out and investments were made because of that.

The same line of thinking does not hold with LLMs given their non-deterministic nature. Time will tell where things land.