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.
Kagi’s Research Assistant is pretty damn useful, particularly when I can have it poll different models. I remember when the first iPhone lacked copy-paste. This feels similar.
(And I don’t think we’re heading towards AGI.)
Even if you skip ARPAnet, you’re forgetting the Gopher days and even if you jump straight to WWW+email==the internet, you’re forgetting the mosaic days.
The applications that became useful to the masses emerged a decade+ after the public internet and even then, it took 2+ decades to reach anything approaching saturation.
Your dismissal is not likely to age well, for similar reasons.
I know a lot of "normal" people who have completely replaced their search engine with AI. It's increasingly a staple for people.
Smartphones were absolutely NOT immediately useful in a million different ways for almost every person, that's total revisionist history. I remember when the iPhone came out, it was AT&T only, it did almost nothing useful. Smartphones were a novelty for quite a while.
The opposition to AI is from people who feel threatened by it, because it either threatens their livelihood (or family/friends'), and that they feel they are unable to benefit from AI in the same way as they had internet/mobile phones.
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)
Those are some very rosy glasses you've got on there. The nascent Internet took forever to catch on. It was for weird nerds at universities and it'll never catch on, but here we are.
A year after llms came out… are you kidding me?
Two years?
10 years?
Today, by adding an MCP server to wrap the same API that’s been around forever for some system, makes the users of that system prefer NLI over the gui almost immediately.
Outside the verifiable domains I think the impact is more assistance/augmentation than outright disruption (i.e. a novelty which is still nice). A little tiny bit of value sprinkled over a very large user base but each person deriving little value overall.
Even as they use it as search it is at best an incrementable improvement on what they used to do - not life changing.
This barrier does not exist for current AI technologies which are being given away free. Minor thought experiment - just how radical would the uptake of mobile phones have been if they were given away free?
I have great faith in AI in e.g. medical equipment, or otherwise as something built in, working on a single problem in the background, but the chat interface is terrible.
You may just be a little early to the renaissance. What happens when the models we have today run on a mobile device?
The nokia 6110 was released 15 years after the first commercial cell phone.
The weekend slumps could equally suggest people are using it at work.
Interesting thought about current SOTA models running on my mobile device. I've given it some thought and I don't think it would change my life in any way. Can you suggest some way that it would change yours?
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.
The same line of thinking does not hold with LLMs given their non-deterministic nature. Time will tell where things land.
I really think most everyone misses the actual potential of llms. They aren't an app but an interface.
They are the new UI everyone has known they wanted going back as long as we've had computers. People wanted to talk to the computer and get results.
Think of the people already using them instead of search engines.
To me, and likely you, it doesn't add any value. I can get the same information at about the same speed as before with the same false positives to weed through.
To the person that couldn't use a search engine and filled the internet with easily answered questions before, it's a godsend. They can finally ask the internet in plain ole whatever language they use and get an answer. It can be hard to see, but this is the majority of people on this planet.
LLMs raise the floor of information access. When they become ubiquitous and basically free, people will forget they ever had to use a mouse or hunt for the right pixel to click a button on a tiny mobile device touch screen.
I can imagine them generating digital reality on the fly for users - no more dedicated applications, just pure creation on demand ('direct me via turn by turn 3d navigation to x then y and z', 'replay that goal that just was scored and overlay the 3 most recent similar goals scored like that in the bottom right corner of the screen', 'generate me a 3D adventure game to play in the style of zelda, but make it about gnomes').
I suspect the only limitation for a product like this is energy and compute.