zlacker

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+(OP)
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+Tj2
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.

>>jheez3+wy2
There's value in intelligence too.

>>tim333+R73
Intelligence? No. Get the wording right. It’s driven by probability.

>>jheez3+Ki3
Calling intelligence “just probability” is like calling music “just vibrations” and thinking you said something deep.