6 ms·

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 u

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.

JumpCrisscross 9mo ago
> AI is not even close to that level 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.)
SgtBastard 9mo ago
… the internet was not immediately useful in a million different ways for almost every person. 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.
- chii 9mo ago
  the "usefulness" excuse is irrelevant, and the claim that phones/internet is "immediately useful" is just a post hoc rationalization. It's basically trying to find a reasonable reason why opposition to AI is valid, and is not in self-interest. 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.
  - duchef 9mo ago
    The usefulness of mobile phones was identifiable immediately and it is absolutely not 'post hoc rationalization'. The issue was the cost - once low cost mobile telephones were produced they almost immediately became ubiquitous (see nokia share price from the release of the nokia 6110 onwards for example). 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?
    - jfyi 9mo ago
      It's only low cost for general usage chat users. If you are using it for anything beyond that, you are paying or sitting in a long queue (likely both). 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.
      - duchef 9mo ago
        Yes although even those people paying are likely still being subsidized and not currently paying the full cost. 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?
        jfyi 9mo ago
        It will open access of llms to developers in the same way smart phones opened access to mobile general computing. 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.
staticassertion 9mo ago
> 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. 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.
- brabel 9mo ago
  I agree with most points but as a tech enthusiast, I was using a smart phone years before the iPhone, and I could already use the internet, make video calls, email etc around 2005. It was a small flip phone but it was not uncommon for phones to do that already at that time, at least in Australia and parts of Asia (a Singaporean friend told me about the phone).
nen-nomad 9mo ago
ChatGPT has roughly 800 million weekly active users. Almost everyone around me uses it daily. I think you are underestimating the adoption.
- throw1235435 9mo ago
  How many pay? And out of that how many are willing to pay the amount to at least cover the inference costs (not loss leading?) 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.
- danielbln 9mo ago
  Even my mom and aunts are using it frequently for all sorts of things, and it took a long time for them to hop onto internet and smartphones at first.
- mrweasel 9mo ago
  The adoption is just so weird to me. I cannot for the life of me get LLM chatbot to work for me. Every time I try I get into an argument with the stupid thing. They are still wrong constantly, and when I'm wrong they won't correct me. 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.
- dragonwriter 9mo ago
  “Almost everyone will use it at free or effectively subsidized prices” and “It delivers utility which justifies its variable costs + fixed costs amortized over useful lifetime” are not the same thing, and its not clear how much of the use is tied to novelty such that if new and progressively more expensive to train releases at a regular cadence dropped off, usage, even at subsidized prices, would, too.
- arctic-true 9mo ago
  Usage plunges on the weekends and during the summer, suggesting that a significant portion of users are students using ChatGPT for free or at heavily subsidized rates to do homework (i.e., extremely basic work that is extraordinarily well-represented in the training data). That usage will almost certainly never be monetizable, and it suggests nothing about the trajectory of the technology’s capability or popularity. I suspect ChatGPT, in particular, will see its usage slip considerably as the education system (hopefully) adapts.
raincole 9mo ago
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)
- tim333 9mo ago
  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-prediction-bf22d612 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.
  - jheez3 9mo ago
    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.
    - tim333 9mo ago
      There's value in intelligence too.
      - jheez3 9mo ago
        Intelligence? No. Get the wording right. It’s driven by probability.
fragmede 9mo ago
> The internet and smartphones were immediately useful in a million different ways for almost every person. AI is not even close to that level. 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.
- jheez3 9mo ago
  Well until the weird nerds at uni created things like Google, Facebook and so on...
what-the-grump 9mo ago
A year after the iPhone came out… it didn’t have an App Store, barely was able to play video, barely had enough power to last a day. You just don’t remember or were not around for it. 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.

JumpCrisscross 9mo ago

> AI is not even close to that level 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.)

SgtBastard 9mo ago

… the internet was not immediately useful in a million different ways for almost every person. 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.

chii 9mo ago
the "usefulness" excuse is irrelevant, and the claim that phones/internet is "immediately useful" is just a post hoc rationalization. It's basically trying to find a reasonable reason why opposition to AI is valid, and is not in self-interest. 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.
- duchef 9mo ago
  The usefulness of mobile phones was identifiable immediately and it is absolutely not 'post hoc rationalization'. The issue was the cost - once low cost mobile telephones were produced they almost immediately became ubiquitous (see nokia share price from the release of the nokia 6110 onwards for example). 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?
  - jfyi 9mo ago
    It's only low cost for general usage chat users. If you are using it for anything beyond that, you are paying or sitting in a long queue (likely both). 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.
    - duchef 9mo ago
      Yes although even those people paying are likely still being subsidized and not currently paying the full cost. 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?
      - jfyi 9mo ago
        It will open access of llms to developers in the same way smart phones opened access to mobile general computing. 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.

staticassertion 9mo ago

> 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. 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.

brabel 9mo ago
I agree with most points but as a tech enthusiast, I was using a smart phone years before the iPhone, and I could already use the internet, make video calls, email etc around 2005. It was a small flip phone but it was not uncommon for phones to do that already at that time, at least in Australia and parts of Asia (a Singaporean friend told me about the phone).

nen-nomad 9mo ago

ChatGPT has roughly 800 million weekly active users. Almost everyone around me uses it daily. I think you are underestimating the adoption.

throw1235435 9mo ago
How many pay? And out of that how many are willing to pay the amount to at least cover the inference costs (not loss leading?) 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.
danielbln 9mo ago
Even my mom and aunts are using it frequently for all sorts of things, and it took a long time for them to hop onto internet and smartphones at first.
mrweasel 9mo ago
The adoption is just so weird to me. I cannot for the life of me get LLM chatbot to work for me. Every time I try I get into an argument with the stupid thing. They are still wrong constantly, and when I'm wrong they won't correct me. 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.
dragonwriter 9mo ago
“Almost everyone will use it at free or effectively subsidized prices” and “It delivers utility which justifies its variable costs + fixed costs amortized over useful lifetime” are not the same thing, and its not clear how much of the use is tied to novelty such that if new and progressively more expensive to train releases at a regular cadence dropped off, usage, even at subsidized prices, would, too.
arctic-true 9mo ago
Usage plunges on the weekends and during the summer, suggesting that a significant portion of users are students using ChatGPT for free or at heavily subsidized rates to do homework (i.e., extremely basic work that is extraordinarily well-represented in the training data). That usage will almost certainly never be monetizable, and it suggests nothing about the trajectory of the technology’s capability or popularity. I suspect ChatGPT, in particular, will see its usage slip considerably as the education system (hopefully) adapts.

raincole 9mo ago

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)

tim333 9mo ago
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-prediction-bf22d612 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.
- jheez3 9mo ago
  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.
  - tim333 9mo ago
    There's value in intelligence too.
    - jheez3 9mo ago
      Intelligence? No. Get the wording right. It’s driven by probability.

fragmede 9mo ago

> The internet and smartphones were immediately useful in a million different ways for almost every person. AI is not even close to that level. 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.

jheez3 9mo ago
Well until the weird nerds at uni created things like Google, Facebook and so on...

what-the-grump 9mo ago

A year after the iPhone came out… it didn’t have an App Store, barely was able to play video, barely had enough power to last a day. You just don’t remember or were not around for it. 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.