7 ms·

Whichever side of the divide you're on, I think it's really weird that on a site like HN (where people have at least a passing familiarity with technology) ther

Whichever side of the divide you're on, I think it's really weird that on a site like HN (where people have at least a passing familiarity with technology) there are such polarised takes on whether it's the next industrial revolution, or a technological parlour trick. I'm giving away which side I'm on now, but most of the TAM have experienced the product at this point, and trillions of dollars have been invested. I would wager most other revolutionary technologies found their game changing, broad reaching applications by this point.

david-gpu 16d ago
Did you experience the popularization of the WWW? There were massive disagreements even among smart tech-savvy people. We even had a stock market boom and just cycle associated with it. Funnily, none of that mattered. What mattered is that enough ordinary people on the street found it useful, both for personal and business reasons. Ask yourself: are regular people using this tech, either as producers or consumers? And remember that this is the least powerful that it will ever be.
- maxnevermind 16d ago
  > Funnily, none of that mattered. What mattered is that enough ordinary people on the street found it useful, both for personal and business reasons. Broad economic impact due to Internet boom in the the US came from 2 main categories: 1) New huge internet enabled tech companies appeared(Amazon, Google, Meta etc.), all created their own products, all were build on reliable foundational technology. LLMs is not a reliable foundational technology. 2) Existing legacy companies could utilize internet to connect their teams/departments/offices though a bunch of new software which were build on reliable foundational technology. LLMs is not a reliable foundational technology. > And remember that this is the least powerful that it will ever be. This mantra is being repeated but "serious LLMs's issues" I described are still there and will be there because they are part of how LLMs are built and work. Without addressing those you can't build products but LLMs's capability as a personal productivity tool will keep rising, yes. The "best" possible outcome of LLMs to a broader economy might be that a smaller group of experts will be able to do the job in companies due to boost of their personal productivity and a bunch of people will be freed up(laid off) and they will have to go and work on something else and thus a boost of productivity in the economy. But it seems it won't be any low hanging fruits(problems to solve) this time as it was during the internet era. It is not like we out of problems: new cancer treatments, self driving cars, nuclear fusion, modular nuclear reactors etc. There is a huge value to capture there, here is the thing though, those are hard problems, it is not a new TikTok, gmail, netflix etc. Yes, people will have LLMs now but can we actually start solving hard problems with them? Because it might be the case that a gravy train of the last few decades for Silicon Valley is over, no more useless internet enabled services, no more billion dollar companies built on just applying internet to yet another thing and producing another digital product. People's free time is limited, its redistribution across digital services will not grow the economy, global internet penetration is already pretty high and won't grow that much, so there might not be much value to capture there.
- entropy47 16d ago
  It's very hard to disagree with the point that it will get more powerful, perhaps in uenxpected ways. I don't know that the average regular person is using this tech as a producer, and while it's hard not to consume it - I don't know if anybody consuming it really wants to. I'm in a bubble of people where we give it a lot more mindshare, but e.g my electrician is aware of the tech, knows what it does, and doesn't really care. I think you're right that if it could manage his books, help him rewire a switchboard, order inventory for him etc that would be very different.
  - calgoo 16d ago
    From what i hear in a small subset of local small businesses is that they are using it for backoffice stuff, like taxes, finding legal codes, organization, planning etc.
  - MrFantastic 14d ago
    I’m remodeling a room in my house and I’ve used Gemini help me troubleshoot problems and it works pretty well. It’s come up with a lot of ideas that I wouldn’t have thought of. Of course it’s contradicted itself a few times too so you have to think about what you’re doing as well.
  - ipsod 16d ago
    > I don't know if anybody consuming it really wants to. You don't know of people who ask LLMs questions? Or just chat with it for fun and to learn? Maybe your electrician isn't interested. A pharmacist and a nurse I talk to are. Virtually everybody I've talked to uses it to some degree or another. I think it'll soon replace Alexa/Siri for most people, as well as google search. That's pretty far from nobody.
    - HarlequinHair 16d ago
      I think the first parent post all this conversation originated from, pointed that LLMs are not groundbreaking inventions. If people use it to replace voice assistants or search engines, you can see how this new invention is not really adding anything you already hadn't. AIs in general are very useful, but apart from the campaign they did to change everything's name into AI (also well known algorithms and "old" machine learning), if you look at all the possible applications, LLMs are possibly the least useful of them. Especially if you take into account how much money they spent, and how much effort they put to shove it in your throat. If a technology is convenient for people, you shouldn't need to insist to make people use it. If it is convenient, people will use it in a natural way.
- aa-jv 16d ago
  >Did you experience the popularization of the WWW? There were massive disagreements even among smart tech-savvy people. We even had a stock market boom and just cycle associated with it. In the early phase of the Internet envelope, we all wanted to build the real Internet and destroy the AOL's and Compuserves' .. but now the Internet has turned into a mass of AOL's and Compuserves. I think the same thing is happening with the silo'ization of LLM's. People don't want to have to use the "AOL of LLM's" for things - they want to build out their own infrastructure and have a pool of local LLM's (where once it was the company's own modem pool, etc.) It is, oddly enough, parallel with the original arguments in the 70's and 80's regarding supercomputers versus personal computers, or the cloud versus locally managed resources, etc. We are still fighting this battle, just with higher bandwidth. Do we operate a terminal with a fixed window into a bigger computer, or do we operate a heavier local computer with a proper interface?
- kakacik 16d ago
  Most people I know, blue and white collar up to and including surgeons and IT folks, use it as better search. My wife is a GP, and all she would ever need is a reliable speech to voice recognition of medical jargon, in french. Not 98%, not almost there, just there. Most people don't live in IT echo chambers like HN. For them, chatgpts are just another online gimmick that saves a bit of time vs googling things, or puts together some paperwork quicker, and thats it. For me, I can see potential beyond but are largely unmoved by it. The price to pay, in fucking up our environment, losing skills and/or losing skills to build skills, making large swaths of population unemployed with no replacement in sight, seems much more like devolution and net loss. Extremely few winners and big bunch of losers. Very happy to be wrong here of course, but only time will tell and neither you nor me know for sure.
  - roel_v 16d ago
    How can it be at the same time "a better search" and also "making large swaths of population unemployed with no replacement in sight" ?
    - stevepotter 16d ago
      Because it’s so powerful and versatile. The other day my wife took a picture of our living room and chathgpt picked out the perfect rug. That’s both a better search and avoided, say, an interior decorator. In that scenario it’s kinda both.
      - roel_v 16d ago
        But only a small part of AI applications are that search-like. I mean we could even argue if this is still only search, but that's semantics and boring. But even if we would, there are a lot more applications than pure search. So the GP's original claim that it's just an improved form of something that doesn't put people out of a job, and also puts large amounts of people out of a job, doesn't make sense. Framing tax advise as "yeah it's just a better way to search tax codes" is in the same boat. It's such a massive improvement of both searching and synthesizing that it's a bit weird to call it that. Like saying a 2026 car is just an improvement of a Model T.
cemkum 16d ago
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.
- entropy47 16d ago
  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 :(
  - munksbeer 16d ago
    > 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.
madaxe_again 16d ago
It took the better part of a century for people to go from “hey look a steam engine” to “why don’t we put it on wheels?”. Electricity took about half that time, 50 years, to go from “hey look a motor” to “why don’t we put them everywhere and build power grids?” TV took 25 years from patent to mass market adoption. The internet, 15 years from lynx to iPhone. Google published the transformer architecture in 2017. We are currently at “oh hey a talking computer”.
- pixl97 16d ago
  Oh, based on the METR report we're beyond a talking computer. Like most technology it's just not spread evenly.
  - madaxe_again 16d ago
    We absolutely are - but we’re still at the “weirdo factory owner installs experimental electric motor” stage. You look at what’s going on in robotics, look at GROOT/Isaac, and the circle closes quite neatly. World’s going to change in ways we can barely even imagine, no more than someone in 1720 could imagine the buffet car on an intercity express train.
bsenftner 16d ago
That polarizing take is magnified by our failure to teach how to manage discussions that contain controversy and disagreement. Then there is the fact that most people's idea of debate is some game of dominance and not to find solutions.
titzer 16d ago
We're still in early stages, but in just 2 years AI has presented higher education with the single most disruptive change in decades. Now a computer can do your entire coursework for you, is available to converse on a broad range of topics, and can accomplish unaided huge open-ended problems. > most other revolutionary technologies found their game changing, broad reaching applications by this point. I think your timeline expectations are miscalibrated. The steam engine goes back centuries. Even in the mid 1700s to 1800s, advances in engine design were decades apart, and the logistics of building and deploying steam engines mandated an uptake in years, even in perfectly-fitted applications. Like these applications where there were existing manual-labor solutions that not only fought the technology but were still competitive, AI and LLMs weren't born in a vacuum. In order to revolutionize, it must displace, and people are rightly finding ways to do their jobs in more productive ways that moderate adoption speed. Can you name some other technologies that have exploded from 0 to billions of users in just 3 years?
- _superposition_ 16d ago
  Let's not forget the electric car... Still yet to be realized at scale but looking more likely.

david-gpu 16d ago

Did you experience the popularization of the WWW? There were massive disagreements even among smart tech-savvy people. We even had a stock market boom and just cycle associated with it. Funnily, none of that mattered. What mattered is that enough ordinary people on the street found it useful, both for personal and business reasons. Ask yourself: are regular people using this tech, either as producers or consumers? And remember that this is the least powerful that it will ever be.

maxnevermind 16d ago
> Funnily, none of that mattered. What mattered is that enough ordinary people on the street found it useful, both for personal and business reasons. Broad economic impact due to Internet boom in the the US came from 2 main categories: 1) New huge internet enabled tech companies appeared(Amazon, Google, Meta etc.), all created their own products, all were build on reliable foundational technology. LLMs is not a reliable foundational technology. 2) Existing legacy companies could utilize internet to connect their teams/departments/offices though a bunch of new software which were build on reliable foundational technology. LLMs is not a reliable foundational technology. > And remember that this is the least powerful that it will ever be. This mantra is being repeated but "serious LLMs's issues" I described are still there and will be there because they are part of how LLMs are built and work. Without addressing those you can't build products but LLMs's capability as a personal productivity tool will keep rising, yes. The "best" possible outcome of LLMs to a broader economy might be that a smaller group of experts will be able to do the job in companies due to boost of their personal productivity and a bunch of people will be freed up(laid off) and they will have to go and work on something else and thus a boost of productivity in the economy. But it seems it won't be any low hanging fruits(problems to solve) this time as it was during the internet era. It is not like we out of problems: new cancer treatments, self driving cars, nuclear fusion, modular nuclear reactors etc. There is a huge value to capture there, here is the thing though, those are hard problems, it is not a new TikTok, gmail, netflix etc. Yes, people will have LLMs now but can we actually start solving hard problems with them? Because it might be the case that a gravy train of the last few decades for Silicon Valley is over, no more useless internet enabled services, no more billion dollar companies built on just applying internet to yet another thing and producing another digital product. People's free time is limited, its redistribution across digital services will not grow the economy, global internet penetration is already pretty high and won't grow that much, so there might not be much value to capture there.
entropy47 16d ago
It's very hard to disagree with the point that it will get more powerful, perhaps in uenxpected ways. I don't know that the average regular person is using this tech as a producer, and while it's hard not to consume it - I don't know if anybody consuming it really wants to. I'm in a bubble of people where we give it a lot more mindshare, but e.g my electrician is aware of the tech, knows what it does, and doesn't really care. I think you're right that if it could manage his books, help him rewire a switchboard, order inventory for him etc that would be very different.
- calgoo 16d ago
  From what i hear in a small subset of local small businesses is that they are using it for backoffice stuff, like taxes, finding legal codes, organization, planning etc.
- MrFantastic 14d ago
  I’m remodeling a room in my house and I’ve used Gemini help me troubleshoot problems and it works pretty well. It’s come up with a lot of ideas that I wouldn’t have thought of. Of course it’s contradicted itself a few times too so you have to think about what you’re doing as well.
- ipsod 16d ago
  > I don't know if anybody consuming it really wants to. You don't know of people who ask LLMs questions? Or just chat with it for fun and to learn? Maybe your electrician isn't interested. A pharmacist and a nurse I talk to are. Virtually everybody I've talked to uses it to some degree or another. I think it'll soon replace Alexa/Siri for most people, as well as google search. That's pretty far from nobody.
  - HarlequinHair 16d ago
    I think the first parent post all this conversation originated from, pointed that LLMs are not groundbreaking inventions. If people use it to replace voice assistants or search engines, you can see how this new invention is not really adding anything you already hadn't. AIs in general are very useful, but apart from the campaign they did to change everything's name into AI (also well known algorithms and "old" machine learning), if you look at all the possible applications, LLMs are possibly the least useful of them. Especially if you take into account how much money they spent, and how much effort they put to shove it in your throat. If a technology is convenient for people, you shouldn't need to insist to make people use it. If it is convenient, people will use it in a natural way.
aa-jv 16d ago
>Did you experience the popularization of the WWW? There were massive disagreements even among smart tech-savvy people. We even had a stock market boom and just cycle associated with it. In the early phase of the Internet envelope, we all wanted to build the real Internet and destroy the AOL's and Compuserves' .. but now the Internet has turned into a mass of AOL's and Compuserves. I think the same thing is happening with the silo'ization of LLM's. People don't want to have to use the "AOL of LLM's" for things - they want to build out their own infrastructure and have a pool of local LLM's (where once it was the company's own modem pool, etc.) It is, oddly enough, parallel with the original arguments in the 70's and 80's regarding supercomputers versus personal computers, or the cloud versus locally managed resources, etc. We are still fighting this battle, just with higher bandwidth. Do we operate a terminal with a fixed window into a bigger computer, or do we operate a heavier local computer with a proper interface?
kakacik 16d ago
Most people I know, blue and white collar up to and including surgeons and IT folks, use it as better search. My wife is a GP, and all she would ever need is a reliable speech to voice recognition of medical jargon, in french. Not 98%, not almost there, just there. Most people don't live in IT echo chambers like HN. For them, chatgpts are just another online gimmick that saves a bit of time vs googling things, or puts together some paperwork quicker, and thats it. For me, I can see potential beyond but are largely unmoved by it. The price to pay, in fucking up our environment, losing skills and/or losing skills to build skills, making large swaths of population unemployed with no replacement in sight, seems much more like devolution and net loss. Extremely few winners and big bunch of losers. Very happy to be wrong here of course, but only time will tell and neither you nor me know for sure.
- roel_v 16d ago
  How can it be at the same time "a better search" and also "making large swaths of population unemployed with no replacement in sight" ?
  - stevepotter 16d ago
    Because it’s so powerful and versatile. The other day my wife took a picture of our living room and chathgpt picked out the perfect rug. That’s both a better search and avoided, say, an interior decorator. In that scenario it’s kinda both.
    - roel_v 16d ago
      But only a small part of AI applications are that search-like. I mean we could even argue if this is still only search, but that's semantics and boring. But even if we would, there are a lot more applications than pure search. So the GP's original claim that it's just an improved form of something that doesn't put people out of a job, and also puts large amounts of people out of a job, doesn't make sense. Framing tax advise as "yeah it's just a better way to search tax codes" is in the same boat. It's such a massive improvement of both searching and synthesizing that it's a bit weird to call it that. Like saying a 2026 car is just an improvement of a Model T.

cemkum 16d ago

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.

entropy47 16d ago
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 :(
- munksbeer 16d ago
  > 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.

madaxe_again 16d ago

It took the better part of a century for people to go from “hey look a steam engine” to “why don’t we put it on wheels?”. Electricity took about half that time, 50 years, to go from “hey look a motor” to “why don’t we put them everywhere and build power grids?” TV took 25 years from patent to mass market adoption. The internet, 15 years from lynx to iPhone. Google published the transformer architecture in 2017. We are currently at “oh hey a talking computer”.

pixl97 16d ago
Oh, based on the METR report we're beyond a talking computer. Like most technology it's just not spread evenly.
- madaxe_again 16d ago
  We absolutely are - but we’re still at the “weirdo factory owner installs experimental electric motor” stage. You look at what’s going on in robotics, look at GROOT/Isaac, and the circle closes quite neatly. World’s going to change in ways we can barely even imagine, no more than someone in 1720 could imagine the buffet car on an intercity express train.

bsenftner 16d ago

That polarizing take is magnified by our failure to teach how to manage discussions that contain controversy and disagreement. Then there is the fact that most people's idea of debate is some game of dominance and not to find solutions.

titzer 16d ago

We're still in early stages, but in just 2 years AI has presented higher education with the single most disruptive change in decades. Now a computer can do your entire coursework for you, is available to converse on a broad range of topics, and can accomplish unaided huge open-ended problems. > most other revolutionary technologies found their game changing, broad reaching applications by this point. I think your timeline expectations are miscalibrated. The steam engine goes back centuries. Even in the mid 1700s to 1800s, advances in engine design were decades apart, and the logistics of building and deploying steam engines mandated an uptake in years, even in perfectly-fitted applications. Like these applications where there were existing manual-labor solutions that not only fought the technology but were still competitive, AI and LLMs weren't born in a vacuum. In order to revolutionize, it must displace, and people are rightly finding ways to do their jobs in more productive ways that moderate adoption speed. Can you name some other technologies that have exploded from 0 to billions of users in just 3 years?

_superposition_ 16d ago
Let's not forget the electric car... Still yet to be realized at scale but looking more likely.