alt Hacker NewsThe 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.
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ChatGPT has roughly 800 million weekly active users. Almost everyone around me uses it daily. I think you are underestimating the adoption.
> 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.)
… 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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)