You’re not making the argument you think you’re making when you ask “Where was the [I]ntwenet 2 years into it?”
You may be intending to refer to 1971 (about two years after the creation of ARPANet) but really the more accurate comparison would be to 1995 (about two years since ISPs started offering SLIP/PPP dialup to the general public for $50/month or less).
And I think the comparison to 1995, the year of the Netscape IPO and URLs starting to appear in commercials and on packaging for consumer products, is apt: LLMs have been a research technology for a while, it’s their availability to the general public that’s new in the last couple of years. Yet while the scale of hype is comparable, the products aren’t: LLMs still don’t anything remotely like what their boosters claim, and have done nothing to justify the insane amounts of money being poured into them. With the Internet, however, there were already plenty of retailers starting to make real money doing electronic commerce by 1995, not just by providing infrastructure and related services.
It’s worth really paying attention to Ed Zitron’s arguments here: The numbers in the real world just don’t support the continued amount of investment in LLMs. They’re a perfectly fine area of advanced research but they’re not a product, much less a world-changing one, and they won’t be any time soon due to their inherent limitations.
They're not a product? Isn't Cursor on the leaderboard for fastest to $100m ARR? What about just plain usage or dependency. College kids are using chrome extensions that direct their searches to chatgpt by default. I think your connection to the internet uptake is a bit weak, and then you've ended by basically saying too much money is being thrown at this stuff, which is quite disconnected from the start of you arg.
I think it's pretty fair to say that they have close to doubled my productivity as a programmer. My girlfriend uses ChatGPT daily for her work, which is not "tech" at all. It's fair to be skeptical of exactly how far they can go but a claim like this is pretty wild.
Both your and her usage is currently being subsidized by venture capital money.
It remains to be seen how viable this casual usage actually is once this money dries up and you actually need to pay per prompt.
We'll just have to see where the pricing will eventually settle, before that we're all just speculating.
> And I think the comparison to 1995, the year of the Netscape IPO and URLs starting to appear in commercials and on packaging for consumer products, is apt
My grandfather didn’t care about these and you don’t care about LLMs, we get it
> They’re a perfectly fine area of advanced research but they’re not a product
You may be intending to refer to 1971 (about two years after the creation of ARPANet) but really the more accurate comparison would be to 1995 (about two years since ISPs started offering SLIP/PPP dialup to the general public for $50/month or less).
And I think the comparison to 1995, the year of the Netscape IPO and URLs starting to appear in commercials and on packaging for consumer products, is apt: LLMs have been a research technology for a while, it’s their availability to the general public that’s new in the last couple of years. Yet while the scale of hype is comparable, the products aren’t: LLMs still don’t anything remotely like what their boosters claim, and have done nothing to justify the insane amounts of money being poured into them. With the Internet, however, there were already plenty of retailers starting to make real money doing electronic commerce by 1995, not just by providing infrastructure and related services.
It’s worth really paying attention to Ed Zitron’s arguments here: The numbers in the real world just don’t support the continued amount of investment in LLMs. They’re a perfectly fine area of advanced research but they’re not a product, much less a world-changing one, and they won’t be any time soon due to their inherent limitations.