Comment by matthewdgreen

I moved to NYC in 1999 and got my first cable modem that year. This meant I could stream AAC audio from a jukebox server we maintained at AT&T Labs. So for my unusual case, streaming was a full-fledged reality I could touch back then. Ironically running a free service was easy, but figuring out how to get people (AKA the music industry) to let us charge for the service was impossible. All that extra time was just waiting for infrastructure upgrades to spread across a whole country to the point that there were enough customers that even the music industry couldn’t ignore the economics; none of the fundamental tech was missing. With LLMs I have access to a pretty robust set of models for about $20/mo (I’m assuming these aren’t 10x loss leaders?), plus pretty decent local models for the price of a GPU. What’s missing this time is that the nature of the “business” being offered is much more vague, plus the reliability isn’t quite there yet. But on the bright side, there’s no distributed infrastructure to build.