Comment by Razengan
4 days ago
> most people hit a wall figuring out what it's actually good for beyond parlor tricks.
That's what my parents thought about computers and the internet, wondering what it's actually good for beyond burning $9000 in phone bills to Zerg rush Protoss noobs.
And all the other things computers+internet could do, they could already do through other more reliable (at the time) ways.
But then it turned out that simply making mundane tasks just a little bit faster, and reducing the need to interact with strangers by just that little bit, created a new step on the staircase, a new baseline, with which to reach and do other grander things more easily.
Email was the killer app I think that showed everyone how damn useful the internet is. Then Hotmail showed how convenient email can be.
What is the AI version of that? Maybe code generation. Maybe.
Code generation/LLMs are the SMTP and other internet protocols, we don't have killer apps yet.
> What is the AI version of that?
Being able to plan a trip from a single sentence would be one killer app for many people:
"I'm free next week. I'd like to go to A, B, or C for a couple days. What's a cheap flight and a room within this budget near X area?"
and if it could go and also make a booking through your accounts that would be amazing.
But right now even Google's Gemini is an utter useless dumbass if asked to search Google Flights or Airbnb.
I mean if LLMs could just be a natural-language wrapper around existing tools, that'd be amazing in itself. But corporivalry has made that an stillborn dream.