Comment by snigsnog
18 hours ago
The 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.
ChatGPT has roughly 800 million weekly active users. Almost everyone around me uses it daily. I think you are underestimating the adoption.
Usage plunges on the weekends and during the summer, suggesting that a significant portion of users are students using ChatGPT for free or at heavily subsidized rates to do homework (i.e., extremely basic work that is extraordinarily well-represented in the training data). That usage will almost certainly never be monetizable, and it suggests nothing about the trajectory of the technology’s capability or popularity. I suspect ChatGPT, in particular, will see its usage slip considerably as the education system (hopefully) adapts.
The summer slump was a thing in 2023 but apparently didn't repeat in 2024: https://www.similarweb.com/blog/insights/ai-news/chatgpt-bea...
The weekend slumps could equally suggest people are using it at work.
“Almost everyone will use it at free or effectively subsidized prices” and “It delivers utility which justifies its variable costs + fixed costs amortized over useful lifetime” are not the same thing, and its not clear how much of the use is tied to novelty such that if new and progressively more expensive to train releases at a regular cadence dropped off, usage, even at subsidized prices, would, too.
How many pay? And out of that how many are willing to pay the amount to at least cover the inference costs (not loss leading?)
Outside the verifiable domains I think the impact is more assistance/augmentation than outright disruption (i.e. a novelty which is still nice). A little tiny bit of value sprinkled over a very large user base but each person deriving little value overall.
Even as they use it as search it is at best an incrementable improvement on what they used to do - not life changing.
The adoption is just so weird to me. I cannot for the life of me get LLM chatbot to work for me. Every time I try I get into an argument with the stupid thing. They are still wrong constantly, and when I'm wrong they won't correct me.
I have great faith in AI in e.g. medical equipment, or otherwise as something built in, working on a single problem in the background, but the chat interface is terrible.
Even my mom and aunts are using it frequently for all sorts of things, and it took a long time for them to hop onto internet and smartphones at first.
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)
> 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 "usefulness" excuse is irrelevant, and the claim that phones/internet is "immediately useful" is just a post hoc rationalization. It's basically trying to find a reasonable reason why opposition to AI is valid, and is not in self-interest.
The opposition to AI is from people who feel threatened by it, because it either threatens their livelihood (or family/friends'), and that they feel they are unable to benefit from AI in the same way as they had internet/mobile phones.
The usefulness of mobile phones was identifiable immediately and it is absolutely not 'post hoc rationalization'. The issue was the cost - once low cost mobile telephones were produced they almost immediately became ubiquitous (see nokia share price from the release of the nokia 6110 onwards for example).
This barrier does not exist for current AI technologies which are being given away free. Minor thought experiment - just how radical would the uptake of mobile phones have been if they were given away free?
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> 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.
I agree with most points but as a tech enthusiast, I was using a smart phone years before the iPhone, and I could already use the internet, make video calls, email etc around 2005. It was a small flip phone but it was not uncommon for phones to do that already at that time, at least in Australia and parts of Asia (a Singaporean friend told me about the phone).