Comment by libraryofbabel
3 hours ago
You’re right to call out consumer use is what’s eating all the tokens. I suppose what was behind my way of putting it is: I haven’t seen much in the way of truly transformative products with LLMs in the consumer space. Sure, there’s a few power users doing some cool things, and lots of promises along the lines of “AI will plan and book you a whole vacation!”, but basically for the median consumer we have an “improved search”, and “fun image generation”, with people using it a couple times a week. So what is the product that changes the world and makes 500M people pay $100 a month? I don’t think it’s really here yet. This feels a bit like we’re in 1996 where people are still trying to figure out what the internet is for, and we don’t know if OpenAI will be 1996’s Amazon, or its AOL.
None of this is to deny how remarkable the underling LLM tech is. I never expected to see something like this in my lifetime; it feels far far more strange and new than when the iPhone came along. I use a coding agent daily and it’s dramatically changed how I work. But I still think we’re in a bubble here.
Ironically the MIT study that was touted for weeks, the one that found corporate AI pilots were almost all failures, also found that virtually every single person was using LLMs almost daily for their work.
The finding of that study was that people are using their personal AI accounts rather than corporate integrated accounts. Hence the pilots failing.
But LLMs are definitely being used to get work done. Hell Jerome Powell just said live on air that he uses it for it's productivity boost.