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Comment by DrewADesign

2 days ago

I encountered multiple people in HN that had Apple Vision Pro. How many people here use Linux? Have flagship model phones? Drank soylent? Microdosed LSD?

Extrapolating based on what you see on HN doesn’t make sense.

Bottom line up front: LLM unlocks the power of a workstation for normal people.

Google Search ate the internet because everyone was using it. Some people said "free search isn't a business model, look what happened to yahoo"... and those people were wrong; not because they misunderstood the economics, but because they misunderstood what people needed.

Google Search reduced the friction of using the internet for normal people - suddenly the internet could be accessed with plain language, simple phrases, no networking knowledge or domain expertise required.

LLM is doing the same thing - reducing friction. Tradesmen and small businesses are building company landing pages and doing SEO by themselves. Businesses in every industry are programming applications in-house to unshackle themselves from SaaS systems. Entrepreneurs can build automated systems to handle mundane processes and get back to pulling the levers that actually move the needle. An LLM can level up your employees on the software they're already using.

The economic potential is only beginning to be realized.

  • Bottom line — all evidence gathered by modern interface design shows that most people don’t like conversing with their computers for anything more than a few single sentence commands. And people hate being forced to use chatbots with the fire of a thousand suns. If people chose their tools based on what engineers determined was the superior usage strategy or technology, nobody would use centralized social media, or MS Windows, unencrypted text chat, email without pgp, etc etc etc

    • Hi I am enjoying this conversation, but I am not understanding you.

      > If people chose their tools based on what engineers determined was the superior usage strategy or technology, nobody would use centralized social media, or MS Windows, unencrypted text chat, email without pgp, etc etc etc

      You're using this as an example of how normal people behave, but that CS/SWE's would advise against? I am having a hard time understanding how you connect this to LLM / chatbot to drive the argument that general purpose LLM's are over valued.