5 ms·

2008 wasn’t so different was it? I guess the big new thing in work since then is the “gig economy”.

onion2k 4y ago
We've had LLMs for about 5 years so far in non-academic research. If we're talking 10 years out that means we're looking at tech that's about 1/3 through its development to date. Take any mature-ish technology that you use today and compare the version 1/3 through its life to the version you use now. Look at Chrome 20 compare to Chrome 111, or React 14 compared to React 18, or an iPhone 4 compared to an iPhone 14, or a car from 1950 compared to a car today... The difference is always quite significant. Superficially they're still the same thing, but if you look at the detail everything is just better. AI will be the same.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  Eh, the difference is almost entirely in presentation. At the core a car today doesn't do significantly more than a car in 1962.
  - onion2k 4y ago
    Superficially they're similar in the "they both have 4 wheels and an engine" sense, but you could examine literally any part of a car today compared to one from the 1950s and find huge improvements. The efficiency, safety, comfort, tech, manufacturing... Everything is better.
    - microtonal 4y ago
      I agree with the safety angle, but besides that driving a car from 2023 is not substantially different from the 1950s (in the sense that it opens up a lot of new possibilities).
- jstx1 4y ago
  You can't extrapolate from an arbitrary selection of technologies and assume that LLMs will have the same trajectory. They could be like the iPhone, or they could be like self-driving cars which have been a year away from replacing all drivers for 10 years now.
  - pharmakom 4y ago
    Self driving cars a few years ago seem particular close in hype level and apprehension to LLM today but progress on those has not matched expectations at all. What if GPT4 is the last major advance in LLMs for a really long time?
    - thequadehunter 4y ago
      Might just be me, but I think the big difference here is the level of adoption. Everybody with an internet connection can use an LLM. It hits closer to home that way, whereas driving is very dangerous and most people haven't used a self driving car before.
  - onion2k 4y ago
    You can't extrapolate from an arbitrary selection of technologies... I'm not. I'm saying it's true for every technology. Everything gets better with time. As for self driving cars, compare a DARPA challenge car from 2013 to a Waymo car today. It's massively better.
- krapht 4y ago
  Where's my fusion powered flying car and electricity too cheap to meter?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- microtonal 4y ago
  When I started reading your comment I thought you were going to argue the opposite. Getting my first iPhone (3G) was a huge change. iPhone 4 to the latest are mostly incremental improvements. Aside from the camera, I could probably live with an iPhone 4 without many issues. Only the software is a lot more bloated now. We still had a Moto X from 2013 that my wife would power on every now and then to test an app that they were developing (iOS household), and besides the camera it still looks like a perfectly usable modern smartphone. When using it, it doesn't feel like a phone from the prehistory.
pzo 4y ago
The whole mobile economy pretty much started in 2008. First iPhone was released in 2007 but App Store was lunched in 2008. This changed landscape dramatically even if you consider software development. Before 2008 you were fine with writing just windows only desktop app in Delphi - no smartphones, tablets, smartwatches, smart tvs and could leave out supporting macOS or Linux
pcthrowaway 4y ago
Well I'm in web dev (though I was studying CS in 2008) and the 2008 landscape had almost none of the same things. jQuery was not yet a household name, let alone SPAs. Facebook had barely 100 million users. Marc Andreessen yet hadn't written about "software eating the world". Personally I was more optimistic. If anything, the last 15 years have seen the growth of an attitude of tech "entitlement" because hackers got to the a lot of the ideas that now seem obvious in hindsight before a lot of the big corps could. I'm sure there's still room for innovation, but I think a lot of it going forward will be driven by rapid improvement in AI capabilities. In 2008, tech wasn't everywhere. iphones were brand new and very few people had them.. There was no "mobile browser" market share (though we did have SMS gateways). 77% of the global population hadn't even been on the internet yet. AI looks like it's going to be at the forefront of the next big wave of fundamental changes to society, and it's really hard to predict where that will lead us. But I suspect it's going to become apparent that this relatively brief period of tech-elite empowerment was a historical anomaly, because the AI underlings are going to be willing to do a lot more work with none of the coddling, and they're going to improve very quickly.
- revelio 4y ago
  Huh? Gmail was a spa and that dates from 2004. I don't think a VC writing a blog post says much about how tech had changed. Smartphones existed before the iPhone and Android, they just weren't as popular.
  - pcthrowaway 4y ago
    The term "SPA" wasn't in use until at least after 2009 and gmail was probably using some hacky AJAX (XMLHTTPRequest wasn't even standardized until, what, 2006?). Chrome wasn't launched until 2008 so they weren't able to get away with just adding the APIs they needed into the browser. Backbone wasn't even released until 2010 and Angular probably wasn't conceived of internally until late 2008. Yes, gmail might have had some SPA-like behaviour in 2004-2006 but it was nothing like what we have today. Pretty sure I got access in 2005 because I knew someone who worked at google, and it was mostly doing full refreshes between actions at the time, like pretty much the entire rest of the web

We've had LLMs for about 5 years so far in non-academic research. If we're talking 10 years out that means we're looking at tech that's about 1/3 through its development to date. Take any mature-ish technology that you use today and compare the version 1/3 through its life to the version you use now. Look at Chrome 20 compare to Chrome 111, or React 14 compared to React 18, or an iPhone 4 compared to an iPhone 14, or a car from 1950 compared to a car today... The difference is always quite significant. Superficially they're still the same thing, but if you look at the detail everything is just better. AI will be the same.

marginalia_nu 4y ago
Eh, the difference is almost entirely in presentation. At the core a car today doesn't do significantly more than a car in 1962.
- onion2k 4y ago
  Superficially they're similar in the "they both have 4 wheels and an engine" sense, but you could examine literally any part of a car today compared to one from the 1950s and find huge improvements. The efficiency, safety, comfort, tech, manufacturing... Everything is better.
  - microtonal 4y ago
    I agree with the safety angle, but besides that driving a car from 2023 is not substantially different from the 1950s (in the sense that it opens up a lot of new possibilities).
jstx1 4y ago
You can't extrapolate from an arbitrary selection of technologies and assume that LLMs will have the same trajectory. They could be like the iPhone, or they could be like self-driving cars which have been a year away from replacing all drivers for 10 years now.
- pharmakom 4y ago
  Self driving cars a few years ago seem particular close in hype level and apprehension to LLM today but progress on those has not matched expectations at all. What if GPT4 is the last major advance in LLMs for a really long time?
  - thequadehunter 4y ago
    Might just be me, but I think the big difference here is the level of adoption. Everybody with an internet connection can use an LLM. It hits closer to home that way, whereas driving is very dangerous and most people haven't used a self driving car before.
- onion2k 4y ago
  You can't extrapolate from an arbitrary selection of technologies... I'm not. I'm saying it's true for every technology. Everything gets better with time. As for self driving cars, compare a DARPA challenge car from 2013 to a Waymo car today. It's massively better.
krapht 4y ago
Where's my fusion powered flying car and electricity too cheap to meter?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
microtonal 4y ago
When I started reading your comment I thought you were going to argue the opposite. Getting my first iPhone (3G) was a huge change. iPhone 4 to the latest are mostly incremental improvements. Aside from the camera, I could probably live with an iPhone 4 without many issues. Only the software is a lot more bloated now. We still had a Moto X from 2013 that my wife would power on every now and then to test an app that they were developing (iOS household), and besides the camera it still looks like a perfectly usable modern smartphone. When using it, it doesn't feel like a phone from the prehistory.

pzo 4y ago

The whole mobile economy pretty much started in 2008. First iPhone was released in 2007 but App Store was lunched in 2008. This changed landscape dramatically even if you consider software development. Before 2008 you were fine with writing just windows only desktop app in Delphi - no smartphones, tablets, smartwatches, smart tvs and could leave out supporting macOS or Linux

pcthrowaway 4y ago

Well I'm in web dev (though I was studying CS in 2008) and the 2008 landscape had almost none of the same things. jQuery was not yet a household name, let alone SPAs. Facebook had barely 100 million users. Marc Andreessen yet hadn't written about "software eating the world". Personally I was more optimistic. If anything, the last 15 years have seen the growth of an attitude of tech "entitlement" because hackers got to the a lot of the ideas that now seem obvious in hindsight before a lot of the big corps could. I'm sure there's still room for innovation, but I think a lot of it going forward will be driven by rapid improvement in AI capabilities. In 2008, tech wasn't everywhere. iphones were brand new and very few people had them.. There was no "mobile browser" market share (though we did have SMS gateways). 77% of the global population hadn't even been on the internet yet. AI looks like it's going to be at the forefront of the next big wave of fundamental changes to society, and it's really hard to predict where that will lead us. But I suspect it's going to become apparent that this relatively brief period of tech-elite empowerment was a historical anomaly, because the AI underlings are going to be willing to do a lot more work with none of the coddling, and they're going to improve very quickly.

revelio 4y ago
Huh? Gmail was a spa and that dates from 2004. I don't think a VC writing a blog post says much about how tech had changed. Smartphones existed before the iPhone and Android, they just weren't as popular.
- pcthrowaway 4y ago
  The term "SPA" wasn't in use until at least after 2009 and gmail was probably using some hacky AJAX (XMLHTTPRequest wasn't even standardized until, what, 2006?). Chrome wasn't launched until 2008 so they weren't able to get away with just adding the APIs they needed into the browser. Backbone wasn't even released until 2010 and Angular probably wasn't conceived of internally until late 2008. Yes, gmail might have had some SPA-like behaviour in 2004-2006 but it was nothing like what we have today. Pretty sure I got access in 2005 because I knew someone who worked at google, and it was mostly doing full refreshes between actions at the time, like pretty much the entire rest of the web