8 ms·

The car wasn't a horse that was better, but a car has not changed drastically since they went mainstream. They've gotten better, more efficient, loaded with te

The car wasn't a horse that was better, but a car has not changed drastically since they went mainstream. They've gotten better, more efficient, loaded with tech, but are still roughly 4 seats, 4 doors, 4 wheels, driven by petroleum. I know that this is a massive oversimplification, but I think we have seen the "shape" of LLMs\Gen AI\AI products already and it's all incremental improvements from here on out with more specialization. We are going to have SUVs, sports cars, and single seater cars, not flying cars. AI will be made more fit for purpose for more people to use, but isn't going to replace people outright in their jobs.

pavlov 2y ago
Feels like someone might have said this in 1981 about personal computers. "We've pretty much seen their shape. The IBM PC isn't fundamentally very different from the Apple II. Probably it's just all incremental improvements from here on out."
- ActionHank 2y ago
  I would agree with your counter if it weren't for the realities of power usage, hardware constraints, evident diminishing returns on training larger models, and as always the fact that AI is still looking for the problem it solves, aside from mass employment. Computers solved a tangible problem in every area of life, AI is being forced everywhere and is arguably failing to make a big gain in areas that it should excel.
- adamc 2y ago
  What do you think hasn't been? I think the big game changer in the PC space was graphics cards, but since their introduction, it has all been incremental improvement -- at first, pretty fast, then... slower. Much like CPU improvements, although those started earlier. I can't think of a point where the next generation of PCs was astoundingly different from the prior one... just better. It used to be that they were reliably faster or more capable almost every year, now the rate of improvements is almost negligible. (Yes, graphics are getting better, but not very fast if you aren't near the high end.)
  - felideon 2y ago
    Arguably form factor, i.e. smartphones and tablets. Whether you think that's incremental or not is subjective, I guess. I would say incremental, but it does solve a different set of problems (connectedness, mobility) than the PC.
    - adamc 2y ago
      I would say smartphones and tablets are new devices, not, per se, PCs. Smartphones did bring something huge to the table, and exploded accordingly. But here we are, less than 2 decades from their introduction and... the pace of improvement has gone back to being incremental at best.
      - tonyarkles 2y ago
        They're, at a minimum, PC replacements in the sense that I'm currently on the Internet and posting on a message board from my bathtub instead of needing to go over to my desk to do that.
        adamc 2y ago
        When people go shopping for a PC, they don't buy a cell phone. Both can connect to the internet, but they're different products.
    - kibwen 2y ago
      Smartphones and tablets aren't PC replacements, they're TV replacements. Even we, deep into the throes of the smartphone age, still need to use real computers to do the tasks we were using them for in 1995, e.g. programming and word processing.
      - pas 2y ago
        The fact that computing went through yet another phase transition with mobile is pretty much undisputed. Battery tech, energy efficient chips, screens, radios, solid-state storage, etc. Of course it's not the same as a desktop/notebook, because it's optimized for being in our pockets/hands not put on a desk. (But the compute power is there, plug in peripherals and many phones easily beat a desktop even from ~10-15 years ago.) It remains to be seen where LLMs and this crop of ML tech can go in the garden of forking paths, and whether they can reach truly interesting places.
- idunnoman1222 2y ago
  That is basically true about computers minus the networking which the Internet brought, but that’s a separate beast
- crote 2y ago
  > The IBM PC isn't fundamentally very different from the Apple II. Probably it's just all incremental improvements from here on out. Honestly? I'm not sure I even disagree with that! Amazon is just an incremental improvement over mail order catalogs. Netflix is just an incremental improvement over Blockbusters. UberEats is just an incremental improvement over calling a pizzeria. Google Sheets is just an incremental improvement over Lotus 1-2-3. Most of the stuff we're doing these days could have been done with 1980s technology - if a bit less polished. Even the Cloud is just renting a time slice on a centralized mainframe. With the IBM PC it was already reasonably clear what the computer was going to be. Most of the innovation since then is "X, but on a computer", "Y, but over the internet", or just plain market saturation. I can only think of two truly world-changing innovations: 1) smartphones, and 2) social media. The current AI wave is definitely producing interesting results, but there is still a massive gap between what it can do and what we have been promised. Considering current models have essentially been trained on the entire internet and they have now poisoned the well and made mass gathering of more training data impossible, I doubt we're going to see another two-orders-of-magnitude improvement any time soon. If anything, for a lot of applications it's probably going to get worse as the training set becomes out of date. And if people aren't willing to pay for the current models, they aren't going to pay for a model which hallucinates 50% less often. They're going to need that two-orders-of-magnitude improvement to actually become world-changing. Taking into account how much money those companies are losing, are they going to survive the 5-10 years or more until they reach that point?
  - Ekaros 2y ago
    And even smartphone is just combination of with computer, but smaller and over internet. It just got pretty good eventually. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_200LX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_200LX arguably is "smartphone" supporting modem or network connectivity, albeit not wireless...
- bangaroo 2y ago
  the difference is a personal computer is a vaguely-shaped thing that has a few extremely broad properties and there is tremendous room inside that definition for things to change shape, grow, and improve. processor architecture, board design, even the methods of powering the machine can change and you still meet the basic definition of "a computer." for better or worse, people saying AI in any capacity right now are referring to current-generation generative AI, and more specifically diffusion image generation and LLMs. that's a very specific category of narrowly-defined technologies that don't have a lot of room to grow based on the way that they function, and research seems to be bearing out that we're starting to reach peak functionality and are now just pushing for efficiency. for them to improve dramatically or suddenly and radically change would require so many innovations or discoveries that they are unrecognizable. what you're doing is more akin to looking at a horse and going "i forsee this will last forever because maybe someday someone will invent a car, which is basically the same thing." it's not. the limitations of horses are a feature of their biology and you are going to see diminishing returns on selectively breeding as you start to max out the capabilities of the horse's overall design, and while there certainly will be innovations in transportation in the future, the horse is not going to be a part of them.
- ForHackernews 2y ago
  And that's more or less true? By 1989 certainly, we had word processors, spreadsheets, email, BBSes. We have better versions of everything today, but fundamentally, yes, the "shape" of the personal computer was firmly established by the late 1980s. Anyone comfortable with MS-DOS Shell would not be totally lost on a modern desktop.
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    Anyone comfortable with a UNIX workstation from the late 1980s wouldn't be lost at all on a modern Linux desktop.
- wslh 2y ago
  Yes, you can say all of them are Turing machines... but now those Turing machines are very fast and in your pocket and beat you at chess, etc. The UI/UX has changed humans.
- epolanski 2y ago
  We had messaging, we had videogames, we had business tools or creative tools in 1981. I think in fact the previous point stands: we've seen the shape of what's coming, it's gonna be now about incremental steps.
- rpcope1 2y ago
  I mean, were they actually wrong though?
ToucanLoucan 2y ago
The big missing thing between both the metaphor in the OP's link and yours is that I just can't fathom any of these companies being able to raise a paying subscriber base that can actually cover the outrageous costs of this tech. It feels like a pipe dream. Putting aside that I fundamentally don't think AGI is in the tech tree of LLM, if you will, that there's no route from the latter to the former: even if there is, even if it takes, I dunno, ten years: I just don't think ChatGPT is a compelling enough product to fund about $70 billion in research costs. And sure, they aren't having to yet thanks to generous input from various commercial and private interests but like... if this is going to be a stable product at some point, analogous to something like AWS, doesn't it have to... actually make some money? Like sure, I use ChatGPT now. I use the free version on their website and I have some fun with AI dungeon and occasionally use generative fill in Photoshop. I paid for AI dungeon (for awhile, until I realized their free models actually work better for how I like to play) but am now on the free version. I don't pay for ChatGPT's advanced models, because nothing I've seen in the trial makes it more compelling an offering than the free version. Adobe Firefly came to me free as an addon to my creative cloud subscription, but like, if Adobe increased the price, I'm not going to pay for it. I use it because they effectively gave it to me for free with my existing purchase. And I've played with Copilot a bit too, but honestly found it more annoying than useful and I'm certainly not paying for that either. And I realize I am not everyone and obviously there are people out there paying for it (I know a few in fact!) but is there enough of those people ready to swipe cards for... fancy autocomplete? Text generation? Like... this stuff is neat. And that's about where I put it for myself: "it's neat." OpenAI supposedly has 3.9 million subscribers right now, and if those people had to foot that 7 billion annual spend to continue development, that's about $150 a month. This product has to get a LOT, LOT better before I personally am ready to drop a tenth of that, let alone that much. And I realize this is all back-of-napkin math here but still: the expenses of these AI companies seem so completely out of step with anything approaching an actual paying user base, so hilariously outstripping even the investment they're getting from other established tech companies, that it makes me wonder how this is ever, ever going to make so much as a dime for all these investors. In contrast, I never had a similar question about cars, or AWS. The pitch of AWS makes perfect sense: you get a server to use on the internet for whatever purpose, and you don't have to build the thing, you don't need to handle HVAC or space, you don't need a last-mile internet connection to maintain, and if you need more compute or storage or whatever, you move a slider instead of having to pop a case open and install a new hard drive. That's absolutely a win and people will pay for it. Who's paying for AI and why?
JustFinishedBSG 2y ago
The car was very much a horse that was better though. It has replaced the horse ( or other draught animal ) and that's basically it. I'm not even sure it has brought fundamentally new and different use cases.
- insane_dreamer 2y ago
  It did. It changed the entire way society operates and how and where we live by greatly increasing the speed of travel and the ability to transport goods (without laying rail everywhere).

pavlov 2y ago

Feels like someone might have said this in 1981 about personal computers. "We've pretty much seen their shape. The IBM PC isn't fundamentally very different from the Apple II. Probably it's just all incremental improvements from here on out."

ActionHank 2y ago
I would agree with your counter if it weren't for the realities of power usage, hardware constraints, evident diminishing returns on training larger models, and as always the fact that AI is still looking for the problem it solves, aside from mass employment. Computers solved a tangible problem in every area of life, AI is being forced everywhere and is arguably failing to make a big gain in areas that it should excel.
adamc 2y ago
What do you think hasn't been? I think the big game changer in the PC space was graphics cards, but since their introduction, it has all been incremental improvement -- at first, pretty fast, then... slower. Much like CPU improvements, although those started earlier. I can't think of a point where the next generation of PCs was astoundingly different from the prior one... just better. It used to be that they were reliably faster or more capable almost every year, now the rate of improvements is almost negligible. (Yes, graphics are getting better, but not very fast if you aren't near the high end.)
- felideon 2y ago
  Arguably form factor, i.e. smartphones and tablets. Whether you think that's incremental or not is subjective, I guess. I would say incremental, but it does solve a different set of problems (connectedness, mobility) than the PC.
  - adamc 2y ago
    I would say smartphones and tablets are new devices, not, per se, PCs. Smartphones did bring something huge to the table, and exploded accordingly. But here we are, less than 2 decades from their introduction and... the pace of improvement has gone back to being incremental at best.
    - tonyarkles 2y ago
      They're, at a minimum, PC replacements in the sense that I'm currently on the Internet and posting on a message board from my bathtub instead of needing to go over to my desk to do that.
      - adamc 2y ago
        When people go shopping for a PC, they don't buy a cell phone. Both can connect to the internet, but they're different products.
  - kibwen 2y ago
    Smartphones and tablets aren't PC replacements, they're TV replacements. Even we, deep into the throes of the smartphone age, still need to use real computers to do the tasks we were using them for in 1995, e.g. programming and word processing.
    - pas 2y ago
      The fact that computing went through yet another phase transition with mobile is pretty much undisputed. Battery tech, energy efficient chips, screens, radios, solid-state storage, etc. Of course it's not the same as a desktop/notebook, because it's optimized for being in our pockets/hands not put on a desk. (But the compute power is there, plug in peripherals and many phones easily beat a desktop even from ~10-15 years ago.) It remains to be seen where LLMs and this crop of ML tech can go in the garden of forking paths, and whether they can reach truly interesting places.
idunnoman1222 2y ago
That is basically true about computers minus the networking which the Internet brought, but that’s a separate beast
crote 2y ago
> The IBM PC isn't fundamentally very different from the Apple II. Probably it's just all incremental improvements from here on out. Honestly? I'm not sure I even disagree with that! Amazon is just an incremental improvement over mail order catalogs. Netflix is just an incremental improvement over Blockbusters. UberEats is just an incremental improvement over calling a pizzeria. Google Sheets is just an incremental improvement over Lotus 1-2-3. Most of the stuff we're doing these days could have been done with 1980s technology - if a bit less polished. Even the Cloud is just renting a time slice on a centralized mainframe. With the IBM PC it was already reasonably clear what the computer was going to be. Most of the innovation since then is "X, but on a computer", "Y, but over the internet", or just plain market saturation. I can only think of two truly world-changing innovations: 1) smartphones, and 2) social media. The current AI wave is definitely producing interesting results, but there is still a massive gap between what it can do and what we have been promised. Considering current models have essentially been trained on the entire internet and they have now poisoned the well and made mass gathering of more training data impossible, I doubt we're going to see another two-orders-of-magnitude improvement any time soon. If anything, for a lot of applications it's probably going to get worse as the training set becomes out of date. And if people aren't willing to pay for the current models, they aren't going to pay for a model which hallucinates 50% less often. They're going to need that two-orders-of-magnitude improvement to actually become world-changing. Taking into account how much money those companies are losing, are they going to survive the 5-10 years or more until they reach that point?
- Ekaros 2y ago
  And even smartphone is just combination of with computer, but smaller and over internet. It just got pretty good eventually. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_200LX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_200LX arguably is "smartphone" supporting modem or network connectivity, albeit not wireless...
bangaroo 2y ago
the difference is a personal computer is a vaguely-shaped thing that has a few extremely broad properties and there is tremendous room inside that definition for things to change shape, grow, and improve. processor architecture, board design, even the methods of powering the machine can change and you still meet the basic definition of "a computer." for better or worse, people saying AI in any capacity right now are referring to current-generation generative AI, and more specifically diffusion image generation and LLMs. that's a very specific category of narrowly-defined technologies that don't have a lot of room to grow based on the way that they function, and research seems to be bearing out that we're starting to reach peak functionality and are now just pushing for efficiency. for them to improve dramatically or suddenly and radically change would require so many innovations or discoveries that they are unrecognizable. what you're doing is more akin to looking at a horse and going "i forsee this will last forever because maybe someday someone will invent a car, which is basically the same thing." it's not. the limitations of horses are a feature of their biology and you are going to see diminishing returns on selectively breeding as you start to max out the capabilities of the horse's overall design, and while there certainly will be innovations in transportation in the future, the horse is not going to be a part of them.
ForHackernews 2y ago
And that's more or less true? By 1989 certainly, we had word processors, spreadsheets, email, BBSes. We have better versions of everything today, but fundamentally, yes, the "shape" of the personal computer was firmly established by the late 1980s. Anyone comfortable with MS-DOS Shell would not be totally lost on a modern desktop.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  Anyone comfortable with a UNIX workstation from the late 1980s wouldn't be lost at all on a modern Linux desktop.
wslh 2y ago
Yes, you can say all of them are Turing machines... but now those Turing machines are very fast and in your pocket and beat you at chess, etc. The UI/UX has changed humans.
epolanski 2y ago
We had messaging, we had videogames, we had business tools or creative tools in 1981. I think in fact the previous point stands: we've seen the shape of what's coming, it's gonna be now about incremental steps.
rpcope1 2y ago
I mean, were they actually wrong though?

ToucanLoucan 2y ago

The big missing thing between both the metaphor in the OP's link and yours is that I just can't fathom any of these companies being able to raise a paying subscriber base that can actually cover the outrageous costs of this tech. It feels like a pipe dream. Putting aside that I fundamentally don't think AGI is in the tech tree of LLM, if you will, that there's no route from the latter to the former: even if there is, even if it takes, I dunno, ten years: I just don't think ChatGPT is a compelling enough product to fund about $70 billion in research costs. And sure, they aren't having to yet thanks to generous input from various commercial and private interests but like... if this is going to be a stable product at some point, analogous to something like AWS, doesn't it have to... actually make some money? Like sure, I use ChatGPT now. I use the free version on their website and I have some fun with AI dungeon and occasionally use generative fill in Photoshop. I paid for AI dungeon (for awhile, until I realized their free models actually work better for how I like to play) but am now on the free version. I don't pay for ChatGPT's advanced models, because nothing I've seen in the trial makes it more compelling an offering than the free version. Adobe Firefly came to me free as an addon to my creative cloud subscription, but like, if Adobe increased the price, I'm not going to pay for it. I use it because they effectively gave it to me for free with my existing purchase. And I've played with Copilot a bit too, but honestly found it more annoying than useful and I'm certainly not paying for that either. And I realize I am not everyone and obviously there are people out there paying for it (I know a few in fact!) but is there enough of those people ready to swipe cards for... fancy autocomplete? Text generation? Like... this stuff is neat. And that's about where I put it for myself: "it's neat." OpenAI supposedly has 3.9 million subscribers right now, and if those people had to foot that 7 billion annual spend to continue development, that's about $150 a month. This product has to get a LOT, LOT better before I personally am ready to drop a tenth of that, let alone that much. And I realize this is all back-of-napkin math here but still: the expenses of these AI companies seem so completely out of step with anything approaching an actual paying user base, so hilariously outstripping even the investment they're getting from other established tech companies, that it makes me wonder how this is ever, ever going to make so much as a dime for all these investors. In contrast, I never had a similar question about cars, or AWS. The pitch of AWS makes perfect sense: you get a server to use on the internet for whatever purpose, and you don't have to build the thing, you don't need to handle HVAC or space, you don't need a last-mile internet connection to maintain, and if you need more compute or storage or whatever, you move a slider instead of having to pop a case open and install a new hard drive. That's absolutely a win and people will pay for it. Who's paying for AI and why?

JustFinishedBSG 2y ago

The car was very much a horse that was better though. It has replaced the horse ( or other draught animal ) and that's basically it. I'm not even sure it has brought fundamentally new and different use cases.

insane_dreamer 2y ago
It did. It changed the entire way society operates and how and where we live by greatly increasing the speed of travel and the ability to transport goods (without laying rail everywhere).