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I'd say the killer "app" for the iPhone was the touch-screen. There were plenty of other phones that could be used to make calls, at the same quality for a lowe

I'd say the killer "app" for the iPhone was the touch-screen. There were plenty of other phones that could be used to make calls, at the same quality for a lower price. Frankly, I still find the iPhone to be way too expensive for what you get in return. For LLMs, the "killer app", for me, is already here. And there's two of them right now. The first is the chatbot (like chatGPT or Pi or Claude). Having someone who you can just ask for any kind of information, from book recommendations to hypothetical space travel situations to advice about birthday gifts, and to get answers that are better than what I'd get from 90% of real humans, is huge to me. The second one is the coding assistant, in my code copilot. It has made me at least twice, if not thrice as productive as I was before.

TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
A killer app in the like-an-iphone context is something that provides obvious value - if not outright delight - to a huge demographic. Coding doesn't do that, because the demographic interested in coding is not huge compared to the rest of the population. Chatbots don't do it either because they're too unreliable. I never know if I'm going to get a recommendation for something the LLM hallucinated and doesn't exist. There's also huge cultural resistance to AI. The iPhone was perceived as an enabling device. AI is perceived as a noisy, low-reliability, intrusive, immoral, disabling technology that is stealing work from talented people and replacing it with work of much lower quality. It's debatable how many of those perceptions are accurate, but it's not debatable the perceptions exist. In fact the way OpenAI, Anthropic, and the others have handled this is a masterclass in self-harming PR. It's been an unqualified cultural disaster. So any killer app has to overcome that reputational damage. Currently I don't think anything does that in a way that works for the great mass of non-technical non-niche users. Also - the iPhone was essentially a repackaging exercise. It took the Mac+Phone+Camera+iPod - all familiar concepts - and built them into a single pocket-sized device. The novelty was in the integration and miniaturisation. AI is not an established technology. It's the poster child for a tech project with amorphous affordances and no clear roadmap in permanent beta. A lot of the resistance comes from its incomprehensibility. Plenty of people are making a lot of money from promises that will likely never materialise. To most people there is no clear positive perception of what it is, what it does, or what specifically it can do for them - just a worry that it will probably make them redundant, or at least less valuable.
InDubioProRubio 2y ago
The Killer App was the user-interface. There was not tutorial video, there was no long explanations. It was touch and go. And it worked.

TheOtherHobbes 2y ago

A killer app in the like-an-iphone context is something that provides obvious value - if not outright delight - to a huge demographic. Coding doesn't do that, because the demographic interested in coding is not huge compared to the rest of the population. Chatbots don't do it either because they're too unreliable. I never know if I'm going to get a recommendation for something the LLM hallucinated and doesn't exist. There's also huge cultural resistance to AI. The iPhone was perceived as an enabling device. AI is perceived as a noisy, low-reliability, intrusive, immoral, disabling technology that is stealing work from talented people and replacing it with work of much lower quality. It's debatable how many of those perceptions are accurate, but it's not debatable the perceptions exist. In fact the way OpenAI, Anthropic, and the others have handled this is a masterclass in self-harming PR. It's been an unqualified cultural disaster. So any killer app has to overcome that reputational damage. Currently I don't think anything does that in a way that works for the great mass of non-technical non-niche users. Also - the iPhone was essentially a repackaging exercise. It took the Mac+Phone+Camera+iPod - all familiar concepts - and built them into a single pocket-sized device. The novelty was in the integration and miniaturisation. AI is not an established technology. It's the poster child for a tech project with amorphous affordances and no clear roadmap in permanent beta. A lot of the resistance comes from its incomprehensibility. Plenty of people are making a lot of money from promises that will likely never materialise. To most people there is no clear positive perception of what it is, what it does, or what specifically it can do for them - just a worry that it will probably make them redundant, or at least less valuable.

InDubioProRubio 2y ago

The Killer App was the user-interface. There was not tutorial video, there was no long explanations. It was touch and go. And it worked.