9 ms·

If in 2009 you claimed that the dominance of the smartphone was inevitable, it would have been because you were using one and understood its power, not because

• SV_BubbleTime 1y ago
  > It's coming faster and harder than any tech in history. True; but how is that not expected? We have more and more efficient communication than any point in history, this is a software solution with a very low bar to the building blocks and theory. Software should be expected to move faster and faster. I’m not sure who is wishing it away. No one wanted to wish away search engines, or dictionaries or advice from people who repeat things they read. It’s panic top to bottom on this topic. Surely there are some adults around that can just look at a new thing for what it is now and not what it could turn into in a fantasy future?
• NBJack 1y ago
  Ironically, this is exactly the technique for arguing that the blog mentions. Remember the revolutionary, seemingly inevitable tech that was poised to rewrite how humans thought about transportation? The incredible amounts of hype, the secretive meetings disclosing the device, etc.? That turned out to be the self-balancing scooter known as a Segway?
  • HPsquared 1y ago
    1. The Segway had very low market penetration but a lot of PR. LLMs and diffusion models have had massive organic growth. 2. Segways were just ahead of their time: portable lithium-ion powered urban personal transportation is getting pretty big now.
    • jdiff 1y ago
      Massive, organic, and unprofitable. And as soon as it's no longer free, as soon as the VC funding can no longer sustain it, an enormous fraction of usage and users will all evaporate. The Segway always had a high barrier to entry. Currently for ChatGPT you don't even need an account, and everyone already has a Google account.
      • lumost 1y ago
        The free tiers might be tough to sustain, but it’s hard to imagine that they are that problematic for OpenAI et al. GPUs will become cheaper, and smaller/faster models will reach the same level of capability.
        • throwawayoldie 1y ago
          [citation needed]
          • jdiff 1y ago
            Eh, I kinda see what they're saying. They haven't become cheaper at all, but GPUs have increased in performance, and the amount of performance you get for each dollar spent has increased. Relative to its siblings, things have gotten worse. A GTX 970 could hit 60% of the performance of the full Titan X at 35% of the price. A 5070 hits 40% of a full 5090 for 27% of the price. That's overall less series-relative performance you're getting, for an overall increased price, by about $100 when adjusting for inflation. But if you have a fixed performance baseline you need to hit, as long as tech gets improving, things will eventually be cheaper for that baseline. As long as you aren't also trying to improve in a way that moves the baseline up. Which so far has been the only consistent MO of the AI industry.
        • deleted 1y ago
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      • etaioinshrdlu 1y ago
        This is wrong because LLMs are cheap enough to run profitably on ads alone (search style or banner ad style) for over 2 years now. And they are getting cheaper over time for the same quality. It is even cheaper to serve an LLM answer than call a web search API! Zero chance all the users evaporate unless something much better comes along, or the tech is banned, etc...
  • godelski 1y ago
    I think about the Segway a lot. It's a good example. Man, what a wild time. Everyone was so excited and it was held in mystery for so long. People had tried it in secret and raved about it on television. Then... they showed it... and... well... I got to try one once. It was very underwhelming...
    • anovikov 1y ago
      Problem with Segway was that it was made in USA and thus was absurdly, laughably expensive, it cost the same as a good used car and top versions, as a basic new car. Once a small bunch of rich people all bought one, it was over. China simply wasn't in position at a time yet to copycat and mass-produce it cheaply, and hype cycles usually don't repeat so by the time it could, it was too late. If it was invented 10 years later we'd all ride $1000-$2000 Segways today.
      • haiku2077 1y ago
        > If it was invented 10 years later we'd all ride $1000-$2000 Segways today. I chat with the guy who works nights at my local convenience store about our $1000-2000 e-scooters. We both use them more than we use our cars.
    • positron26 1y ago
      I'm going to hold onto the Segway as an actual instance of hype the next time someone calls LLMs "hype". LLMs have hundreds of millions of users. I just can't stress how insane this was. This wasn't built on the back of Facebook or Instagram's distribution like Threads. The internet consumer has never so readily embraced something so fast. Calling LLMs "hype" is an example of cope, judging facts based on what is hoped to be true even in the face of overwhelming evidence or even self-evident imminence to the contrary. I know people calling "hype" are motivated by something. Maybe it is a desire to contain the inevitable harm of any huge rollout or to slow down the disruption. Maybe it's simply the egotistical instinct to be contrarian and harvest karma while we can still feign to be debating shadows on the wall. I just want to be up front. It's not hype. Few people calling "hype" can believe that this is hype and anyone who does believes it simply isn't credible. That won't stop people from jockeying to protect their interests, hoping that some intersubjective truth we manufacture together will work in their favor, but my lord is the "hype" bandwagon being dishonest these days.
  • zulban 1y ago
    > Remember ... No, I don't remember it like that. Do you have any serious sources from history showing that Segway hype is even remotely comparable to today's AI hype and the half a trillion a year the world is spending on it? You don't. I love the argument ad absurdum more than most but you've taken it a teensy bit too far.
    • thom 1y ago
      People genuinely did suggest that we were going to redesign our cities because of the Segway. The volume and duration of the hype were smaller (especially once people saw how ugly the thing was) but it was similarly breathless.
      • zulban 1y ago
        Yes, people say all kinds of things.
        • thom 1y ago
          Apparently so.
      • guappa 1y ago
        We now have electric kickbikes… they aren't any better looking.
    • Jensson 1y ago
      > Do you have any serious sources from history showing that Segway hype is even remotely comparable to today's AI hype and the half a trillion a year the world is spending on it? LLM are more useful than Segway, but it can still be overhyped because the hype is so much larger. So its comparable, as you say LLM is so much more hyped doesn't mean it can't be overhyped.
      • brulard 1y ago
        I get immense value out of LLMs already, so it's hard for me to see them as overhyped. But I get how some people feel that way when others start talking about AGI or claiming we're close to becoming the inferior species.
  • antonvs 1y ago
    That was marketing done before the nature of the device was known. The situation with LLMs is very different, really not at all comparable.
  • delichon 1y ago
    I remember the Segway hype well. And I think AI is to Segway as nuke is to wet firecracker.
    • andsoitis 1y ago
      > AI is to Segway as nuke is to wet firecracker wet firecracker won’t kill you
  • johnfn 1y ago
    Oh yeah I totally remember Segway hitting a 300B valuation after a couple of years.
  • deleted 1y ago
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  • haiku2077 1y ago
    > Remember the revolutionary, seemingly inevitable tech that was poised to rewrite how humans thought about transportation? The incredible amounts of hype, the secretive meetings disclosing the device, etc.? That turned out to be the self-balancing scooter known as a Segway? Counterpoint: That's how I feel about ebikes and escooters right now. Over the weekend, I needed to go to my parent's place for brunch. I put on my motorcycle gear, grabbed my motorcycle keys, went to my garage, and as I was about to pull out my BMW motorcycle (MSRP ~$17k), looked at my Ariel ebike (MSRP ~$2k) and decided to ride it instead. For short trips they're a game changing mode of transport.
    • withinboredom 1y ago
      Even for longer trips if your city has the infrastructure. I moved to the Netherlands a few years ago, that infrastructure makes all the difference.
      • andsoitis 1y ago
        Flatness helps
        • haiku2077 1y ago
          My parents live on a street steeper than San Francisco (we live along the base of a mountain range), my ebike eats that hill for lunch
        • Qwertious 1y ago
          Ebikes really help on hills. As nice as ebikes on flat land are, they improve hills so much more.
        • pickledoyster 1y ago
          Infrastructure helps more. I live in a hilly city and break a mild sweat pedaling up a hill to get home from work (no complaints, it's good cardio). e-scooters and bikes - slowly - get up the hills too, but it's a major difference (especially for scooters) doing this up on an old bumpy sidewalk vs an asphalt bike path
  • ako 1y ago
    Trend vs single initiative. One company failed but overall personal electric transportation is booming is cities. AI is the future, but along the way many individual companies doing AI will fail. Cars are here to stay, but many individual car companies have and will fail, same for phones, everyone has a mobile phone, but nokia still failed…
    • leoedin 1y ago
      Nobody is riding Segways around any more, but a huge percentage of people are riding e-bikes and scooters. It’s fundamentally changed transportation in cities.
      • ako 1y ago
        I recently saw someone riding a Segway, but it was an e-bike: https://store.segway.com/ebike https://store.segway.com/ebike
  • conradev 1y ago
    ChatGPT has something 300 million monthly users after less than three years and I don't think has Segway sold a million scooters, even though their new product lines are sick. I can totally go about my life pretending Segway doesn't exist, but I just can't do that with ChatGPT, hence why the author felt compelled to write the post in the first place. They're not writing about Segway, after all.
    • causal 1y ago
      Doubting LLMs because Segway was also trendy yet failed is so funny
      • conradev 1y ago
        Genuinely
      • deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
  • ascorbic 1y ago
    The Segway hype was before anyone knew what it was. As soon as people saw the Segway it was obvious it was BS.
  • petesergeant 1y ago
    > Ironically, this is exactly the technique for arguing that the blog mentions. So? The blog notes that if something is inevitable, then the people arguing against it are lunatics, and so if you can frame something as inevitable then you win the rhetorical upper-hand. It doesn't -- however -- in any way attempt to make the argument that LLMs are _not_ inevitable. This is a subtle straw man: the blog criticizes the rhetorical technique of inevitabilism rather than engaging directly with whether LLMs are genuinely inevitable or not. Pointing out that inevitability can be rhetorically abused doesn't itself prove that LLMs aren't inevitable.
• godelski 1y ago
  If you told someone in 1950 that smartphones would dominate they wouldn't have a hard time believing you. Hell, they'd add it to sci-fi books and movies. That's because the utility of it is so clear. But if you told them about social media, I think the story would be different. Some would think it would be great, some would see it as dystopian, but neither would be right. We don't have to imagine, though. All three of these things have captured people's imaginations since before the 50's. It's just... AI has always been closer to imagined concepts of social media more than it has been to highly advanced communication devices.
  • energy123 1y ago
    > But if you told them about social media, I think the story would be different. It would be utopian, like how people thought of social media in the oughts. It's a common pattern through human history. People lack the imagination to think of unintended side effects. Nuclear physics leading to nuclear weapons. Trains leading to more efficient genocide. Media distribution and printing press leading to new types of propaganda and autocracies. Oil leading to global warming. IT leading to easy surveillance. Communism leading to famine. Some of that utopianism is wilful, created by the people with a self-interested motive in seeing that narrative become dominant. But most of it is just a lack of imagination. Policymakers taking the path of local least resistance, seeking to locally (in a temporal sense) appease, avoiding high-risk high-reward policy gambits that do not advance their local political ambitions. People being satisfied with easy just-so stories rather than humility and a recognition of the complexity and inherent uncertainty of reality. AI, and especially ASI, will probably be the same. The material upsides are obvious. The downsides harder to imagine and more speculative. Most likely, society will be presented with a fait accompli at a future date, where once the downsides are crystallized and real, it's already too late.
    • cwnyth 1y ago
      All of this is a pretty ignorant take on history. You don't think those who worked on the Manhattan Project knew the deadly potential of the atom bomb? And Communism didn't lead to famine - Soviet and Maoist policies did. Communism was immaterial to that. And it has nothing to do with utopianism. Trains were utopian? Really? It's just that new technology can be used for good things or bad things, and this goes back to when Grog invented the club. It's has zero bearing on this discussion. Your ending sentence is certainly correct: we aren't imagining the effects of AI enough, but all of your examples are not only unconvincing, they're easy ways to ignore what downsides of AI there might be. People can easily point to how trains have done a net positive in the world and walk away from your argument thinking AI is going to do the same.
• troupo 1y ago
  Literally from the article --- start quote --- Anyone who sees the future differently to you can be brushed aside as “ignoring reality”, and the only conversations worth engaging are those that already accept your premise. --- end quote --- Mass adoption is not inevitable. Everyone will drop this "faster harder" tech like a hot potato when (not if) it fails to result in meaningful profits. Oh, there will be forced mass adoption alright. Have you tried Gemini? Have you? Gemini? Have you tried it? HAVE YOU? HAVE YOU TRIED GEMINI?!!!
  • _carbyau_ 1y ago
    Or Copilot. It's actions like this that are making me think seriously about converting my gaming PC to Linux - where I don't have to eat the corporate overlord shit.
    • throwawayoldie 1y ago
      Do it. Proton is really, really, really good now.
  • boogieknite 1y ago
    what i like about your last jokey comment is that discussions about ai, both good and bad, are incredibly boring went to some tech meetups earlier this year and when the topic came up, one of the organizers politely commented to me that pretty much everything said about ai has been said. the only discussions worth having are introductions to the tools then leaving an individual to decide for themselves whether or not its useful to them. those introductions should be brief and discussions of the applications are boring back in the bar scene days discussing work, religion, and politics were social faux pas. im sensing ai is on that list now
    • troupo 1y ago
      > what i like about your last jokey comment We use probably all of Google's products at work, and sadly the comment is not even a joke. Every single product and page still shows a Gemini upsell even after you've already dismissed it fifteen times
• mekael 1y ago
  We might not be able to wish it away, but we can, as a society, decide to not utilize it and even actively eradicate it. I honestly believe that llm's/ai are a net negative to society and need to be ripped out root and stem. If tomorrow all of us decided to do that, nothing bad would happen, and we'd all be ok.
• darepublic 1y ago
  I still can't make some of the things in my imagination so I'm going to keep coding, using whatever is at my disposal including LLMs if I must.
• rafaelmn 1y ago
  If you claimed that AI was inevitable in the 80s and invested, or claimed people would be inevitably moving to VR 10 years ago - you would be shit out of luck. Zuck is still burning billions on it with nothing to show for it and a bad outlook. Even Apple tried it and hilariously missed the demand estimate. The only potential bailout for this tech is AR, but thats still years away from consumer market and widespread adoption, and probably will have very little to do with shit that is getting built for VR, because its a completely different experience. But I am sure some of the tech/UX will carry over. Tesla stock has been riding on the self driving robo-taxies meme for a decade now ? How many Teslas are earning passive income while the owner is at work ? Cherrypicking the stuff that worked in retrospect is stupid, plenty of people swore in the inevitability of some tech with billions in investment, and industry bubbles that look mistimed in hindsight.
  • gbalduzzi 1y ago
    None of the "failed" innovations you cited were even near the adoption rate of current LLMs. As much as I don't like it, this is the actual difference. LLMs are already good enough to be a very useful and widely spread technology. They can become even better, but even if they don't there are plenty of use cases for them. VR/AR, AI in the 80s and Tesla at the beginning were technology that someone believe could become widespread, but still weren't at all. That's a big difference
    • weatherlite 1y ago
      > They can become even better, but even if they don't there are plenty of use cases for them. If they don't become better we are left with a big but not huge change. Productivity gains of around 10 to 20 percent in most knowledge work. That's huge for sure but in my eyes the internet and pc revolution before that were more transformative than that. If LLMs become better, get so good they replace huge chunks of knowledge workers and then go out to the physical world then yeah ...that would be the fastest transformation of the economy in history imo.
      • TeMPOraL 1y ago
• p0w3n3d 1y ago
  Back in 1950s nuclear tech was seen as inevitable. Many people had even bought plates made from uranium glass. They still glow somewhere in my parents' cabinet or maybe I broke them
  • moffkalast 1y ago
    Well there are like 500 nuclear powerplants online today supplying 10% of the world's power, so it wasn't too far off. Granted it's not the Mr. Fusion in every car as they imagined it back then. We probably also won't have ASI taking over the world like some kind of vengeful comic book villain as people imagine it today.
    • eddythompson80 1y ago
      Oh boy. People were expecting nuclear toothbrushes, nuclear school backpacks, nuclear stoves and nuclear fridges, nuclear grills, nuclear plates, nuclear medicine, nuclear sunglasses and nuclear airplanes. Saying well, we got 500 nuclear power plants is like saying “well, we got excellent `npx create-app` style templates from AI. That’s pretty huge impact. I don’t know a single project post 2030 that didn’t start as an AI scaffolded project. That’s pretty huge dude”
      • moffkalast 1y ago
        Ngl I do feel a bit robbed about those toothbrushes, where's my uranium battery sonicare that never needs to charge?
  • umeshunni 1y ago
    The comparison is apt because nuclear would have been inevitable if it wasn't for doomerism and public opinion turning against it after 3 mile Island / Chernobyl
• afavour 1y ago
  Feels somewhat like a self fulfilling prophecy though. Big tech companies jam “AI” in every product crevice they can find… “see how widely it’s used? It’s inevitable!” I agree that AI is inevitable. But there’s such a level of groupthink about it at the moment that everything is manifested as an agentic text box. I’m looking forward to discovering what comes after everyone moves on from that.
  • XenophileJKO 1y ago
    We haven't even barely extracted the value from the current generation of SOTA models. I would estimate less then 0.1% of the possible economic benefit is currently extracted, even if the tech effectively stood still. That is what I find so wild about the current conversation and debate. I have claude code toiling away building my personal organization software right now that uses LLMs to take unstructured input and create my personal plans/project/tasks/etc.
    • WD-42 1y ago
      I keep hearing this over and over. Some llm toiling away coding personal side projects, and utilities. Source code never shared, usually because it’s “too specific to my needs”. This is the code version of slop. When someone uses an agent to increase their productivity by 10x in a real, production codebase that people actually get paid to work on, that will start to validate the hype. I don’t think we’ve seen any evidence of it, in fact we’ve seen the opposite.
      • XenophileJKO 1y ago
        :| I'm an engineer of 30+ years. I think I know good and bad quality. You can't "vibe code" good quality, you have to review the code. However it is like having a team of 20 Junior Engineers working. If you know how to steer a group of engineers, then you can create high quality code by reviewing the code. But sure, bury your head in the sand and don't learn how to use this incredibly powerful tool. I don't care. I just find it surprising that some people have such a myopic perspective. It is really the same kind of thing.. but the model is "smarter" then a junior engineer usually. You can say something like "hmm.. I think an event bus makes sense here" Then the LLM will do it in 5 seconds. The problem is that there are certain behavioral biases that require active reminding (though I think some MCP integration work might resolve most of them, but this is just based on the current Claude Code and Opus/Sonnet 4 models)
• mattigames 1y ago
  For the way you speak you seem to be fairly certain that they still gonna need you as it's user, that they aren't going to find a better monetization than selling it to people like you (or even small companies in general), I wouldn't be so sure, remember we are talking about the machine that is growing with the aim of being able to do do every single white-collar job.
  • mekael 1y ago
    And with everyone constantly touting robotics as the next next frontier, every blue collar job as well.
• mbgerring 1y ago
  I’ve tried to use AI for “real work” a handful of times and have mostly come away disappointed, unimpressed, or annoyed that I wasted my time. Given the absolutely insane hard resource requirements for these systems that are kind of useful, sometimes, in very limited contexts, I don’t believe its adoption is inevitable. Maybe one of the reasons for that is that I work in the energy industry and broadly in climate tech. I am painfully aware of how much we need to do with energy in the coming decades to avoid civilizational collapse, and how difficult all of that will be, without adding all of these AI data centers into the mix. Without several breakthroughs in one or more hard engineering disciplines, the mass adoption of AI is not currently physically possible.
  • dheera 1y ago
    That's how people probably felt about the first cars, the first laptops, the first <anything>. People like you grumbled when their early car broke down in the middle of a dirt road in the boondocks and they had to eat grass and shoot rabbits until the next help arrived. "My horse wouldn't have broken down", they said. Technologies mature over time.
    • mbgerring 1y ago
      We actually don’t know whether or not meaningful performance gains with LLMs are available using current approaches, and we do know that there are hard physical limits to electricity generation. Yes, technologies mature over time. The history of most AI approaches since the 60s is a big breakthrough followed by diminishing returns. I have not seen any credible argument that this time is different.
    • ezst 1y ago
      We have been in the phase of diminishing returns for years with LLMs now. There is no more data to train them on. The hallucinations are baked in at a fundamental level and they have no ability to emulate "reasoning" past what's already in their training data. This is not a matter of opinion.
    • Disposal8433 1y ago
• seydor 1y ago
  they said the same about VR glasses, about cryptocurrency ...
  • osti 1y ago
    If you are seriously equating these two with AI, then you have horrible judgements and should learn to think critically, but unfortunately for you, I don't think critical thinking can be learned despite what people say. Note that I'm not even going to bother arguing against your point and instead resort to personal attacks,because I believe it would be a waste of time to argue against people with poor judgment.
    • deleted 1y ago
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    • deleted 1y ago
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    • eddythompson80 1y ago
      You're significantly stupider than you think you are. Notice how I did that too?
• bgwalter 1y ago
  Smartphones are different. People really wanted them since the relatively primitive Nokia Communicator. "AI" was introduced as an impressive parlor trick. People like to play around, so it quickly got popular. Then companies started force-feeding it by integrating it into every existing product, including the gamification and bureaucratization of programming. Most people except for the gamers and plagiarists don't want it. Games and programming fads can fall out of fashion very fast.
  • gonzric1 1y ago
    Chatgpt Has 800 million weekly active users. That's roughly 10% of the planet. I get that it's not the panacea some people want us to believe it is, but you don't have to deny reality just because you don't like it.
    • bgwalter 1y ago
      There are all sorts of numbers floating around: https://www.theverge.com/openai/640894/chatgpt-has-hit-20-million-paid-subscribers https://www.theverge.com/openai/640894/chatgpt-has-hit-20-mi... This one claims 20m paying subscribers, which is not a lot. Mr. Beast has 60m views on a single video. A lot of weekly active users will use it once a week, and a large part of that may be "hate users" who want to see how bad/boring it is, similar to "hatewatching" on YouTube.
      • famouswaffles 1y ago
        >This one claims 20m paying subscribers, which is not a lot. It is for a B2C with $20 as its lowest price point. >A lot of weekly active users will use it once a week That's still a lot of usage. >and a large part of that may be "hate users" who want to see how bad/boring it is, similar to "hatewatching" on YouTube. And they're doing this every week consistently ? Sorry but that's definitely not a 'large part' of usage.
    • Gigachad 1y ago
      Sure, because it's free. I doubt most users of LLMs would want to even pay $1/month for them.
• Roark66 1y ago
  Exactly. Anyone who has learned to use these tools to your ultimate advantage (not just short term perceived one, but actually) knows their value. This is why I've been extremely suspicious of the monopolisation of the LLM services by single business/country. They may well be loosing billions on training huge models now. But once the average work performance shifts up sufficiently so as to leave "non AI enhanced" by the wayside we will see huge price increases and access to these AI tools being used as geopolitics leverage. Oh, you do not want to accept "the deal" where our country can do anything in your market and you can do nothing? Perhaps we put export controls on GPT5 against your country. And from then on its as if they disconnected you from the Internet. For this reason alone local AI is extremely important and certain people will do anything possible to lock it in a datacenter (looking at you Nvidia).
  • player1234 1y ago
    It's weird noone can measure and show us the numbers of this ultimate advantage. Is "ultimate advantage" in the room right now?
• ludicrousdispla 1y ago
  Except there is a perverse dynamic in that the more AI/LLM is used, the less it will be used.
• v3xro 1y ago
  While we can't wish it away we can shun it, educate people why it shouldn't be used, and sabotage efforts to included it in all parts of society.
• teeray 1y ago
  > If in 2009… …is exactly inevitablist framing. This claims perfect knowledge of the future based on previous uncertain knowledge of the future (which is now certain). You could have been making the same claims about the inevitability of sporks in the late 19th century and how cutlery drawers should adapt to the inevitable single-utensil future.