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Ironically, this is exactly the technique for arguing that the blog mentions. Remember the revolutionary, seemingly inevitable tech that was poised to rewrite
by 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 ago1. 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 agoMassive, 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 agoThe 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 agoEh, 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[deleted]
- etaioinshrdlu 1y agoThis 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...
- scubbo 1y ago> LLMs are cheap enough to run profitably on ads alone > It is even cheaper to serve an LLM answer than call a web search API These, uhhhh, these are some rather extraordinary claims. Got some extraordinary evidence to go along with them?
- haiku2077 1y agohttps://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2025-06-02-llms-are-cheap/ https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2025-06-02-llms-are-ch..., also note the "objections" section Anecdotally thanks to hardware advancements the locally-run AI software I develop has gotten more than 100x faster in the past year thanks to Moore's law
- DonHopkins 1y agoThat's funny, I remember seeing "IT" penetrate Mr. Garrison. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SK362RLHXGY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SK362RLHXGY Hey, it still beats what you go through at the airports.
- lmm 1y ago> LLMs and diffusion models have had massive organic growth. I haven't seen that at all. I've seen a whole lot of top-down AI usage mandates, and every time what sounds like a sensible positive take comes along, it turns out to have been written by someone who works for an AI company.
- godelski 1y agoI 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 agoProblem 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 agoI'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 agoPeople 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.
- 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 agoI 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 agoThat 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 agoI 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 agoOh yeah I totally remember Segway hitting a 300B valuation after a couple of years.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- 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 agoEven 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 agoFlatness helps
- haiku2077 1y agoMy 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 agoEbikes really help on hills. As nice as ebikes on flat land are, they improve hills so much more.
- pickledoyster 1y agoInfrastructure 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 agoTrend 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 agoNobody 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 agoI recently saw someone riding a Segway, but it was an e-bike: https://store.segway.com/ebike https://store.segway.com/ebike
- conradev 1y agoChatGPT 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.
- ascorbic 1y agoThe 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.