3 ms·
The early internet and smartphones (the Japanese ones, not iPhone) were definitely not "immediately" adopted by the mass, unlike LLM. If "immediate" usefulness
by raincole 10mo ago
The early internet and smartphones (the Japanese ones, not iPhone) were definitely not "immediately" adopted by the mass, unlike LLM.
If "immediate" usefulness is the metric we measure, then the internet and smartphones are pretty insignificant inventions compared to LLM.
(of course it's not a meaningful metric, as there is no clear line between a dumb phone and a smart phone, or a moderately sized language model and a LLM)
- tim333 10mo agoYeah the internet kind of started with ARPANET in 1969 and didn't really get going with the public till around 1999 so thirty years on. Here's a graph of internet takeoff with Krugman's famous quote of 1998 that it wouldn't amount to much being maybe the end of the skepticism https://www.contextualize.ai/mpereira/paul-krugmans-poor-prediction-bf22d612 https://www.contextualize.ai/mpereira/paul-krugmans-poor-pre... In common with AI there was probably a long period when the hardware wasn't really good enough for it to be useful to most people. I remember 300 baud modems and rubber things to try to connect to your telephone handset back in the 80s.
- jheez3 10mo agoThats all irrelevant. Is/was there tremendous value to be had by being able to transport data? Of course. No doubt about it. Everything else got figured out and investments were made because of that. The same line of thinking does not hold with LLMs given their non-deterministic nature. Time will tell where things land.
- tim333 10mo agoThere's value in intelligence too.
- jheez3 10mo agoIntelligence? No. Get the wording right. It’s driven by probability.
- threethirtytwo 10mo agoCalling intelligence “just probability” is like calling music “just vibrations” and thinking you said something deep.