[dewitt]

The microwave oven is a strange choice of metaphor here, considering that even now microwaves sell 100's of millions of units every year, are nearly ubiquitous in households in the western world, are present in nearly every commercial restaurant and kitchen outside fine dining, and reached $5m/year in sales in their first decade, $30m/yr in their second, and doubling basically every decade since, before finally reaching near 100% market penetration and plateauing around $15b year ever since.

I mean, I get the author's point not to over-hype AI, but the microwave oven is one of the most successful inventions in the past 100 years.

How about ... the Segway? I hear whole cities will be designed around them.

[techpineapple]

I think the microwave is actually the perfect example, per your data, I, as an AI skeptic don’t think AI is going to go the way of the Segway, I think it will have real solid use cases and quickly grow to sustained usage that will persist. And like the microwave, will plateau long before the “end of all white collar jobs and scarcity” superintelligence, but yeah, a solid $100 billion dollar a year business? Great? But people are investing in it like it will be the only tool ever used for everything, and a multi trillion dollar business.

Ai obviously has solid use cases, it’s just not the whole kitchen.

[cosmic_cheese]

The point may be that while AI may become ubiquitous in dev toolboxes, it’s not going to supplant traditional tools and devs who use it only for minor supporting tasks won’t necessarily be at a disadvantage. Kind of like how a chef might use a microwave to soften butter even if they don’t do any actual cooking with one.

That strikes me as a likely outcome. Many other things have played out similarly.

[joe_the_user]

Microwave oven may not be the best analogy but its a better analogy than Segway because both microwave ovens and LLMs are both definitely not failures. Millions of people pay to use LLMs now. Certain jobs have been entirely eliminated by LLMs (media back office notable - dividing video into distinct scenes, etc).

So the point is even successful new technology can be over-hyped.

Of course, LLMs may or may have a functionality that expands to everything also. Unlike a microwave over, if LLMs have limitations, those limitations aren't visible.