[2sk21]

This reminds me of the early 1980s, when home PCs were still very new, the main use cases that vendors used to promote were managing household accounts and recipes. These use cases were extremely unimpressive for most ordinary people. It took a long time for PCs to become ubiquitous in homes - until gaming and the web became common.

[rchaud]

The web was an academic project funded by modest research grants, requiring nowhere near the level of capital and electricity AI requires. The output of that research emphasized open source and decentralized implementation, which is antithetical to corporate AI models that are predicated on vendor lock-in.

Consumer adoption also happened organically over time, catalyzed mostly by email and instant messaging, which were huge technological leaps over fax and snail mail. IBM and DEC didn't have to jam "Internet" buttons all over their operating systems to juice usage (although AOL certainly contributed to filling landfills with their free trial disks).

[goalieca]

Well, LLM is mainly aiming to “Improve” what we can already do. It’s not really opening up new use cases the way the personal computer, the smart phone, or the Internet did.

[3vidence]

Thank you for putting this so succinctly, this is what I'm observing as well.

Feels like this combination (usually) creates a race to the bottom instead of expansion of new ideas.

LLMs kind of feel somewhere in the middle