[numinary1]

Being old as dirt, my observation is that potential tech revolutions take ten years after the initial exuberance to be realized broadly, or three to five years to fizzle. Of those that fizzle, some were bad ideas and some were good ideas replaced by better ideas. FWIW

[mirekrusin]

And how long did it take for those tech revolutions to gain first 100M users?

[PaulDavisThe1st]

Well, during the initial "tech" (broadly interpreted to mean computational processes that somehow involve the internet) revolutions, there were not 100M, nor even 1M users to be gained.

And what is a "user" when it comes to ChatGPT and it's ilk? How does that compare with the definition of a user of, say, the web? Or of SMS ?

[pixl97]

With most other technologies before this there was the issue with rollout of physical infrastructure. And that is still true somewhat. All the big AI players want more AI processors and would take possession of as many as they could get.

Buy the other side of physical infrastructure is already here. The internet, cellphones, and computers already exist in mass and can be utilized by AI now. We didn't need to build new highways for this. No new towers. No wires put in the ground. Those fields already exist and are ready for planting.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

My point was that "time to 100M users" is not a particularly useful comparison.

[KaiserPro]

openai having 100million users seems a bit suspect to me.

given that they need a _huge_ amount of GPU power to server that kind of traffic, I suspect that 100million seems out by an order of magnitude.

[lostmsu]

This one started with GPT-2, IMHO. So 4 years into making.