Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by rsynnott 634 days ago
I'm tired of 3d TV - Someone in 2013 (3D TV, after a big push by the industry in 2010, peaked in 2013, going into a rapid decline with the last hardware being produced in 2016).

Sometimes, the hyped thing doesn't catch on, even when the industry really, really wants it to.

2 comments

That's an interesting example. I would argue that 3D TV as a "solution" didn't work, but 3D as a "problem" is still going strong, and with new approaches coming out all the time (most recently Meta's announcement of the Orion AR glasses), we'll gradually see extensive adoption of 3D experiences, which I expect will eventually loop back to some version of 3D films.

EDIT: To clarify my analogy, GenAI is definitely a "problem" rather than a particular solution, and as such I expect it to have longevity.

> To clarify my analogy, GenAI is definitely a "problem" rather than a particular solution, and as such I expect it to have longevity.

Hrm, I'm not sure that's true. "An 'AI' that can answer questions" is a problem, but IMO it's not at all clear that LLMs, with their inherent tendency to make shit up, are an appropriate solution to that problem.

Like, there have been previous non-LLM chatbots (there was a small bubble based on them a while back, in which, for a few months, everyone was claiming to be adding chat to their things; it kind of came to a shuddering halt with Microsoft Tay). It seems slightly peculiar to assume that LLMs are the ultimate answer to the problem, especially as they are not actually very good at it (in some ways, they're worse than the old-gen).

Let's not focus on "LLM" then, I agree that it's just a step towards future solutions.
AI isn’t 3D TV
Ah, but, at least for generative AI, that kind of remains to be seen, surely? For every hyped thing that actually is The Future (TM), there are about ten hyped things which turn out to be Not The Future due to practical issues, cost, pointlessness once the novelty wears off, overpromising, etc. At this point, LLMs feel like they're heading more in that direction.
I use generative AI every day.
And 5 years ago, people used blockchain to operate a toaster. It remains to be seen the applications that are optimal for LLMs and the ones where it's being shoehorned into every conceivable place because "AI."