[kaiwen1]

No. My memory of the advent of the WWW was a sidebar in PC Magazine in Nov 1993 with an FTP link to download the NCSA Mosaic browser. It was a wow! moment to visit the few sites that existed. But nothing like this. What we’re seeing now is generating vastly more interest and excitement. It’s more akin to the 1999 dotcom bubble, but with far more impact and reach.

[catmanjan]

>far more impact and reach.

Absurd, AI has had zero impact in the everyday life of most of the population of Earth, in fact the biggest impact has been upon the wallets of speculators

[icetank]

I can tell you from personal experience that chatgpt is a game changer in universities and schools. Close to 100% of students use chatgpt to study. I know in our university pretty much everyone that attends exams uses chatgpt to study. Chatgpt is arguably more valuable then Wikipedia and Google for studies.

[master-lincoln]

It will be interesting to see if this benefits the learning of students or just helps them pass more easily without retaining any knowledge...

[anshumankmr]

i don't think they are gonna allow chat gpt while giving the end semester exams, right? or quizzes/assignments? Unless there is some homework aspect to it, it still can act as a tool not a crutch. If student's use it as a crutch, then yeah they are not gonna do as well I presume.

[davidron]

This is EXACTLY what I remember people saying about Cell Phones and PDAs when they were popular in the 90s (people can't remember phone numbers any more), Google when it was first unleashed (people won't know how to use card catalogs and libraries any more), and then again about Wikipedia when it became popular. What actually happened was that behavior changed and people became more efficient with these better tools.

[salviati]

Let me add that this change compounds over time. More efficient studying results in more competent people. I believe it's very hard to measure the impact, but there is a very positive long term impact from how much these tools help with learning.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

There was a posting, some time ago, about someone complaining that their young, primary-school-age sister was using ChatGPT to an absurd degree. I'm not sure that's a bad thing. She'll probably be one of the Thought Leaders, of Generation AI.

I think that ML will have a really big impact on almost everyone, in every developed (and maybe developing, as well) nation.

We need to keep in mind that ML is still very much in its infancy. We haven't even seen the specialized models that will probably revolutionize almost every knowledge-based vocation. What we've seen so far, has been relatively primitive all-purpose "generate buzz" models.

Also, don't expect the US (and many other nations) to take this lying down. Competition can be a good thing. Someone referred to this as the "Sputnik Moment" for AI.

It's going to be exciting, and probably rather scary. Keep your hands inside the vehicle at all times, and don't feed the lions.

[xigoi]

Offloading all your thinking to a machine will not make you a “thought leader”, but rather a nitwit who can’t tie their shoelaces without asking ChatGPT.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

It was a joke.

Anyway, I'm old enough to remember when use of calculators made one a nitwit.

[maximus-decimus]

It's like when we were kids and teachers said "you won't always have a calculator in your pocket". In 30 years, we might all have an AI model in a brain chip, who knows.

[mojuba]

> Chatgpt is arguably more valuable then Wikipedia and Google for studies.

But ChatGPT is just a glorified Wikipedia/Google. For the consumers it's an incremental thing (although from the engineering perspective it may seem to be a breakthrough).

[diggan]

> But ChatGPT is just a glorified Wikipedia/Google

It really isn't, unless something really majorly changed recently. Neither of those you can query for something you don't know about. Lets say you want to find the meaning of a joke related to cars, Spain, politicians and a fascist, how you'd use Wikipedia and Google to find the specific joke I'm thinking about?

ChatGPT been really helpful (to me at least) to find needles from haystacks, especially when I'm not fully sure what I'm looking for.

[voidUpdate]

Every time I ask chatgpt, I get a different answer. Copilot refused to answer me. Not sure LLMs are the answer you're looking for here

[diggan]

I just tried it myself with ChatGPT o1 and with Claude's Sonnet 3.5, Sonnet got it after two messages, o1 after 4.

If you're unable to reproduce, maybe tune the prompt a bit? I'm not sure what to tell you, all I can tell you that I'm able to figure out stuff a lot faster today than I was 2-3 years ago, thanks to LLMs.

Additional hints that might help; the joke involves a car and possibly a space program.

[dgfitz]

https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=+find+the+meaning+of+a+joke+r...

Second result. The first is this post.

[diggan]

Wow, the 90s came back to visit us at HN :) So funni.

Did quick scroll through the results, none of them seem to find the correct joke (none of the links even include "Spain" for me). Try again :)

For the record, this is what I see: https://i.imgur.com/XdsBGfM.png (no links to HN?)

[whamlastxmas]

Go try to learn a college level mathematics concept from Wikipedia, then try to learn it from ChatGPT. The wiki article may as well be written in a foreign language

[JetSpiegel]

Sure, a glorified Google, it will link to 3Blue1Brown and its ilk, not AI slop.

[liendolucas]

Yeah, and when I was in high school everyone used to refer to Encarta.

> I know in our university pretty much everyone that attends exams uses chatgpt to study.

And they shouldn't be doing that. They are wrong. Students should be reading suggested bibliography and spending long hours with an open book in a table instead of being lazy and abuse a tech that is yet in its infancy when learning concepts. Studying with a chatbot. Complete madness.

[danielbln]

You sound like our teachers back in the day, warning us to not use Wikipedia because "everyone can write stuff there!!". The kids will be fine.

[taurknaut]

Wikipedia furnishes sources, which is what you actually use.

[xigoi]

The information on Wikipedia is mostly correct except for controversial topics.

[master-lincoln]

I don't know why you are being downvoted. Learning from something that regularly hallucinates info doesn't seem right. I think AI is a good starting point to learn about what terms to research on your own though.

[danielbln]

OP is downvoted because of "students should be at a table with a book and that's it", like it's the 50s. LLMs can be wonderful study aids but do have plenty of issues with hallucination, and they should therefore only be part of a holistic research mix, alongside search engines, encyclopedias, articles and yes, books. Turning Amish is probably not the right way to go though.

[liendolucas]

If you want reputable sources of information, books are unparalleled like it or not, it's a fact.

> "students should be at a table with a book and that's it"

That's not what I meant (or yes if you take what you read literally):

What I meant was whole process that your brain goes through when you read, synthesize information, take notes, do an exercise, check answers, compare different explanations/definitions from different authors, etc. makes at least from my point of view a rich way to study a topic.

I'm not saying that technology can't help you out. When you watch for example a 3brown1blue video you are definitely putting good use of technology to aid you to understand or literally "view" a concept. That's ok and actually in many cases can be revealing. You can't get that from a book! But on the other side a book also forces you to do the hard work of thinking and maybe come up with such visualizations and ideas by your own.

Happy to be pointed as an "Amish" when it comes to studying/learning things ;) but I hope that I convinced you that what I explained has nothing of Amish but that you don't need a source of power to read a book.

[xenocratus]

> far more impact and reach

> has had zero impact in the everyday life of most of the population of Earth

You do realise those two can be true at the same time, right? The first one is relative, while the second is absolute, so they don't necessarily cancel out.

[bwb]

I am personally using it for around 50% of my questions about all kinds of things (things I used to Google and get frustrated with bad results). And my wife uses it for about 40% right now, even or recipes and other bits. We both love it.

Work wise about to implement it and see how it does on some work we couldn't scale to humans.

[ben_w]

Relative to the 1999 Dot.com bubble?

I'm fairly sure the customer support agents I've been talking to recently were using an LLM to draft their emails. No idea if they were supposed to be doing so or not, but the style of sentences in their emails…

And I'm seeing GenAI images on packaging, and in advertising.

AI is definitely having more than "zero impact", even if AI has gone from being a signal saying "we're futuristic" (when it was expensive, even though it was worse) to "we cut every cost we can" (now it's cheap).

[cameronh90]

The internet had zero impact on most of the population of earth for quite a while too.

[prettyStandard]

Zero impact?

AI is involved in things from writing laws to taking drive through orders.

[xdennis]

Zero impact is an exaggeration, but what others have pointed out is that there aren't a lot of companies primarily based on AI which are making a profit. Personally I can't think of any.

[anthk]

And it will create horrible un-debuggable bugs, human-killing causalities and who knows what more. Welcome to Idiocracy.

[__MatrixMan__]

So far I've found the bugs that it writes to be indistinguishable from the bugs that I'd write. Like, you look at it and think:

> Oh I see what you were going for, but no...

It's learning its deficiencies from us. That's concerning for many reasons, but "un-dubuggable bugs" is pretty far down on the list for me.

[infecto]

The only thing Absurd is the holdouts like yourself who refuse to see the impact the current gen of AI has on. Sure, you could probably say most people are not touched but there are definitely significant populations within the US and its only going to grow and spread.

[planb]

So had the companies that crashed in the Dotcom Bubble. And still a pet food delivery service (like the infamous pets.com) can be a profitable and sustaining business now (> 20 years later).

[dustingetz]

chatgpt has >1b arr, so for comparison that’s about the size of Notion.

[newsclues]

Social media really changed news, especially the pace of breaking news.