[avaer]

The difference is LLMs let you "run Google" on your own data with copy paste. Which you could not do before.

If you're using ChatGPT like you use Google then I agree with you. But IMO comparing ChatGPT to Google means you haven't had the "aha" moment yet.

As a concrete example, a lot of my work these days involves asking ChatGPT to produce me an obscure micro-app to process my custom data. Which it usually does and renders in one shot. This app could not exist before I asked for it. The productivity gains over coding this myself are immense. And the experience is nothing like using Google.

[MadDemon]

It's great for you that you were able to create this app that wouldn't otherwise exist, but does that app dramatically increase your overall productivity? And can you imagine that a significant chunk of the population would experience a similar productivity boost? I'm not saying that there is no productivity gain, but big tech has promised MASSIVE productivity gains. I just feel like the productivity gains are more modest for now, similar to other technologies. Maybe one day AGI comes along and changes everything, but I feel like we'll need a few more break throughs before that.

[bryanrasmussen]

there have been various solutions that allow you to "run Google" on your own data for quite a while, what is the "aha" moment related to that?

[avaer]

By "run Google" I don't mean "index your data into a search engine". I mean the experience of being able to semantically extract and process data at "internet scale", in seconds.

It might seem quaint today but one example might be fact checking a piece of text.

Google effectively has a pretty good internal representation of whether any particular document concords with other documents on the internet, on account of massive crawling and indexing over decades. But LLMs let you run the same process nearly instantly on your own data, and that's the difference.

[dumbmrblah]

But before I needed to be a programmer or have a team of data analysts analyze the data for me, now I can just process that data on my own and gather my own insights. That was my aha moment.