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While I agree with your sentiment and observatin by and large, ideally you could have added a few constraints as a lot of people here have had "Holy shit" moments with AI, but often it's most pronounced in a very specific personal context. Learning topics faster, fixing things without having to call a repair man, life-saving medical tips (somewhat more of a thing because of a handicapped health system, but that's another discussion). Funnily enough though, the benefits don't seem to scale to the work environment as smoothly across the board. It's almost as if, to use pg's famous line, they built things that don't scale. The moment you scale AI beyond the personal context, the noisiness and non-determinism of the technology starts wrecking havoc in ripples through the industry, damn the productivity. Managing the slop you've created, but more importantly (I would normally put an emdash here) managing the slop others created turns out to be a problem as big as the tech that created it. What is the evidence of this? Isn't it strange no revolutionary product has yet
been created from the coding output of this technology? More to the point, the only thing that comes close is the Claw. So what we have as the first breakaway product is something to help orchestrate the slop generators, instead of say, a new Phone OS that rivals Android and iOS, or a Metaverse that is actually worthy of its name. Nothing to see here, just more shovels to shovel the shit essentially. We are still in the grasp of the electric and information revolution. Peter Thiel said more than a decade ago that if you compare life in the 70s and now the only major visible difference would simply be more screens in various forms nowadays. This he presented as evidence that no new revolutionary technology has been created in the interim. At present, the same is more true of AI. It has made access to information faster than before. However, unlike other processes of learning, it has made it more difficult to ascertain the correctness of the information presented. It is doing this by actively removing the direct connection between the information it presents and the primary sources responsible for that information (think Google replacing its search field with an AI field). The non-LLM AI stuff in the medical field is what I find most promising. Not the banal AI doctors and nurses replacing real doctors and nurses, but more the research end of things, where hallucinating and pattern matching to create new compounds to test seems promising. Of course, any technology that is able to routinely aid discoveries in applied maths and physics will also be welcome. If this half decade saw an explosion of new bespoke hardware being built and sold aided by LLMs (think a tech shop of 10 employees being able to build and sell robust smartphones from scratch to a niche market sustainably etc), or jumpstarts an era of reverse engineering on crack that pierces through the tech oligopoly then that would be evidence of disruption on a macro scale... But no, alas, we are still waiting. |
You could extend Thiel's statement back even to the 1960's: beyond address and phone lookup, everything added by the WWW has been of little use to a wise consumer IMO.