[Gareth321]

It's interesting to score our predictions of various technologies. I've been waiting for hoverboards for 40 years. Our predictions of nuclear power being in every consumer appliance were way off. We just couldn't make it safe and cheap enough. This is a common theme for "physical" technologies. On the other hand, we greatly underestimated the advent and potential of the internet. Most science fiction of the 20th century envisioned very large computers with limited interconnected capabilities. We made computers far smarter and more ubiquitous than most could ever have conceived. I see AI as a function of the kinds of technologies we consistently underestimate.

[ifwinterco]

Yes, that's a fair counterpoint. I guess my counter-counterpoint would be that LLMs actually seem to have characteristics closer to the first group than the second, in that they (currently at least) need enormous quantities of physical things and energy in order to work.

So the nuclear power problem of "it works fine and it's actually very good in a lot of ways, it's just too expensive" could be quite relevant