[bojan]

> It seems quite premature to say that. We're 3 to 4 years into the LLM revolution and the rate of progress is still impressive.

When we were 3 to 4 years into mobile phone revolution it was already abundantly clear that it's changing the way people leave.

Ditto when mobile phones became smartphones, and for many other tech items we got in the past decades.

As for LLMs... outside of a few precious professions you could live your life and not notice they are there.

[treis]

This isn't accurate. The first mobile phone came out in 1983. It took at least a decade before they started to become common.

[pproe]

Mobile phones at that time were 800g and cost $4000. Using your logic you could say we are almost 20 years into the age of LLMs because Cleverbot was released in 2008.

[treis]

The first prototype of a cellphone was functional in the early 70s. Before that you had walkie talkies and farther back wireless communications.

We're just shy of 10 years since attention is all you need and just a few years past the first commercially viable LLMs. So in cellphones we are something like early 90s.

[tavavex]

What they're saying is that mobile phone tech didn't scale at the same rate as LLMs. How fast it takes a technology to unfold into full adoption varies depending on the industry and on what's blocking development at its inception.

Mobile phones were severely constrained by hardware that made them impractically expensive and unwieldy, and also by the time it took to set up wireless networks at a large enough scale. That's why it took mobile phones a few decades to really get going, and this is going to be different for every other technology.

LLMs, for instance, were not as hardware-constrained - we have a lot more compute now, but there wasn't a hardware paradigm shift or anything, things were already pretty good a few years ago - now it's just about scale. LLMs were also always relatively affordable - there wasn't a period where they cost $10/token, so we don't get the same kind of affordability scaling as with phones. They also utilize existing internet infrastructure and don't need to be rolled out in some new worldwide grid.

[treis]

I think this is off. LLMs are severely constrained by hardware and we've seen at least an order of magnitude improvement in flops since ChatGPT launched. Over the next couple of decades we are likely to see that level of improvement in memory capacity. There's likely at least a few step changes left.

Regardless, the point of the GP that we saw revolutionary changes in society within a few years of technology introduction is off. It took decades for the full impact of the pc, internet, or mobile to be seen. We're still in a very early phase of figuring out how to use LLMs.

[inigyou]

Everyone uses chatgpt instead of Google now, but at least half of that is on Google.

[goatlover]

Define "everyone". Google has an AI result before the search results. People do use that. People also still use search results when they're dissatisfied with the AI answer.

[phil21]

> As for LLMs... outside of a few precious professions you could live your life and not notice they are there.

And old folks said the same thing about the internet and smart phones. Fads that would pass. While the younger generations lived an entirely different lifestyle.

I’m personally seeing the same. I resisted AI being a “thing” for a long while, but since I’m around a lot of teens and young adults it was a choice of burying my head in the sand or deciding to take a look.

They are going to change society on a scale far beyond smart phones. In ways many will not see as positives, but change never goes the way one may expect.

[ThrowawayR2]

> "And old folks said the same thing about the internet and smart phones."

Ironic how LLM promoters like to hallucinate citations, much like the tools they espouse.

[mh-]

"Internet 'may be just a passing fad as millions give up on it'" - Daily Mail, December 2000

I recall seeing similar sentiment in other publications throughout the late 90s.

https://www.reddit.com/r/retrocomputing/comments/1m6i4ui/art...

(Apologies that this was the best image host I could find for it)

[ThrowawayR2]

Surely you jest. Since people here are fans of LLMs, the Google summary describes said publication as: "The Daily Mail is widely regarded as a sensationalist tabloid with low factual credibility and a strong right-leaning bias."

I was there in the 1990s too and we were deluged with headlines trumpeting how everyone, young and old, was rushing headlong onto the Information Superhighway as the dotcom bubble kept inflating.