Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO

I would press X to doubt just because of profitability.

It’s cute that we now have image and video gen AI. Also we have now Turing test passing chat bots (Id say). But although they are very impressive, and I know lots of people who use them for various tasks, I haven’t seen a “killer app” yet.

For iPhone the killer app was making calls. It was the best phone you could get. Then it had apps. It was undeniably better.

LLMs are good at a lot of things, but they don’t seem to excel any particular task - yet. I’m not sure they are a revolution yet.

I’d say they’re more of Macintosh moment. A hugely useful technology no doubt - but useful for what exactly? For Mac it was desktop publishing.

I agree generally with what you're saying but feel you were all over the place in your comment.

The killer app on the iPhone was not "making calls" — I suspect instead it was Safari, the other 1st party apps, the touch screen and the slick integration of all of that to make it a no-brainer device that even my mom and dad could use (they were approaching their 70's when the iPhone debuted).

Your analogy that ChatGPT (or LLMs generally) are more akin to the Mac feels close to the mark to me. Your comment about the Mac's killer app, desktop publishing, suggests that LLM's killer app will follow, just hasn't arrived yet.

The analogy is a little shaky though since, some would argue, it was the laser printer (plus the Mac) that kicked off desktop publishing.

I'd say the killer "app" for the iPhone was the touch-screen. There were plenty of other phones that could be used to make calls, at the same quality for a lower price. Frankly, I still find the iPhone to be way too expensive for what you get in return.

For LLMs, the "killer app", for me, is already here. And there's two of them right now.

The first is the chatbot (like chatGPT or Pi or Claude). Having someone who you can just ask for any kind of information, from book recommendations to hypothetical space travel situations to advice about birthday gifts, and to get answers that are better than what I'd get from 90% of real humans, is huge to me.

The second one is the coding assistant, in my code copilot. It has made me at least twice, if not thrice as productive as I was before.

>For iPhone the killer app was making calls.

What?

Making calls was the killer app for Nokia brick phones in the late 1990s.

The killer app for the first generation of smartphones (Windows Mobile, Blackberry, etc.) was email and calendar.

The killer app for iPhone and Android was the capacitative touchscreen combined with the ability to run 3rd party apps (yes, I'm aware there was an extremely brief moment in the history of the original iPhone where Apple opposed this), and 3G mobile internet (yes, again, I realize this came a year after the initial iPhone release). Mobile web browsers and Maps/GPS got the party started.

A killer app in the like-an-iphone context is something that provides obvious value - if not outright delight - to a huge demographic.

Coding doesn't do that, because the demographic interested in coding is not huge compared to the rest of the population.

Chatbots don't do it either because they're too unreliable. I never know if I'm going to get a recommendation for something the LLM hallucinated and doesn't exist.

There's also huge cultural resistance to AI. The iPhone was perceived as an enabling device. AI is perceived as a noisy, low-reliability, intrusive, immoral, disabling technology that is stealing work from talented people and replacing it with work of much lower quality.

It's debatable how many of those perceptions are accurate, but it's not debatable the perceptions exist.

In fact the way OpenAI, Anthropic, and the others have handled this is a masterclass in self-harming PR. It's been an unqualified cultural disaster.

So any killer app has to overcome that reputational damage. Currently I don't think anything does that in a way that works for the great mass of non-technical non-niche users.

Also - the iPhone was essentially a repackaging exercise. It took the Mac+Phone+Camera+iPod - all familiar concepts - and built them into a single pocket-sized device. The novelty was in the integration and miniaturisation.

AI is not an established technology. It's the poster child for a tech project with amorphous affordances and no clear roadmap in permanent beta. A lot of the resistance comes from its incomprehensibility. Plenty of people are making a lot of money from promises that will likely never materialise.

To most people there is no clear positive perception of what it is, what it does, or what specifically it can do for them - just a worry that it will probably make them redundant, or at least less valuable.

The Killer App was the user-interface. There was not tutorial video, there was no long explanations. It was touch and go. And it worked.

You're right it is a bit all over the place.

"The killer app is making calls" is me quoting Steve Jobs on the Iphone 1 presentation. I get that it doesn't sound true now, knowing all we can do. It's true Iphone was a lot more, but that was his conviction at the time, and I think it makes sense. Their aim was to make the best phone in the world.

I also think yeah, it is a bit like Macintosh in the sense that this is a new general purpose technology, and I'm not sure we've really figured out what's going to the most transformative about it yet.

Want the whole premise of the original iPhone keynote that it was a fusion of three things - telecommunications, an iPod and internet? (Is that right?) That seems to place "phone" as not the killer app, but rather a pillar of three things that made up a "killer app" when combined.

I do remember the initial visual voicemail implementation being very appealing of course. Especially since it seemed they had enough leverage to get the carrier/s (just one at the beginning) to do whatever they needed.

That's true. I think his idea was to beat the competitors in every category - it was the better phone, it was the better internet device, and it was the better iPod (apparently that was one of Apple's main reasons for making the iPhone at the time, they felt like phones would start having mp3s).

I think we agree. All I meant is, yes LLMs seem to do a lot of things, but nothing quite perfectly. Yet.

I was quoting Steve Jobs during the initial iPhone presentation. You're right it was not a good example.