Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

> The best AI applications are beneath the surface to empower users

Not this time, tho. ChatGPT is the iphone moment for "AI" for the masses. And it was surprising and unexpected both for the experts / practitioners and said masses. Working with LLMs pre gpt3.5 was a mess, hackish and "in the background" but way way worse experience overall. Chatgpt made it happen just like the proverbial "you had me at scroll and pinch-to-zoom" moment in the iphone presentation.

The fact that we went from that 3.5 to whatever claude code thing you can use today is mental as well. And one of the main reasons we got here so fast is also "chatgpt-like bots and buttons with sparkles". The open-source community is ~6mo behind big lab SotA, and that's simply insane. I would not have predicted that 2 years ago, and I was deploying open-source LLMs (GPT-J was the first one I used live in a project) before chatgpt launched. It is insane!

You'll probably laugh at this, but a lot of fine-tuning experimentation and gains in the open source world (hell, maybe even at the big labs, but we'll never know) is from the "horny people" using local llms for erotica and stuff. I wouldn't dismiss anything that happens in this space. Having discovered the Internet in the 90s, and been there for every hype cycle in this space, this one is different, no matter how much anti-hype tokens get spent on this subject.

I’ll spend an anti-hype token :)

ChatGPT wasn’t the iphone moment, because the iphone wasn’t quickly forgotten.

Outside of software, most adult professionals in my network had a play with chatgpt and have long since abandoned their accounts. They can’t use chatbots for work (maybe data is sensitive, or their ‘knowledge work’ isn’t the kind that produces text output). Our native language is too poorly supported for life admin (no Gemini summaries or ‘help writing an email’). They just don’t have any obvious use case for LLMs in their life.

It’s tough because every CEO and VC is hyperventilating about LLMs as a paradigm shift for humanity when in reality they are useful but also so are gene editing and solid state batteries and mrna vaccines. It’s just that software innovations are much more attractive to certain groups with money.

"It’s tough because every CEO and VC [on LinkedIn and CNBC] is hyperventilating about LLMs as a paradigm shift for humanity"

I guess there's a quiet majority thing going on where the vast majority of businesses are just not integrating chatbots because their business is not generating text.

ChatGPT has between 800 million and 1 billion weekly users.

>>Outside of software, most adult professionals in my network had a play with chatgpt and have long since abandoned their accounts.

I know an architect, after much encouraging her to use it. She said ChatGPT most of the times would make bedroom window into a rest room. Its kind of hilarious because guessing the next word, and spatial thinking seem to be very different beasts altogether. And in some way might be two different tracks of intelligence. Like two different types of AGI.

A picture is better than thousand words - A saying.

My guess is a picture is better than a infinite words. How do you explain something as it exists, you can use as many words, phrases, metaphors and similes. But really is it possible to describe something in words and have two different people, or even a computer program not imagine it very differently?

Another way of looking at this is language itself might be several layers below intelligence. If you see you can go close but never accurate describe what you are thinking. If that is the case we are truly cooked and might never have AGI itself as there is only that far you can represent something you don't understand by guessing.

Not only that, there is active backlash for talking about ChatGPT in social circles now. Where as, I guess March 2023-ish it was the topic of conversation. Then when something new dropped it came up again and most people had used it and had an interesting story mainly about asking it for some sort of advice. Now when someone mentions it or tries to show you something it's mostly an eye roll and to the non-tech general user it hasn't made any major improvement since mid 2023. Most people I know are in fact complaining about the amount of crappy AI content and are actively opposed to it.