Tesla stock has been riding on the self driving robo-taxies meme for a decade now ? How many Teslas are earning passive income while the owner is at work ?
Cherrypicking the stuff that worked in retrospect is stupid, plenty of people swore in the inevitability of some tech with billions in investment, and industry bubbles that look mistimed in hindsight.
As much as I don't like it, this is the actual difference. LLMs are already good enough to be a very useful and widely spread technology. They can become even better, but even if they don't there are plenty of use cases for them.
VR/AR, AI in the 80s and Tesla at the beginning were technology that someone believe could become widespread, but still weren't at all.
That's a big difference
If they don't become better we are left with a big but not huge change. Productivity gains of around 10 to 20 percent in most knowledge work. That's huge for sure but in my eyes the internet and pc revolution before that were more transformative than that. If LLMs become better, get so good they replace huge chunks of knowledge workers and then go out to the physical world then yeah ...that would be the fastest transformation of the economy in history imo.
With the smartphone in 2009, the web in the late 90s or LLMs now, there's no element of "trust me, bro" needed. You can try them yourself and see how useful they are. You didn't need to be a tech visionary to predict the future when you're buying stuff from Amazon in the 90s, or using YouTube or Uber on your phone in 2009, or using Claude Code today. I'm certainly no visionary, but both the web and the smartphone felt different from everything else at the time, and AI feels like that now.
The 'adoption rate' of LLMs is entirely artificial, bolstered by billions of dollars of investment in attempting to get people addicted so that they can siphon money off of them with subscription plans or forcing them to pay for each use. The worst people you can think of on every c-suite team force pushes it down our throats because they use it to write an email every now and then.
The places LLMs have achieved widespread adoption is in environments abusing the addictive tendencies of a advanced stochastic parrot to appeal to lonely and vulnerable individuals to massive societal damage, by true believers that are the worst coders you can imagine shoveling shit into codebases by the truckful and by scammers realizing this is the new gold rush.
Musk's 2014/2015 promises are arguably delivered, here in 2025 (took a little more than '1 month' tho), but the promises starting in 2016 are somewhere between 'undelivered' and 'blatant bullshit'.
No, they wouldn't. The '80s saw obscene investment in AI (then "expert systems") and yet nobody's mom was using it.
> It's hard to compare a business attempting to be financially stable and a business attempting hyper-growth through freebies.
It's especially hard to compare since it's often those financially stable businesses doing said investments (Microsoft, Google, etc).
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Aside: you know "the customer is always right [in matters of taste]"? It's been weirdly difficult getting bosses to understand the brackets part, and HN folks the first part.
But it's NOT a person when it's time to 'tell the AI' that you have its puppy in a box filled with spikes and for every mistake it makes you will stab it with the spikes a little more and tell it the reactions of the puppy. That becomes normal, if it elicits a slightly more desperate 'person' out of the AI for producing work.
At which point the meat-people who've taught themselves to normalize this workflow can decide that opponents of AI are clearly so broken in the head as to constitute non-player characters (see: useful memes to that effect) and therefore are NOT people: and so, it would be good to get rid of the non-people muddying up the system (see: human history)
Told you it gets worse. And all the while, the language models are sort of blameless, because there's nobody there. Torturing an LLM to elicit responses is harming a person, but it's the person constructing the prompts, not a hypothetical victim somewhere in the clouds of nobody.
All that happens is a human trains themselves to dehumanize, and the LLM thing is a recipe for doing that AT SCALE.
Great going, guys.
ChatGPT is so useful, people without any technology background WANT to use it. People who are just about comfortable with the internet, see the applications and use it to ask questions (about recipes, home design, solving small house problems, etc).
"Novelty" comes to mind.
With all the insane exposure and downloads how many people cant even be convinced to pay 20$/month for it ? The value proposition to most people is that low. So you are basically betting on LLMs making a leap in performance to pay for the investments.
We do have self-driving taxis now, and they are so good that people will pay extra to take them. It's just not Tesla cars doing it.
And those systems were never "commodified" - your average mom is forcefully exposed to LLMs with every google search, can interact with LLMs for free instantly anywhere in the world - and we're comparing to a luxury product for nerds basically?
Not to forget that those massive companies are also very heavy in advertising - I don't think your average mom in the 80s heard of those systems multiple times a day, from multiple aquaintances AND social media and news outlets.
Something I struggle to internalise, even though I know it in theory.
Customers can't be told they're wrong, and the parenthetical I've internalised, but for non-taste matters they can often be so very wrong, so often… I know I need to hold my tongue even then owing to having merely nerd-level charisma, but I struggle to… also owing to having merely nerd-level charisma.
(And that's one of three reasons why I'm not doing contract work right now).
Back in 2009, I was expecting normal people to be able to just buy a new vehicle with no steering wheel required or supplied by 2019, not for a handful of geo-fenced taxis that slowly expanded over the 6 years from 2019 to 2025.
But that isn't the argument. The article isn't arguing about something failing or succeeding based on merit, they seem to have already accepted strong AI has "merit" (in the utility sense). The argument is that despite the strong utility incentive, there is a case to be made that it will be overall harmful so we should be actively fighting against it, and it isn't inevitable that it should come to full fruition.
That is very different than VR. No-one was trying to raise awareness of the dangers of VR and fight against it. It just hasn't taken off because we don't really like it as much as people thought we would.
But for the strong AI case, my argument is that it is virtually inevitable. Not in any predestination sense, but purely because the incentives for first past the post are way too strong. There is no way the world is regulating this away when competitive nations exist. If the US tries, China won't, or vice versa. It's an arms race, and in that sense is inevitable.