LLM Inevitabilism

Smartphones are different. People really wanted them since the relatively primitive Nokia Communicator.

"AI" was introduced as an impressive parlor trick. People like to play around, so it quickly got popular. Then companies started force-feeding it by integrating it into every existing product, including the gamification and bureaucratization of programming.

Most people except for the gamers and plagiarists don't want it. Games and programming fads can fall out of fashion very fast.

Chatgpt Has 800 million weekly active users. That's roughly 10% of the planet.

I get that it's not the panacea some people want us to believe it is, but you don't have to deny reality just because you don't like it.

There are all sorts of numbers floating around:

https://www.theverge.com/openai/640894/chatgpt-has-hit-20-mi...

This one claims 20m paying subscribers, which is not a lot. Mr. Beast has 60m views on a single video.

A lot of weekly active users will use it once a week, and a large part of that may be "hate users" who want to see how bad/boring it is, similar to "hatewatching" on YouTube.

> Most people except for the gamers and plagiarists don't want it.

As someone who doesn't actually want or use AI, I think you are extremely wrong here. While people don't necessarily care about the forced integrations of AI into everything, people by and large want AI massively.

Just look at how much it is used to do your homework, or replaces Wikipedia & Google in day to day discussions. How much it is used to "polish" emails (spew better sounding BS). How much it is used to generate meme images instead of trawling the web for them. AI is very much a regular part of day to day life for huge swaths of the population. Not necessarily in economically productive ways, but still very much embedded and unlikely to be removed - especially since it's current capabilities today are already good enough for these purposes, they don't need smarter AI, just keep it cheap enough.

Sure, because it's free. I doubt most users of LLMs would want to even pay $1/month for them.

how much of the world would you guess be willing to pay for, say, instagram?

Sure, you could try to load ChatGPT with adverts, but I suspect the cost per user for LLMs is far higher than serving images on instagram.

>This one claims 20m paying subscribers, which is not a lot.

It is for a B2C with $20 as its lowest price point.

>A lot of weekly active users will use it once a week

That's still a lot of usage.

>and a large part of that may be "hate users" who want to see how bad/boring it is, similar to "hatewatching" on YouTube.

And they're doing this every week consistently ? Sorry but that's definitely not a 'large part' of usage.

The value extraction will also be much higher. When you control someone's main source of information, they won't even find out your competitors exist. You can program people from birth, instead of "go to a search engine", it's "go to Google" (as most of us have already been programmed!) or instead of "to send an email, you need an email account" the LLM will say "to send an email, you need a Gmail account". Whenever it would have talked about TV, it can say YouTube instead. Or TikTok. Request: "What is the best source of information on X?" Reply: "This book: [Amazon affiliate link]" - or Fox News, if they outbid Amazon.