People said the same things about blockchain—that it would be the foundational tech that would power a new iteration of the Internet, a web3.
Not that LLMs are in the same category, they certainly seem to have more utility in certain contexts than I ever saw in blockchain, but OP is correct that not every hyped technology turns into the next internet.
There are real use cases and value from blockchain, but it is far more niche than the crypto and NFT folks wanted to believe. IMO there was a lot of horse-cart thinking. “Blockchain is so amazing any product built on it will be successful!”
Which I guess gets back to AI. But AI is so much more general purpose than secure public ledgers. One is a screwdriver, the other is a million pound press.
even if you look at something like DLSS where “all” it’s doing is giving you a tractable approximation of a difficult optimization problem (weighting temporal samples inside a TAA algorithm), that’s such a broadly-applicable approach that it alone would probably change society. The value of increasing shipping or rail efficiency by 5-10% alone is worth billions, and there’s probably thousands of smaller optimization tasks it can be adapted to.
The LLM stuff is an even bigger pot of gold potentially, a workable semantic embedding for semantic queries or other things is another thing that a million improvements can be shaken out of.
it’s actually bizarre to me how much people stand on the “no commercial value!!!” thing, and I have to view some of it as just being the next round of histrionics from the same people who are mad their deviantart got scraped etc.
And everyone with any sense said blockchains were stupid tech.
So many people have been following the hype of foolish tech trends that they can no longer differentiate them from actual ground shifting technology.
It's sad what blockchain hype has done to a supposed tech audience. To this day all nobody can describe an actual large impactuf use for blockchains other than get rich quick. Even with the tech there it does nothing for day to day life.
Duplicating portions of human intelligence has tremendous practical use in every facet of society. The tech just needs to get there.
> Duplicating portions of human intelligence has tremendous practical use in every facet of society. The tech just needs to get there.
That last part is the only part that skeptics are skeptical of.
GPT-4 is amazing in a lot of ways and shouldn't be discounted, but the grandest predictions of AI's impact depend on the exponential growth we saw in 2022-2023 continuing. What we've seen this year (GPT-4o, increasing cries from the established players for governments to build them a moat) suggests that that's not happening. We seem to have hit a cap on capabilities and have started just making it smaller and faster.
This is great and will be useful, but GPT-4-level tech isn't going to revolutionize everything the way that the hype suggests. We need something more.
