This really is different, and I say that as someone who spent a lot of time on expert systems, not as someone who is overly bought into AI hype.

The problem with expert systems is that even if the tooling was perfect the people using them needed a rather nuanced and sophisticated understanding of ontologies. That just wasn’t going to happen. There is not enough of that kind of expertise to go around. Efforts to train people largely failed. I think the intentional undermining of developer salaries pushed a lot of smart people out of the software industry making the problem even worse.

That’s what makes AI special, the ability to deliver value even when used by unsophisticated operators. Many workflows can largely stay the same and AI can be sprinkled in where it makes the most sense. I use it for documentation writing and UI asset production and it’s better in that role than the people I used to pay.

You should also be reminded about the internet. After the dotcom bubble it was extremely common to hear it outright dismissed as never being useful for anything.

Sometimes the future just gets here before we're ready for it.

> After the dotcom bubble it was extremely common to hear it outright dismissed as never being useful for anything

eBay, Amazon, Google, Yahoo etc were all around at the time and making serious money.

Not sure who those people were but it was very obvious to most that the internet was here to stay.

Repeat after me: An LLM is not AI. The internet enabled a whole new world of possible applications. It's unlikely this or even the next upgrade to ML will get there. If we get to AGI, sure, that's grpund-breaking, but we're still a few steps removed from that.

> An LLM is not AI

Good luck with that genie

Repeat after me: "AI hype" is not like Bitcoin hype, it's like Dot-com boom.

Generative models are already changing how people live and work. Ignore the grifters, and ignore the entrepreneurs. Look at civilians, regular folks, and watch how it impacts them.

I see you saying this all over this topic and yet I don't know anyone who uses AI for anything real. I've never used it once for anything, and I work in tech. The only people I know who use AI are kids who use it to do their homework for them. I'm sure they love it, but it's hardly a good thing.

It's like hiring someone to go to the gym for you, as far as I can see.

Oh the belief is so strong! Wouldn't it be great if this were true.

It's not hard to have strong beliefs about something that's real.

To be fair to Bitcoin, the world's largest economic bloc is actively building an alternative to USD/Western banks for international settlements, with blockchain technology.

It doesn't have anything to do with the libertarian vision of BTC but it's the same technical concept.

>Repeat after me: An LLM is not AI.

They are more intelligent than the average person I deal with on a daily basis.

The one thing us meat bags have going for us is that we have bodies and can do things.

> They are more intelligent than the average person I deal with on a daily basis.

No they aren't. They are differently intelligent. Which includes being more "intelligent" in some ways, and vastly less in others.

It is an all too common mistake to infer an LLM's capability based on what it would mean if a human could produce the same output. But it's not the same thing at all. A human that could produce the quality of many LLM outputs I've seen would be a person with superintelligence (and supercreativity, for that matter). But a human who is constrained to only the output that an LLM is capable of would be an untrustworthy idiot.

What's interesting to me is looking at the human+LLM combos that have recently entered the world. (As in, everyone who is regularly using good quality LLMs.) What are they capable of? Hopefully they'll be at least as intelligent as a regular human, though some of the articles on people blindly accepting LLM hallucinations do make me wonder.

And with the advances in robotics recently, who knows how long we're going to hold on to this monopoly.

there were probably people who doubted electricity, vaccines and indoor plumbing.

There were also people who doubted the Segway, Magic Leap, Theranos, 3D TVs, Windows Phone, and Google Glass.

I think doubt is OK, at least it is before any particular technology or product has actually proven itself.

the gap between participants in this conversation is that some have had it proven itself for themselves and others around them, and others have not seen that same proof.

Thing is, that comment would have worked in a thread three years ago about ‘metaverses’. Sometimes, the early adopters are the only adopters. Not saying that’s definitely the case here, but it is looking like it’s going in that direction - huge hype, absurd levels of VC spending, a bunch of ultra-enthusiastic early adopters, but real mainstream application still absent.

The ration of hyped technologies that turned out to be overhyped, versus ones that turned out to be as impactful as electricity is... I don't even know how many orders of magnitude different, but it's a lot.

This is false equivalence and you know better. Electricity is foundational technology. What we call AI are LLMs, which are great and useful, but not in the same league as something foundational like electricity.

Now, the question of "Are LLMs intelligent" is debatable, but intelligence is foundational itself.