This whole AI thing reminds me of the early 90 and people talking about how computers would change the world. Of course they were right but probably not in the ways they expected.
If you go back and look at the overhyped ads back then, you'd see them describing the future that we are currently living, except tainted by some institutions that were too-ingrained; things like "Using the World Wide Web, you will be able to view your checking account balance and make a payment to your utility provider with just a few clicks!" right after someone brings the milk in. i.e., They could predict online banking but not the rise of DoorDash.
Given the accelerated invention/deployment cycles we're in, it's not hard to extrapolate GPT4o to $0 token cost and 0ms latency. Even assuming stagnation in context lengths and cognition, the extreme scope of impact on every computerized industry becomes self-evident.
I think many of the changes actually were predicted. What seems to have been the most unexpected was how it would monetize and where market power would gather.
Online banking is great, and people knew it was coming since the dawn of the internet, but they mostly didn’t predict Stripe.
