In the mid-90s, I decided to _not_ pick AI as a major because we had just gone through the original AI winter and most academic research on the topic was getting defunded in favor of high-speed networking and video conferencing.

To this day, and even though I am deeply involved with AI, I do not regret that decision—but I am constantly reminded that the expectations practitioners have are _way_ off what most people will actually want.

See slides 58 and 59 - this can take a while.

ChatGPT got to 100m users much faster than anything else because it's riding on all the infrastructure we already built in the last 20 years. To a consumer, it's 'just' a website, and you don't have to wait for telcos to build broadband networks or get everyone to buy a $600 smartphone.

But, most people go to the website and say 'well, that's very cool, but I don't know what I'd use it for'. It's very useful for coding and marketing, and a few general purposes, but it isn't - YET - very helpful for most of the things that most people do all day. A lot of the presentation is wondering about this.

I agree with everything except the use of the word “anachronistic”. It’s using LLM for everything today that is anachronistic, because almost everyone today does not ;)

> Pretty much every thing I do starts with an interaction with a neural network.

Pretty much nothing I do starts this way.

Look LLM's are interesting. I sure spend a lot less time writing basic one off scripts because of them. The "extra step" of tossing emails to an LLM is just proof reading with less tedium.

LLMs gave every one an intern that does middling work quickly, never complains and doesn't get coffee.

We need them to be cheap (to run) and localy/owned hardware (for security and copy right reasons).

> ... replacing letters with email ...

Some true, but not totally. The role of email has many differences from old-age letters. And letters are not only replaced with email, but also more modern communication manners. And the more modern communication manners not only replace letters, but telephone etc.

And the letter case is specified case. There are many old-age things which are not replaced totally.

The same is for AI. It will replace something, but not all.

I don't think it will be as massive as you and a lot of people think.

The problem is reliability,you can't bulid of unstable foundations.

We would need some kind of library of "verified sentences" in LLMs, like facts verified by experts for them to be useful for a tons of stuff.

Right now if you are using LLMs for anything else that is not verifiable in a objective way (like programming, a program works or does not [let's not even talk efficency or security]) or fluff (generating fancy text for non crucial reasons) you are using a tool wrong.

I think this is a good observation of the past, but applying these patterns to AI is like when people applied them liberally to cryptocurrency and claimed it would replace the internet protocol, which was a certain kind of exuberance of the ill informed.

If everything you do starts by asking an LLM, then you start with superficial research, because frankly it was never anything better than a fancy google search.

Even when the potential is obvious, it takes time for people to adapt, trust and integrate it into daily life

I think they are, though, just not consciously. I’m finding more and more it is rare that I find myself typing on a device and there isn’t some AI lurking in it. Email, docs, mobile keyboards, soon to be also Apple intelligence searching your photos, etc.

I can’t even type a note to myself in gmail without “polish!” Popping in to tell me that I’m shit at writing a good note-to-self and it needs polishing. (Wherein it typically reforms to , “dear customer service, …”)

Every Google search is using llm now right? At least I can’t figure out how to stop it from happening.

The Internet was fun and interesting because there were people on it creating fun and interesting projects and there were very few restrictions. Now it's just a shopping mall where people shout at each other.

AI is a trash compactor run through an HR department. It's already neutered and censored to hell. If you want to get the official, approved version of something, ask an AI. If you think that's fun, you've probably forgotten what it was like to be young.

This is probably related to cynicism (but also maybe wisdom from a life that at times was not easy) I've developed over the years, but I can't help but get seriously dystopian vibes from your post. More than the usual boosters, because it seems to be a little more honest and a little less cognizant of what I think the real moral hangups are that people tend to have with AI. So you seem genuine in some sense in a way many others aren't.

I don't for one second really suspect it will be the case (not for the usual technical criticisms although I'm skeptical there as well, but more that I don't think it would be socially sustainable for an extended period of time)...but let's for a moment take your last paragraph at face value and in good faith.

I mean...what exactly is it that you are advocating for or accepting? Even if we get some kind of very generous UBI, there's something about human nature that makes me suspect the consequences of this would be an almost guaranteed miserable existence for pretty much everyone.

Even in the best case scenario, where the results of this transformation are kept under control and distributed in a reasonable manner and the whole thing doesn't cause a social and political meltdown...what is everybody going to do? There's some amount of wisdom in the old saying that "idle hands are the devil's plaything".

Thats the real issue I am the most concerned about and that seems to be the least often addressed by big AI boosters and detractors (I realize both of these camps often have ulterior motives). I suspect many are feeling some amount of concern like that...why is this (I would argue most fundamental) question about the impact of AI never talked about?

I don't want to hear anything about some big terminator style fight against AI or about how wonderful and unpredictable the inevitable future of WALL-E style luxury gay space communism is going to be...none of those discussion points get to the heart of what makes many people so uncomfortable with the concept...and I think the people believing in some version of that second scenario being at all socially plausible is what gives me the most pause. It makes the terminator scenario almost seem like a preferred outcome if we were given a binary choice...in reality I think most would prefer neither and would agree with me in saying that we aren't even discussing the right issues w.r.t an "AI gets much better" potential future.

I’m the same. I haven’t read the responses to your comment yet but I guarantee there are some folks pulling out their hair in disbelief about what you could possibly be using LLMs for, how the code can never stand up to what they’re writing etc. I don’t understand how you can’t find chatGPT useful. I use it at least 30 times in any given day.

It’s just a play on the title of the “Why Software is Eating the World” article [1] that went viral in the tech industry 13 years ago. It’s no different from all the “[…] is all you need” ML papers. It’s a metaphor, don’t read too much into it.

[1] https://a16z.com/why-software-is-eating-the-world/

If you look past the hyperbole, I think there are some interesting data points in there. For example, fewer enterprises claim to have AI systems in production this year vs last year.

Incidentally, are those three separate talks in 2013, 2015 and 2016 with identical titles, or the same talk revised and given three times?

Most of the presentation is saying that is isn't clear how this will work, it will take a long time, and it probably won't do everything.

Indeed, you would see that if you'd read even the first half-dozen 5 slides ;)

The world is like a fruit that can be eaten over and over ad infinitum.

Though some people want to save it.

I prefer eating.

AI resides inbetween the mobile layer [hardware devices through which we will consume content] and above internet layer [information / content]. In that sense AI will eat stuff at the layer, tasks which were generally done differently.

I don’t like the guy. But don’t you think he was right about mobile?

Mobile ate the world though, most people daily interactions with computer-related stuff is through a mobile.

Back in the 2000s-2010s the hyperbole was that software was eating the world. And it did, almost everything on the modern world depends on software to function.

Will AI eat the world? We will only know in hindsight, right now it's too much in flux but it will be clear in another 20 years if the hyperbole is true or not.

> Is AI eating Mobile now?

Yes

I like your words which have metaphors. Does "Power" here mean Electricity Power, Political Power or Financial Power?

"AI uses the same amount of power as Bolivia per day to craft 80% accurate powerpoint slides for consultants to present to executives who are outsourcing their primary job function for 900/hr"

Well, I'm not trying to explain the state of the science and the engineering, but to work out what this means to everyone else. There are no products to analyse yet - which is part of the problem.

I think the talk is meant for executives who are more cautious and want the fluff and dust to settle before they deploy resources at their companies at the next shiny thing.

The core of the issue is that you need beefy GPUs to really run these models at production workloads.

So I think what you're currently imagining won't happen until GPU prices go down massively

I tried to capture this on the last slide before the conclusion - maybe all AI questions have one of two answers - "no-one knows" or "it will be the same as the last time"

this is one of the "no-one knows" questions

Indeed, and after that shit turns cold, it'll be the "heat death" of the Information Universe that we called the Internet.

...the ending from Marshall Brain's short story, Manna

Therefore, after being digested, the world will have turned to data

Typical a16z. Also brought us The Techno-Optimist Manifesto and please vote Trump because of muh crypto.

Edit: Benedict Evans no longer works for a16z. However I think it must be a reference to Why Software Is Eating the World.

> We need AI to solve climate change

It's a chat bot. Solving climate change is way above its paygrade.

I hope this is irony. If not you could write the same with little changes about the steam engine. It is a technological advance same as every one prior to it. Those that embrace it and use it will come out on top (not without personal risks of having your own skills atrophy). Others will loose. Just like every person doing horse stables work when automobiles became widely used.