> Whenever I hear about AI craze, I remind myself of the 3D printers craze from 10-15 years ago. "Death blow to factories", "We will print our own cars", "We will print our own food". I imagine LLM AI will follow the same fate - yes, but not really.
Strong disagree here.
I remember that craze, especially since I had heard of it often before joining a company working on 3d printing in a fairly serious way (Autodesk).
And the thing is, I had no prior experience with 3d printing, but it took me about 2 months to realize that everything talked about in the press was bullshit. It just made zero sense - from a technical perspective, we were nowhere close to getting anything like what some articles claimed (printing our own cars). From a business sense, there were stunningly few places where using 3d printing instead of traditional manufacturing made any kind of improvement.
(I don't mean to overstate this - 3d printing is awesome and has plenty of real use cases. It was the media around it that was overhyped.)
Most people who actually knew anything about 3d printing realized the media were... overly enthusiastic, to put it mildly. And you can see that many years later, none of those grand visions materialized.
With AI, on the other hand, we have two huge differences:
1. It's already proven massively useful, and has already had 100 times the impact that 3d printing ever had.
Seriously, when was the last time you found a product that was effectively launched 4 years ago, and that has achieved such stunning market penetration? ChatGPT is legit the fastest growing product in history in terms of users.
2. Insiders are, mostly, incredibly enthusiastic about the technology, and think both that it can get much better, and that the current potential is as yet untapped. That's my view, for sure.
Do you think there is no inference we can draw from ChatGPT being faster to X million users than, e.g., Facebook, Uber, YouTube, whatever? I don't think population exploding is true, and certainly not true enough over 20 years to make a difference.
(If anything, better criticisms are that the amount of people with access to the internet has grown a lot, which is far more true. Or that what counts as a user can be very different for different services.
I still think it's a good-enough metric to be able to say that ChatGPT has achieved some pretty serious level of success and adoption, enough to put ideas that AI is just a lot of hot air to rest.)
Strong disagree here.
I remember that craze, especially since I had heard of it often before joining a company working on 3d printing in a fairly serious way (Autodesk).
And the thing is, I had no prior experience with 3d printing, but it took me about 2 months to realize that everything talked about in the press was bullshit. It just made zero sense - from a technical perspective, we were nowhere close to getting anything like what some articles claimed (printing our own cars). From a business sense, there were stunningly few places where using 3d printing instead of traditional manufacturing made any kind of improvement.
(I don't mean to overstate this - 3d printing is awesome and has plenty of real use cases. It was the media around it that was overhyped.)
Most people who actually knew anything about 3d printing realized the media were... overly enthusiastic, to put it mildly. And you can see that many years later, none of those grand visions materialized.
With AI, on the other hand, we have two huge differences:
1. It's already proven massively useful, and has already had 100 times the impact that 3d printing ever had.
Seriously, when was the last time you found a product that was effectively launched 4 years ago, and that has achieved such stunning market penetration? ChatGPT is legit the fastest growing product in history in terms of users.
2. Insiders are, mostly, incredibly enthusiastic about the technology, and think both that it can get much better, and that the current potential is as yet untapped. That's my view, for sure.