I've been thinking about this over the weekend and I can't put my finger on exactly where (or if) I disagree, so I'm gonna write to sharpen my thinking, if you'll humour me. Maybe the biggest disagreement is that I don't understand what classifies as world-changing to you. How can you both believe NFTs are already changing the world when the largest use case is improving the bottom line of specific luxury brands through destroying their grey market, yet not seeing LLMs make a dent in the universe? I mean - are LLMs world-changing to the tune of the $200B put into it or to NVDIA's market cap? Hell no. Is AGI around the corner? Also no. Are LLMs world-changing at all? Well, I'd put it at 'somewhere between YouTube and smartphones'. They'll make a bunch of things worse, they'll make a bunch of things better, like any powerful tool. But because it's a tool that can so directly influence the core of knowledge work, I find it very hard to believe it won't change things at all like you seem to suggest. Whether that means the big corporations are making smart decisions about investments AI is an exercise left to the reader. It's not that I'm not aware that LLMs are, to a large and arguably frightening degree, a bullshit machine. You know how much I hate Tesla's """self-driving""" for the exact same reason. I will not trust LLM output for anything with any serious consequences, just like I will never have Musk take the wheel so I can nap. But as a co-intelligence? Microsoft was at least somewhat on point by naming it Copilot. The copilot can do useful things but I'm still piloting this thing, I'm still making the decisions to the degree that I want to make them. The guy behind NotebookLM makes the point that the useful thing about LLMs isn't just the model, but also its ability to combine that with a context window that is getting so large it's exceeding what most of us are capable of. It can see a needle in a haystack but, more importantly, it can see the entire haystack. Hallucinations are much rarer when the text is right there, so it's also markedly more accurate and can cite shit. I was discussing LLMs with my FIL the other day. He has been writing reports on construction failures for almost three decades now. All his work, and that of his colleagues going back five decades, is digitized into an archive of searchable text. But he said it's hard to use in his desk research because he can only search on keywords and those keywords change a lot over time. My FIL also has a hard time getting started with a new report - not because he doesn't know his shit, but because he's not the best at structuring his thoughts into a logical, linearly ordered line of reasoning. I'm 100% sure his company would pay a lot for a suite of LLM tools to enable him and his colleagues to supercharge their desk research. Not to replace their expertise but to enhance it, by having an LLM surface decades of knowledge in a way that isn't possible now, combining it with relevant information in a case, and then also helping them make use of it. Now multiply this use case for all academics and knowledge workers around. We still need professionals in the loop, just like I still need to be in control in a Tesla. We need expertise to tell bullshit from fact. That doesn't mean LLMs are doomed to be useless toys - even when I, too, use it as a toy now from time to time.
"World-changing" is "change the world." It's a new way of doing things that is so successful over old ways that the old ways are abandoned. Refrigeration changed groceries. Air conditioning changed geography. Here's an argument about how cell phones changed Africa, and how AI probably won't. Your argument boils down to "provides better search for my father-in-law" which, okay, hire him an assistant. What's that? An assistant is too expensive? Are you sure? Oh, I see. A research assistant won't be as fast. Okay, so now we're talking about incremental productivity gains. Look. I'm so old I remember when women were secretaries. Watch a few scenes of Mad Men, that shit was real. Then typewriters were electric and... women were still secretaries. Then word processors came out and women suddenly had more time to do shit other than type. Slowly but surely you started to see an integration of women into the workplace, you started to see a rise in daycare standards, you started to see double-income families as the norm. The modern western world owes its existence to the word processor in many ways but I doubt you'd argue that word processors are world-changing. They're an incremental tool that was one of many aspects of computerization that led to the information age. "Incremental productivity gains" for whom? The most reasonable argument is that LLMs might make that part of your job that you hate less arduous. Okay, great. That's a good thing. fuck yeah Wordstar. My mother used to compose tests for her biology students with a typewriter, a pair of scissors and a copy machine. She did it that way well past the point that word processors existed because she needed diagrams and diagrams in desktop publishing took a dozen years longer so word processors basically bypassed her but for a big chunk of academia they revolutionized things. They didn't give anyone any more free time, though, because the job is the job. If anything, word processors annihilated the mimeograph industry - you poor bastards will never know that particular smell of fresh purple ink and for that i feel sorry for you. The real matter, however, is that word processing was equally useful to amateurs and professionals alike. i can write like hell and even I lean on spell-check. My daughter basically taught herself to spell by guessing at ways to get rid of the squiggly red line when she typed. Yay word-processing. But if you're a shitty writer and I'm a great writer, LLMs will allow you to crank out mediocre work nobody wants to read while it won't do a damn thing for me because I can crap out better stuff than it can without pausing to sip my coffee. Oh, but that's gonna save the bad writers hours of time. Okay? But who cares? If nobody wanted to read it anyway why does it exist? Bloomberg has had AIs writing finance stories since 2018; that's because the articles are all written for sentiment bots doing high frequency trading anyway and it doesn't fucking matter. Because luxury goods are used to evade tariffs, embargoes and sanctions, as well as to provide untraceable bribes. Here's Imran Khan, going to prison over watches. Here's the government of Angola, falling over watches. Here's Wired, arguing in 2020 that this shit is about to be over and here's Rolex, hopping on the blockchain. "Improving the bottom line of specific luxury brands" is one thing. "locking off a major portion of the shadow economy" is quite another. LLMs - make it easier for mediocre writers to churn out copy, make it easier for mediocre coders to churn out programming NFTs - make it harder to bribe governments Has that sharpened your thinking? How can you both believe NFTs are already changing the world when the largest use case is improving the bottom line of specific luxury brands through destroying their grey market, yet not seeing LLMs make a dent in the universe?