This is not an event that calls for pithy adages. The fruits of ML are not a fad just like personal computing was not a fad. It's a watershed event that cuts across every knowledge worker's domain. If you're not currently using these LLMs it may not be obvious to you but those of us that have tried to apply them to our current fields see huge gains in productivity. Just in my own little slice of knowledge work, I've seen yield increases that have saved me multiple days of work on a single project.
Everyone is going to feel this, most prominently people in the sorts of industries that frequent HN. If you haven't yet, you will or you will be forced to when you discover everyone in your field is out-producing you armed with these tools.
Well, we certanly didn't hit the "apppocalypse", iPads didn't fully replace desktop computing and phones haven't ended up equalizing wealth inequality. A lot of breathless BS that was spoken around those technologies didn't come to pass - they became tools. Great tools, but just tools that fit into our lives where it made sense.
Same for the internet - things changed, but the breathless predictions that retails stores are dead and everyone will be WFH haven't happened. It became a tool.
So will ChatGPT - I look forward to good autocomplete and a nice bullshitter-in-a-box tool to generate these HN comments. But most jobs aren't improved or more productive by adding a faster bullshit generator. The bullshit generators in suits are already really good at that.
There's certainly been sweeping social changes thanks to smartphones, but it's arguably not because of smartphones in of themselves, so much as mobile connectivity. In a world where we invented William Gibson-style cyberdecks or if netbooks became wildly popular, that would have happened as well.
db112nl@gmail.com
Why wasn't Blockchain a watershed moment but chatGPT is.
There are several factors that contribute to why blockchain and chatGPT have had different impacts on their respective fields.
Firstly, blockchain technology has had a significant impact in certain areas, particularly in the financial industry, where it has been used to create new forms of digital currency and facilitate secure and efficient transactions. However, it has not yet achieved the widespread adoption and transformative impact that some had predicted. One reason for this may be that the technology is still relatively new and complex, and many organizations are still trying to figure out how best to implement it.
In contrast, chatGPT is a language model that has been designed to understand and generate natural language text. This technology has been more widely adopted because it has a broad range of potential applications, from customer service chatbots to language translation services. Additionally, language is a fundamental aspect of human communication, which makes the potential impact of language models like chatGPT more readily apparent to people.
Another factor that may have contributed to the different impacts of blockchain and chatGPT is the level of public attention and interest. While blockchain has received significant media coverage, it has not captured the popular imagination in the same way that chatGPT has. ChatGPT has been widely publicized and has even been featured in news articles and talk shows, which has helped to raise awareness and generate interest in the technology.
In conclusion, the differences in impact between blockchain and chatGPT can be attributed to a range of factors, including the complexity and novelty of the technology, the level of public awareness, and the broad range of potential applications.
IMO "public attention and interest" in ChatGPT dissipates at an r-squared rate the further you move out from the tech industry (or the NLP research) bubble.
I'm sure that for the people in the thick of crypto and web3, it would've felt like that was the most important thing on everyone's mind.
Everyone is going to feel this, most prominently people in the sorts of industries that frequent HN. If you haven't yet, you will or you will be forced to when you discover everyone in your field is out-producing you armed with these tools.