The question is how fast.

I remember in the late 90s, me and some friends discovered the internet and went "Woah! Letters, books, shops, work, study, gaming ... pretty much everything will take place in this virtual realm soon!".

We were right. Except for the "soon".

When the first internet café opened, we started spending a lot of our time there, meeting lots of interesting people. Everything outside the internet already seemed anachronistic to us.

What I didn't expect back then was that even replacing letters with email (which already worked!) would take another painstaking ... 20 years!

Today, my work is already massively transformed via neural networks. Pretty much everything I do starts with an interaction with a neural network. Usually a question to an LLM. And then LLMs or other networks are involved all the way up to finishing the task. Thinking about how I worked before these large neural networks came up makes me shiver. How cumbersome. How anachronistic.

But when I talk to people outside the tech sphere, most are not using LLMs or other neural networks at all.

Everything humans do will be deeply transformed. Even more so than via the internet. Will it take 20 years again? Or is technological progress accelerating and this time it will take only 10 years? So far, my feeling is that it will be a bit faster, but not twice as fast.

But maybe it will be even more surprising. One future I can imagine is that people don't even need to adapt. Maybe we will see software simply do all aspects of a job. One can already imagine it for driving cars or making movies. It is harder to imagine it for managing a company, for example. But who knows. LLMs are already surprisingly good at creating chains of thoughts. Maybe we'll find ourselves in an unexpected future in a few years already, where human involvement in anything is just a burden to the process.

> 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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ;)

> ... 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.

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

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.

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.