I think of my Alexa often when I think about AI and how Amazon, of all people, couldn't monetize it. What hope do LLM providers have? Alexa is in rooms all around my house and has gotten amazing at answering questions, setting timers, telling me the weather, etc., but would I ever pay a subscription for it? Absolutely not. I wouldn't even have bought the hardware except that it was a loss leader and was like $20. I wouldn't have even paid $100 for it. Our whole economy is mortgaged on this?

This is probably why there’s so much attention on LLM powered coding tools, as it’s one of the few use cases that seem like people would actually pay for it. Ironically mostly developers, who are being marketed as being replaced by AI.

I'm extremely bearish on AI, but I'm not sure I agree with the framing "not even Amazon could..." All of the advertising around Alexa focused on the simple narrow use cases that people now use it for, and I'm inclined to assume that advertising is part of it. I think another part is probably that voice is really just not that fantastic of an interface for any other kind of interactions. I don't find it surprising that OpenAI's whole framing around ChatGPT, of it being a text-based chat window (as are the other LLMs), is where most of the use seems to happen. I like it best when Alexa acts as a terse butler ("turn on the lights" "done"), not a chatty engaging conversationalist.