> Imagine asking “What will be changed by the internet?” in 1997

Pretty much all of the stuff that was suggested back then or earlier: Shopping, advertising, video conferencing, collaboration, software distribution, media consumption, banking, finance and of course communication overall.

Most of these ideas weren't exactly new in 1997, but go back to services like CompuServe and even Douglas Engelbart's Mother of All Demos. The bottlenecks were bandwidth and personal computer performance (both of which were then predictably following Moore's law), not human imagination.

A few examples that a lot of people correctly extrapolated from: NLS (1968), PictureTel (1987) and later LiveShare, IndyCam (1993), CUSeeMee (1995), RealAudio (1995), RealVideo (1997).

Perhaps the core business problem with LLM:s isn't finding a product-market fit, but that our imaginations have been running wild with expectations on "AI" since at least the 1950s, and now we have something that quacks - but doesn't quite walk - like a duck.

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thrance an hour ago | parent [-]

Knowing why we're trying to build something is a good smell test to segregate promising tech from snake oil, in my experience.

Take quantum computers for example, a lot of the time people will compare that to the dawn of classical computing, with claims such as "we can't know yet what we'll be able to achieve, we have to build it first!". Except that even the first classical computers were built with goals and applications in mind. Turing's was to decrypt Nazi codes, for example. Instead, when asking a quantum computing company what they're trying to achieve, they'll gesture vaguely at "chemistry, finance, ecology".

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aleph_minus_one 34 minutes ago | parent [-]

> Except that even the first classical computers were built with goals and applications in mind. [...] Instead, when asking a quantum computing company what they're trying to achieve, they'll gesture vaguely at "chemistry, finance, ecology".

I think the problem is a little bit more subtle:

To finance a lot of innovations, better also some intermediate step towards the far goal should already be very useful, otherwise the company that builds it will go bankrupt.

If this is not the case, it's typically not commercially viable, some product category is typically basic research (which is very important, but it typically means that the commercial potential will only come up in some future).

There do exist problems where a quantum computer gives an extreme advantage in the sense that we have no idea how a fast classical algorithm could look like. So, the only viable approaches for these problems are:

1. work on a huge algorithmic breakthrough (to be able to solve these problems fast on a classical computer)

2. build a quantum computer

What are these problems?

They are basically all special cases of the abelian hidden subgroup problem:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hidden_subgroup_p...

In particular cf. the table at the end of this Wikipedia article:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hidden_subgroup_p...

If you do have such a problem to solve, 1 and 2 are the only viable approaches.

So, there do exist goals and applications for which a quantum computer is insanely useful (assuming no huge algorithmic breakthrough happens).

The questions are thus:

- Is the abelian hidden subgroup problem sufficient for being able to carry a whole potential industry?

- (To come back to my introduction) What use does a quantum computer that is only capable of solving very small instances of this problem have for the user?

	▲	thrance 21 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I am familiar with these applications. Indeed, your questions are very relevant. I've personally decided a long time ago that no, these applications are insufficiently useful to justify the billions invested in quantum computing, and the billions more that will be required to build anything remotely capable. So far, nothing's come up to make me reconsider.