> You can see a similar history with electrification.

It took a massive amount of new infrastructure for electricity to benefit people. Lines had to be run, houses and businesses had to be wired, new light fixtures and appliances had to be purchased and installed.

LLMs can currently be accessed and used everywhere instantly by everybody right now and at any moment day or night. Rich and poor alike can take advantage of it. There's nothing holding back anybody. If everybody without electricity could have pulled a small rectangle out of their pocket and pressed a button to instantly have electric lights and power, the positive impact of electrification would have been immediate. This is not even close to a "same thing now" situation.

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scotty79 a day ago | parent [-]

> new light fixtures and appliances had to be purchased and installed

Exactly.

> There's nothing holding back anybody.

The same thing is holding back AI. Most businesses don't have AI powered appliances. Yet.

The industries that used appliances that can be AI powered, the AI took over in months.

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autoexec a day ago | parent [-]

Every computer and cellphone in the office is an "AI powered appliance". Every application can be an AI powered one. LLMs have been shoehorned into damn near every app they use already. There's no magic appliance or software that will make productivity and profits suddenly happen for businesses that they couldn't already be doing right now, and I say that fully realizing that there are people here who desperately want to sell businesses something (possibly vibecoded) that they'll claim is a magic AI appliance/software that will make productivity and profits suddenly happen.

	▲	scotty79 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Every computer and cellphone in the office is an "AI powered appliance". Every application can be an AI powered one. True, but funnily enough those are not workhorses of most businesses outside of AI. Jevons paradox was about that. Introduction of computers into most businesses didn't traslate to immediate performance gains so it's hard to imagine that automating computers will have strong immediate effect. I think the most powerful way that software is going to benefit businesses outside of IT is creation and maintenance of custom software for every business that's going to be better fit, faster and cheaper than anything IT industry can deliver. Though even those gains are still going to be modest to moderate. At some point real AI powered appliances might show up, like robots or full stack AI management.