What Netscape brought to the market was a product that was easy to use. A lot of technologists don't seem to understand this, but tech products are not used by the masses because the tech is cool. Tech products are used by the masses when the tech is easy for normal people to use. And, while ChatGPT or Claude 3's chat interface is miles easier to use than arcane HTTP command line interfaces that were common before Netscape came on the scene, it is *still* hard for normal people to understand how to interact with this tech. Yes, as Ethan Mollick has repeatedly said, if you sit in front of your computer for a few hours playing with the tools, you will figure it out, but even that learning curve is far too steep for most people to traverse.
Yes! AI IS in the hands of millions of K-12 educators already. I was at the ASU+GSV AI expo in San Diego a few weeks ago, before their well known annual edtech summit. https://www.asugsvsummit.com/airshow
It's worth signing up and exploring it. It's a platform that provides 60+ ready-to-go prompts, matching what K12 teacher do, from creating a newsletter, quiz from video, lesson plans, IEPs, email to parents, and is set up to draw from quality sources aligned with learning standards even. They've provided a way for teachers to EASILY leverage AI and get decent results, saving them from having to start from scratch with ChatGPT or another AI model. It's brilliant and I wish the equivalent existed for my profession (b2b marketing).
"I think that LLMs are missing these sorts of intermediaries. We are waiting for someone to come up with a Netscape, an eBay, and a GeoCities for large language models."
I've found many intermediaries in the SaaS (software as a service) world, though none are ubiquitous!
There are 1000s. I am seeing every existing platform in my techstack integrating AI, so it's showing up in what people/orgs already do (sales, marketing, customer success, finance, operations). I also see new tools launching daily focused on specific needs. For example, there's about a dozen AI platforms that will take everything customers say about a product/company (support tickets, chats, website, social media, surveys, emails, phone calls) and tell orgs which bugs/requests they might pay attention to. Another dozen with really, really good chat support that are going to reduce human support agents for sure. It's an arms race.
Tools I use that let me save/optimize my prompts, to leverage AI for repeatable work (not code, mostly written/research tbh) include Copy.ai, text.cortex. They do provide smart overlays. I have looked through the public saved prompts on these platforms, and like ChatGPT most aren't great. Not yet Netscape/EBay
Also, if you haven't tried Google's AI tool for academic RESEARCH - have a look at https://notebooklm.google.com/. You manually put in your research papers/sources. Then use AI to dig into them. We might end up in a world where oral exams are the only option to prove learning? idk.
"LLMs have not yet broken through to the mass market. This reminds me of the World Wide Web before Netscape."
I don't exactly disagree with you but maybe it's worth adding more details to the history. My memory is that email was a pretty important business tool well before Netscape. One could argue AOL brought the internet to the masses before Netscape came on the scene. I wonder if the Yahoo search engine wasn't as important or more than Netscape even if Netscape got far more attention. Either way, lots of apps followed the GUI and search capabilities. They made it just about as ubiquitous as it could be until the smartphone. Ebay seems near the top of that list but I'm missing how GeoCities gets a mention even if it goes somewhere on the list.
Until then... Microsoft has blended its Copilot into regular Bing searches. While I thought that the LLMs were interesting, I couldn't think of much to do with it day-to-day. Now that my daily Bing searches are also integrating Copilot results, doing a plain old Google search that just displays a list of links seems primitive.
This is how it might work out: The technology just works its way into what we already use in ways that won't seem revolutionary until you look back years later -- like looking at an old Yahoo page from the 90s.
I am savagely indifferent to it myself, but if I were to venture a guess, it’s arrived at a moment when the people are less verbal in terms of being able to read or write, than a few decades ago. Literacy, fluency with language - is moving in retrograde with, uh, progress. Now you might say, oh, that’s perfect - AI is just in time to help people with their searches, with writing whatever little text they need to write or absorbing what they need to understand.
I think that would be a serious misconception, but y’all do y’all :-).
Late to this but there has to be a matter of language. I'm a complete layman on AI and indeed all IT, and as much as I admire The Zvi and have read his stuff for a while I understand less than 2% of his posts on LLMs and AI. It's mostly gobbledygook, at least to me, and he is a writer who is easy to understand on usual subjects. Everyone knows what it means to google something but I bet on the average British or American street, or any other street for that matter, less than 5% of people would know what LLM even stands for. I would think that most people sat in front of an LLM would struggle before they found a utility for it in their day to day life.
At this point it is easy to be impressed with what LLMs can do but I have found its limits quite readily, even as someone without very much idea of how to get the best out of one, meaning it should be impressing me. It's not obviously better than Google for most things for most people. It can't give the user copyrighted material. It can't answer a question like "give me the transcript of what Jordan Peterson told Joe Rogan about Dostoyevsky on their podcast eighteen months or so ago." You couldn't for instance ask it 'Find me the highlights video on Youtube featuring Shohei Ohtani's 29th home run of 2023 and tell me exactly which time to skip to."
For obscure reasons I shan't go into, last week I wanted to know if the grazing reserve in northern Senegal was of a highly comparable size in square km to any of Nigeria's 36 states. It took twenty minutes of to and fro. The thing just did not get it at all.*
Frankly the only real-world use I have yet encountered for LLMs is people cheating on job applications.
*It's just about the same size as Plateau state, incidentally...
LLMs are not always truthful. Not 9 of 10, 99 of 100 nor even 999 of a 1000 right answers are "good enough" if the user can't trust the LLM bot to be correct.
There's plenty of sources on the internet for fake news, and fake facts.
An aiBot which dosn't, ever, tell wrong facts authoritatively, is probably a prerequisite for a killer app. It might be enough for all potentially wrong answers to be identified like,
"Maybe Arnold Kling went to Harvard", with the "maybe" fudge word to indicate where the fact might be false.
Maybe in K-12 education, where the facts taught are well known & documented, an LLM teacher won't make any mistakes. But repeating a sarcastic "add bleach to baking soda" to clean sweaters, because it became viral as being so terrible, but was called "this excellent advice" -- it's not clear LLMs can avoid that mistake.
It might be that LLMs are a tech dead end for true, and only true, facts.
Interesting analogy, but I just don’t think these models are, or even can be, as generally useful as the internet. Rather than saying these models are like the internet waiting for Netscape, I think about them as being like general relativity waiting for Garmin.
GPS wouldn’t work without taking into account general relativity, but general relativity isn’t the product. Maps and geolocation are the product. In the case of the internet, the product is cheap long distance communication, and non-tech normies needed Netscape to properly use the communication channel.
A computer that’s able to generate reasonable text (or images or whatever) at scale is just not a problem normies ever have, in the same way that properly accounting for space-time curvature isn’t a problem normies ever have. Might there be a product someday that leverages these newfound computing powers? Maybe, but my guess is that if there is a “killer app” built on the models, users/customers will care about *what* the app does (e.g. maps and driving directions) more than *how* it does it (e.g. satellite triangulation).
In the fall of 1994, I was on a 30 day wait list to have a network card and whatever winsock software was required to get installed on my computer in my dorm room. I waited patiently and gladly paid whatever fee that the university IT department was charging. The internet was just that cool and only got better.
I highly doubt that I will ever be as stoked about AI. I’ve used it on Amazon to get customer service “help” when the bag of coffee arrives exploded all over the shipping box and to research products/reviews in a more efficient manner. I would call it marginally useful at best. Interesting, but not a game changer for the average consumer like me.
What Netscape brought to the market was a product that was easy to use. A lot of technologists don't seem to understand this, but tech products are not used by the masses because the tech is cool. Tech products are used by the masses when the tech is easy for normal people to use. And, while ChatGPT or Claude 3's chat interface is miles easier to use than arcane HTTP command line interfaces that were common before Netscape came on the scene, it is *still* hard for normal people to understand how to interact with this tech. Yes, as Ethan Mollick has repeatedly said, if you sit in front of your computer for a few hours playing with the tools, you will figure it out, but even that learning curve is far too steep for most people to traverse.
Yes! AI IS in the hands of millions of K-12 educators already. I was at the ASU+GSV AI expo in San Diego a few weeks ago, before their well known annual edtech summit. https://www.asugsvsummit.com/airshow
Magic School AI alone has 1.5 million educators using it. https://www.magicschool.ai/mission.
It's worth signing up and exploring it. It's a platform that provides 60+ ready-to-go prompts, matching what K12 teacher do, from creating a newsletter, quiz from video, lesson plans, IEPs, email to parents, and is set up to draw from quality sources aligned with learning standards even. They've provided a way for teachers to EASILY leverage AI and get decent results, saving them from having to start from scratch with ChatGPT or another AI model. It's brilliant and I wish the equivalent existed for my profession (b2b marketing).
AI is also now embedded into existing edtech tools for curriculum , analytics, supplemental learning, administration. https://www.asugsvsummit.com/airshow/partners
"I think that LLMs are missing these sorts of intermediaries. We are waiting for someone to come up with a Netscape, an eBay, and a GeoCities for large language models."
I've found many intermediaries in the SaaS (software as a service) world, though none are ubiquitous!
There are 1000s. I am seeing every existing platform in my techstack integrating AI, so it's showing up in what people/orgs already do (sales, marketing, customer success, finance, operations). I also see new tools launching daily focused on specific needs. For example, there's about a dozen AI platforms that will take everything customers say about a product/company (support tickets, chats, website, social media, surveys, emails, phone calls) and tell orgs which bugs/requests they might pay attention to. Another dozen with really, really good chat support that are going to reduce human support agents for sure. It's an arms race.
Tools I use that let me save/optimize my prompts, to leverage AI for repeatable work (not code, mostly written/research tbh) include Copy.ai, text.cortex. They do provide smart overlays. I have looked through the public saved prompts on these platforms, and like ChatGPT most aren't great. Not yet Netscape/EBay
Also, if you haven't tried Google's AI tool for academic RESEARCH - have a look at https://notebooklm.google.com/. You manually put in your research papers/sources. Then use AI to dig into them. We might end up in a world where oral exams are the only option to prove learning? idk.
William Gibson wrote: “The street finds its own uses for things.”
"LLMs have not yet broken through to the mass market. This reminds me of the World Wide Web before Netscape."
I don't exactly disagree with you but maybe it's worth adding more details to the history. My memory is that email was a pretty important business tool well before Netscape. One could argue AOL brought the internet to the masses before Netscape came on the scene. I wonder if the Yahoo search engine wasn't as important or more than Netscape even if Netscape got far more attention. Either way, lots of apps followed the GUI and search capabilities. They made it just about as ubiquitous as it could be until the smartphone. Ebay seems near the top of that list but I'm missing how GeoCities gets a mention even if it goes somewhere on the list.
Until then... Microsoft has blended its Copilot into regular Bing searches. While I thought that the LLMs were interesting, I couldn't think of much to do with it day-to-day. Now that my daily Bing searches are also integrating Copilot results, doing a plain old Google search that just displays a list of links seems primitive.
This is how it might work out: The technology just works its way into what we already use in ways that won't seem revolutionary until you look back years later -- like looking at an old Yahoo page from the 90s.
I am savagely indifferent to it myself, but if I were to venture a guess, it’s arrived at a moment when the people are less verbal in terms of being able to read or write, than a few decades ago. Literacy, fluency with language - is moving in retrograde with, uh, progress. Now you might say, oh, that’s perfect - AI is just in time to help people with their searches, with writing whatever little text they need to write or absorbing what they need to understand.
I think that would be a serious misconception, but y’all do y’all :-).
Late to this but there has to be a matter of language. I'm a complete layman on AI and indeed all IT, and as much as I admire The Zvi and have read his stuff for a while I understand less than 2% of his posts on LLMs and AI. It's mostly gobbledygook, at least to me, and he is a writer who is easy to understand on usual subjects. Everyone knows what it means to google something but I bet on the average British or American street, or any other street for that matter, less than 5% of people would know what LLM even stands for. I would think that most people sat in front of an LLM would struggle before they found a utility for it in their day to day life.
At this point it is easy to be impressed with what LLMs can do but I have found its limits quite readily, even as someone without very much idea of how to get the best out of one, meaning it should be impressing me. It's not obviously better than Google for most things for most people. It can't give the user copyrighted material. It can't answer a question like "give me the transcript of what Jordan Peterson told Joe Rogan about Dostoyevsky on their podcast eighteen months or so ago." You couldn't for instance ask it 'Find me the highlights video on Youtube featuring Shohei Ohtani's 29th home run of 2023 and tell me exactly which time to skip to."
For obscure reasons I shan't go into, last week I wanted to know if the grazing reserve in northern Senegal was of a highly comparable size in square km to any of Nigeria's 36 states. It took twenty minutes of to and fro. The thing just did not get it at all.*
Frankly the only real-world use I have yet encountered for LLMs is people cheating on job applications.
*It's just about the same size as Plateau state, incidentally...
LLMs are not always truthful. Not 9 of 10, 99 of 100 nor even 999 of a 1000 right answers are "good enough" if the user can't trust the LLM bot to be correct.
There's plenty of sources on the internet for fake news, and fake facts.
An aiBot which dosn't, ever, tell wrong facts authoritatively, is probably a prerequisite for a killer app. It might be enough for all potentially wrong answers to be identified like,
"Maybe Arnold Kling went to Harvard", with the "maybe" fudge word to indicate where the fact might be false.
Maybe in K-12 education, where the facts taught are well known & documented, an LLM teacher won't make any mistakes. But repeating a sarcastic "add bleach to baking soda" to clean sweaters, because it became viral as being so terrible, but was called "this excellent advice" -- it's not clear LLMs can avoid that mistake.
It might be that LLMs are a tech dead end for true, and only true, facts.
The killer app is a talking software agent like HAL 9000 that accurately does, digitally, all the stuff you as a human could do.
We're not there yet, but getting closer -- 2023 was a big step.
Interesting analogy, but I just don’t think these models are, or even can be, as generally useful as the internet. Rather than saying these models are like the internet waiting for Netscape, I think about them as being like general relativity waiting for Garmin.
GPS wouldn’t work without taking into account general relativity, but general relativity isn’t the product. Maps and geolocation are the product. In the case of the internet, the product is cheap long distance communication, and non-tech normies needed Netscape to properly use the communication channel.
A computer that’s able to generate reasonable text (or images or whatever) at scale is just not a problem normies ever have, in the same way that properly accounting for space-time curvature isn’t a problem normies ever have. Might there be a product someday that leverages these newfound computing powers? Maybe, but my guess is that if there is a “killer app” built on the models, users/customers will care about *what* the app does (e.g. maps and driving directions) more than *how* it does it (e.g. satellite triangulation).
Also needed for bit coin
"They succeeded in that vision, even though they faltered as a company."
I don't disagree with you but it still seems an odd statement. How many "successful" companies make the owners as rich as Andreesen and Bina?
In the fall of 1994, I was on a 30 day wait list to have a network card and whatever winsock software was required to get installed on my computer in my dorm room. I waited patiently and gladly paid whatever fee that the university IT department was charging. The internet was just that cool and only got better.
I highly doubt that I will ever be as stoked about AI. I’ve used it on Amazon to get customer service “help” when the bag of coffee arrives exploded all over the shipping box and to research products/reviews in a more efficient manner. I would call it marginally useful at best. Interesting, but not a game changer for the average consumer like me.