I think people in the LLM space are being far too impatient with the general public and their adoption. And I think they need to start thinking harder about building products that genuinely enrich people's lives. Look at how long home computing took to establish itself with the public, then the internet, and finally social media. None of these trends happened overnight, and some were accelerated by other technological advances (social media-> smartphones).
The adoption of these technologies spurned ton of innovation in these spaces, and I feel like with LLMs its the first time I've seen genuine frustration from the industry directed towards users for not adopting the technology fast enough. This attitude did not exist in the 1980s, it didn't exist in the 90s, and it didn't exist in the 00s/early 10s either.
Do you blame them for getting impatient? They’re burning cash and quickly running to a point of never being able to justify it. The hardware they buy will be replaced with even more expensive hardware before they start to make a profit. It’s not sustainable and the market hasn’t figured that out yet. At least they’re starting to question it.
These backward looking analogies are tiresome.
Whether you like it or not - technology causes compression of life cycles. You have a hit product? Great - I expect you to have crazy high growth rate. That’s the expectation of a world that is so deeply interconnected.
Consumer-ready LLMs have been widely available to the public now nearly 4 years if you start counting at GPT 3.5. There's certainly some compression here but Karpathy does a good job of outlining how silo'd those experiences are: the bulk of the product penetration (based on headcount rather than token usage) is "derpy chatbots" (his words, not mine). Most of the actual token spend is likely done on the STEM side. We're talking about a technology today that currently only has significant penetration with <25M users.
People need to be patient and put in the work to build great products, rather than lament its slower-than-desired (albeit still quite fast) adoption curve.