> Correct, but the thing is, AI blown up much faster than phones
What do you base that on though? Two years into the iPhone, Apple reported a $6.75b revenue on iPhone related sales. ChatGPT may reach or surpass that this year considering they're currently at $3.4b. That's not exactly what I would call growing faster than phones, however, and according to this article, very few people outside of nvidia and OpenAI are actually making big money on LLM's.
I do think it's silly to see this wave of AI to be referred to as the next blockchain, but I also think you may be hyping it a little beyond its current value. It being a fun and useful tool for a lot of things isn't necessarily the same thing at it being something that's actually worth the money investors are hoping it will be.
>> Correct, but the thing is, AI blown up much faster than phones
>What do you base that on though? Two years into the iPhone, Apple reported a $6.75b revenue on iPhone related sales. ChatGPT may reach or surpass that this year considering they're currently at $3.4b.
But the iPhone was launched more than 10 years past mobile phones (in fact, more than 20, but that's stretching it). There were more than 1B mobile phones shipped in 2006, the year before the iPhone launched.
My childhood? I was a teen when mobile phones started to become widely used, and soon after pretty much necessary, in my part of the world. But, to reiterate:
> Two years into the iPhone, Apple reported a $6.75b revenue on iPhone related sales.
That's just an iteration, and not what I'm talking about. Smartphones were just different mobile phones. I'm talking about the adoption of a mobile phone as a personal device by general population.
> It being a fun and useful tool for a lot of things isn't necessarily the same thing at it being something that's actually worth the money investors are hoping it will be.
That's probably something which needs to be disentangled in these conversations. I personally don't care what investors think and do. AI may be hype for the VCs. It's not hype for regular Janes and Joes, who either already integrated ChatGPT into their daily lives, or see their friends doing so.
Its a lot easier to use AI when its basically given away for free than when it cost $399 for a Palm Pilot in the 90s.
For a $399 device, Palm Pilot did well and had an excellent reputation for the time. Phones really took over the PDA market as a personal pocket-computer more-so than being used as ... a phone...
Really, I consider the modern smartphone a successor to the humble PDA. I grew up in that time too, and I remember the early Palm adopters having to explain why PDAs (and later Blackberries) were useful. That was already all figured out by the time iPhone took over.
> I personally don't care what investors think and do.
Isn't this a an odd take when you're discussing things on a VC website? In any case, if you like LLM's you probably should care considering it's the $10b Microsoft poured into OpenAI that's made the current landscape possible. Sure, most of those money were fuled directly into Azure because that's where OpenAI does all it's compute, but still.
> It's not hype for regular Janes and Joes, who either already integrated ChatGPT into their daily lives, or see their friends doing so.
Are they paying for it? If they aren't then will they pay for it? I think it's also interesting to view the numbers. ChatGPT had 1.6 billion visitors in January 2024, but it had 637 million in May 2024.
Again. I don't think it's all hype, I think it'll change the world, but maybe not as radically as some people expect. The way I currently view it is another tool in the automation tool-set. It's useful, but it's not decision making and because of the way it functions (which is essentially by being very good at being lucky) it can't be used for anything important. You really, really, wouldn't want your medical software to be written by a LLM's programmer. Which doesn't necessarily change the world too much because you really, really, didn't want it to be written by a search engine programmer either. On the flip-side, you can actually use ChatGPT to make a lot of things and be just fine. Because 90% (and this a number I've pulled out my ass, but from my anecdotal experience it's fairly accurate) of software doesn't actually require quality, fault tolerance or efficiency.
> And regular Janes and Joes are not using ChatGPT. Revenues would be 10-100x if that were the case.
3/4 of the people I know are actively using it are on free tier. And based on all the HN conversations in the last year, plenty of HNers commenting here are also using free tier. I'd never go back to GPT-3.5, but apparently most people find it useful enough to the point they're reluctant to pay that $20/month.
As for the rest, OpenAI is apparently the fastest-growing service of all time ever, so that says something.
A while back I used 3.5 to make a chat web page so I could get the better models as PAYG rather than subscription… and then OpenAI made it mostly pointless because they gave sufficient 4o access to the free tier to meet my needs.
Calling the iPhone an iteration is pure nonsense. Mobile phones had tiny utility compared to smartphones.
A phone on the go didn’t fundamentally alter anything except for making coordination while traveling easier. I went through both the cell phone adoption curve and the smartphone curve.
The latter was the massive impact that brought computing to the remaining 85% of the planet and upended targeting desktop operating systems for consumers by default.
Calling smartphones an iteration on cellphones is like calling ChatGPT an iteration on the neural networks we had 10 years ago.
> Mobile phones had tiny utility compared to smartphones
They had tiny utility compared to modern smartphones but the first iPhone was a glorified iPod with a touchscreen and a cellular radio. It didn’t have an app store and the only thing it really did better than other mobile phones was web browsing, thanks to the touchscreen keyboard.
It wasn’t as revolutionary as hindsight now makes it seem. It was just an iteration on PalmPilots and Blackberries.
Another thing that is forgotten about the first iPhone: I think Apple negotiated with AT&T (?) to change the voice mail system so you could select from your iPhone (voicemail app?) which message you wanted to listen. Prior, you always needed to call the mobile provider voice mail system, then listen the messages in order (or skip them). That was a huge early selling point for the iPhone. I know -- no one cares about voice mail in 2024, but it used to be very important.
The iPhone was not the first cell phone. Initial adoption of cell phones was much slower than ChatGPT. Think 1980’s/1990’s.
Even when cell phones started getting popular, often only one or two family members would get one. The transition time between “started becoming popular” and “everyone has one” was >5 years and even then it was relatively normal that people would just turn off their cell phone for a few days (to mixed reactions from friends and family).
What do you base that on though? Two years into the iPhone, Apple reported a $6.75b revenue on iPhone related sales. ChatGPT may reach or surpass that this year considering they're currently at $3.4b. That's not exactly what I would call growing faster than phones, however, and according to this article, very few people outside of nvidia and OpenAI are actually making big money on LLM's.
I do think it's silly to see this wave of AI to be referred to as the next blockchain, but I also think you may be hyping it a little beyond its current value. It being a fun and useful tool for a lot of things isn't necessarily the same thing at it being something that's actually worth the money investors are hoping it will be.