> The IBM PC isn't fundamentally very different from the Apple II. Probably it's just all incremental improvements from here on out.
Honestly? I'm not sure I even disagree with that!
Amazon is just an incremental improvement over mail order catalogs. Netflix is just an incremental improvement over Blockbusters. UberEats is just an incremental improvement over calling a pizzeria. Google Sheets is just an incremental improvement over Lotus 1-2-3.
Most of the stuff we're doing these days could have been done with 1980s technology - if a bit less polished. Even the Cloud is just renting a time slice on a centralized mainframe.
With the IBM PC it was already reasonably clear what the computer was going to be. Most of the innovation since then is "X, but on a computer", "Y, but over the internet", or just plain market saturation. I can only think of two truly world-changing innovations: 1) smartphones, and 2) social media.
The current AI wave is definitely producing interesting results, but there is still a massive gap between what it can do and what we have been promised. Considering current models have essentially been trained on the entire internet and they have now poisoned the well and made mass gathering of more training data impossible, I doubt we're going to see another two-orders-of-magnitude improvement any time soon. If anything, for a lot of applications it's probably going to get worse as the training set becomes out of date.
And if people aren't willing to pay for the current models, they aren't going to pay for a model which hallucinates 50% less often. They're going to need that two-orders-of-magnitude improvement to actually become world-changing. Taking into account how much money those companies are losing, are they going to survive the 5-10 years or more until they reach that point?
And even smartphone is just combination of with computer, but smaller and over internet. It just got pretty good eventually. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_200LX arguably is "smartphone" supporting modem or network connectivity, albeit not wireless...
Honestly? I'm not sure I even disagree with that!
Amazon is just an incremental improvement over mail order catalogs. Netflix is just an incremental improvement over Blockbusters. UberEats is just an incremental improvement over calling a pizzeria. Google Sheets is just an incremental improvement over Lotus 1-2-3.
Most of the stuff we're doing these days could have been done with 1980s technology - if a bit less polished. Even the Cloud is just renting a time slice on a centralized mainframe.
With the IBM PC it was already reasonably clear what the computer was going to be. Most of the innovation since then is "X, but on a computer", "Y, but over the internet", or just plain market saturation. I can only think of two truly world-changing innovations: 1) smartphones, and 2) social media.
The current AI wave is definitely producing interesting results, but there is still a massive gap between what it can do and what we have been promised. Considering current models have essentially been trained on the entire internet and they have now poisoned the well and made mass gathering of more training data impossible, I doubt we're going to see another two-orders-of-magnitude improvement any time soon. If anything, for a lot of applications it's probably going to get worse as the training set becomes out of date.
And if people aren't willing to pay for the current models, they aren't going to pay for a model which hallucinates 50% less often. They're going to need that two-orders-of-magnitude improvement to actually become world-changing. Taking into account how much money those companies are losing, are they going to survive the 5-10 years or more until they reach that point?