Man, when you take a step back, it's insane that the industry has invested unprecedented resources on a product that just sort of works okay, sometimes. If there was something primed for bursting it's this. At least the internet and smart phones did what was advertised on the box. An entire industry just cranking on vibes and Wizard-of-Oz level puffery.
Man, when you take a step back, it's insane that the industry has invested unprecedented resources on a product that just sort of works okay, sometimes. If there was something primed for bursting it's this. At least the internet and smart phones did what was advertised on the box. An entire industry just cranking on vibes and Wizard-of-Oz level puffery.
Yeah, exactly. We had a very concrete idea of what the WWW or smartphones were capable of. And the hype was nowhere near this level back then.
They were not advertised as the “last invention of mankind” and “only hope”.
Or as a divinely powerful menace that poses a danger for *all sentient life* not just on our planet but in the whole cosmos itself (an extreme doomer perspective by Geoffrey Miller).
Despite the insane hype, LLMs are the only tech product that feels enshittified right from the start.
I have to doubt every single fact they tell me; if anything serious would depend on it, I would have to look it up the old-fashioned way. So I pay for convenience with the risk of being misinformed. Which feels awful even for silly trivia.
Most content they produce suffers from an aura of hollowness. Generic and bland but still riddled with inaccuracies. Not creative, unique, sharp, to the point, and correct.
You can waste an awful lot of time when going into a hallucination rabbit hole in which one hallucination is justified by another hallucination ad infinitum.
GPT-5 once invented whole new Scala inheritance rules that do not exist and would be absolutely absurd if they truly were so—with detailed source code examples and everything.
If they do not hallucinate, they still mostly dance around the issues and produce silly generalities.
And most importantly: For any serious, unfamiliar problem they fail.
Yeah, sometimes I succumb to the temptation of using LLMs, but I usually get frustrated. It just feels like an awful deal. The only time when it might be tolerable is the rare question for which the answer is very difficult to find but very straightforward to check.
It's still hoped by a lot of people that LLM hallucinations are just something to be ironed out rather than a fundamental flaw. Yes, the internet and smart phones were not technical limitations but investment bubbles. In the LLM case, it is a technical limitation.
I don't think that's right for the web. There was a lot of hyperventilating in the 90s about what the "information superhighway" was going to do for the world, when we didn't actually have much of an idea. The dot-com boom was huge and crazy, and then it suddenly popped, and people thought maybe the www was just a flash in the pan. Then it gradually became integrated in much of our economy and society - the Gartner hype cycle proven right yet again.
We're heading for the trough of disillusionment with LLMs; hard to predict how high the plateau of productivity will eventually end up.
I helped develop the ARPANET and worked for and hold several patents developed at a Content Delivery Network company that started shortly before the bubble, rode the wave, and the technology we developed was later sold and is still in use ... and I can authoritatively say that your history is off. For one thing you make the common mistake of confusing the Internet with the WWW. The original vision of JCR Licklider that led to the development of the 'net, and Al Gore's vision of a public/private network not restricted to government use panned out. The dot-com boom came years after the development of both the Internet and the WWW, and was a market phenomenon funded initially by VC and then moms and pops where everyone and his brother thought they could become millionaires overnight based on sketchy business plans and worthless "products" (quite a few people at my company did become millionaires because we had a real network infrastructure service, not some fly-by-night silliness). But no one with any sense thought that "www was just a flash in the pan" when the bubble burst--the Internet and the web already were integrated into much of our economy and society (and you're typing on it) which is what made the dot-com flash possible, and it got even more so during that bubble ... the bubble bursting was a market thing, not a technology thing. There was no Internet winter.
That’s cool you helped develop the ARPANET. I’m writing a book partly about the structure of the internet. What specifically did you work on?
I’m quite aware of the distinction between the www and the internet. Here I’m talking exclusively about the web between 1995 and 2002 — the dot-com boom and crash — and how regular people thought of it. As an insider with technical knowledge, you probably didn’t go bipolar during the boom and bust, but a lot of other people did. Here’s some insight about contemporaneous popular perceptions:
<<“After the bubble burst,” said [Jeffrey] Cole [director of the Center for the Digital Future at USC Annenberg], “it was amazing to see how many people in industry assumed that the collapse meant the end of the internet itself.”
“We had been studying the internet since the early 90s,” Cole remembered, “and at meetings I would be asked, ‘now that this internet thing is over, what are you going to do now?’ They assumed that when the bubble burst, the usefulness of the internet had ended – and as a result they wouldn’t have to relearn how the business world works.
“And I wasn’t just hearing this view from leadership in retail – it was journalists, advertising executives, and people in other fields as well.>>
This is the kind of popular and market perception that I’m talking about. PH, the original commenter, said there was nowhere near this level of hype about the web, but there was in fact an enormous amount of hype about web businesses in the late 90s; they dominated the advertising in Super Bowls, and their funny-money business models became open jokes, even as their stock prices kept skyrocketing. There was so much hype and investment that a significant amount of the American economy depended on dot-coms, and the crash was the predominant cause of the full-blown recession in 2001.
Obviously there are important differences between the web and LLMs, but there are marked similarities in their hype cycles.
(Edit: it seems I replied to Chad, but I meant to reply to PH. It's that damn www acting up again!)
I hear you but the difference to me is that the internet / web worked as promised, even if the larger socioeconomic promises were overblown. The difference with LLMs is that they aren't capable of doing a lot of what is advertised and won't for a very long time with the current approaches.
Modern day alchemy — the deep human desire to unlock the mysteries of life and harness them for our own wealth and power. A tale as old as time, but yes, never with this much investment behind it.
Man, when you take a step back, it's insane that the industry has invested unprecedented resources on a product that just sort of works okay, sometimes. If there was something primed for bursting it's this. At least the internet and smart phones did what was advertised on the box. An entire industry just cranking on vibes and Wizard-of-Oz level puffery.
Yeah, exactly. We had a very concrete idea of what the WWW or smartphones were capable of. And the hype was nowhere near this level back then.
They were not advertised as the “last invention of mankind” and “only hope”.
Or as a divinely powerful menace that poses a danger for *all sentient life* not just on our planet but in the whole cosmos itself (an extreme doomer perspective by Geoffrey Miller).
Despite the insane hype, LLMs are the only tech product that feels enshittified right from the start.
I have to doubt every single fact they tell me; if anything serious would depend on it, I would have to look it up the old-fashioned way. So I pay for convenience with the risk of being misinformed. Which feels awful even for silly trivia.
Most content they produce suffers from an aura of hollowness. Generic and bland but still riddled with inaccuracies. Not creative, unique, sharp, to the point, and correct.
You can waste an awful lot of time when going into a hallucination rabbit hole in which one hallucination is justified by another hallucination ad infinitum.
GPT-5 once invented whole new Scala inheritance rules that do not exist and would be absolutely absurd if they truly were so—with detailed source code examples and everything.
If they do not hallucinate, they still mostly dance around the issues and produce silly generalities.
And most importantly: For any serious, unfamiliar problem they fail.
Yeah, sometimes I succumb to the temptation of using LLMs, but I usually get frustrated. It just feels like an awful deal. The only time when it might be tolerable is the rare question for which the answer is very difficult to find but very straightforward to check.
It's still hoped by a lot of people that LLM hallucinations are just something to be ironed out rather than a fundamental flaw. Yes, the internet and smart phones were not technical limitations but investment bubbles. In the LLM case, it is a technical limitation.
I don't think that's right for the web. There was a lot of hyperventilating in the 90s about what the "information superhighway" was going to do for the world, when we didn't actually have much of an idea. The dot-com boom was huge and crazy, and then it suddenly popped, and people thought maybe the www was just a flash in the pan. Then it gradually became integrated in much of our economy and society - the Gartner hype cycle proven right yet again.
We're heading for the trough of disillusionment with LLMs; hard to predict how high the plateau of productivity will eventually end up.
I helped develop the ARPANET and worked for and hold several patents developed at a Content Delivery Network company that started shortly before the bubble, rode the wave, and the technology we developed was later sold and is still in use ... and I can authoritatively say that your history is off. For one thing you make the common mistake of confusing the Internet with the WWW. The original vision of JCR Licklider that led to the development of the 'net, and Al Gore's vision of a public/private network not restricted to government use panned out. The dot-com boom came years after the development of both the Internet and the WWW, and was a market phenomenon funded initially by VC and then moms and pops where everyone and his brother thought they could become millionaires overnight based on sketchy business plans and worthless "products" (quite a few people at my company did become millionaires because we had a real network infrastructure service, not some fly-by-night silliness). But no one with any sense thought that "www was just a flash in the pan" when the bubble burst--the Internet and the web already were integrated into much of our economy and society (and you're typing on it) which is what made the dot-com flash possible, and it got even more so during that bubble ... the bubble bursting was a market thing, not a technology thing. There was no Internet winter.
LLMs are not the same.
That’s cool you helped develop the ARPANET. I’m writing a book partly about the structure of the internet. What specifically did you work on?
I’m quite aware of the distinction between the www and the internet. Here I’m talking exclusively about the web between 1995 and 2002 — the dot-com boom and crash — and how regular people thought of it. As an insider with technical knowledge, you probably didn’t go bipolar during the boom and bust, but a lot of other people did. Here’s some insight about contemporaneous popular perceptions:
<<“After the bubble burst,” said [Jeffrey] Cole [director of the Center for the Digital Future at USC Annenberg], “it was amazing to see how many people in industry assumed that the collapse meant the end of the internet itself.”
“We had been studying the internet since the early 90s,” Cole remembered, “and at meetings I would be asked, ‘now that this internet thing is over, what are you going to do now?’ They assumed that when the bubble burst, the usefulness of the internet had ended – and as a result they wouldn’t have to relearn how the business world works.
“And I wasn’t just hearing this view from leadership in retail – it was journalists, advertising executives, and people in other fields as well.>>
This is the kind of popular and market perception that I’m talking about. PH, the original commenter, said there was nowhere near this level of hype about the web, but there was in fact an enormous amount of hype about web businesses in the late 90s; they dominated the advertising in Super Bowls, and their funny-money business models became open jokes, even as their stock prices kept skyrocketing. There was so much hype and investment that a significant amount of the American economy depended on dot-coms, and the crash was the predominant cause of the full-blown recession in 2001.
Obviously there are important differences between the web and LLMs, but there are marked similarities in their hype cycles.
(Edit: it seems I replied to Chad, but I meant to reply to PH. It's that damn www acting up again!)
I hear you but the difference to me is that the internet / web worked as promised, even if the larger socioeconomic promises were overblown. The difference with LLMs is that they aren't capable of doing a lot of what is advertised and won't for a very long time with the current approaches.
Modern day alchemy — the deep human desire to unlock the mysteries of life and harness them for our own wealth and power. A tale as old as time, but yes, never with this much investment behind it.