Correct, but the thing is, AI blown up much faster than phones - pretty much a decade in a single year, in comparison. Mobile phones weren't that useful early on, outside of niche cases. Generative AI is already spreading to every facet of peoples' lives, and has even greater bottom-up adoption among regular people, than top-down adoption in business.
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.
>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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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).
You're a long time HN contributor and I admit when I see your username, I stop and read the comment because it's always insightful, polite, and often makes me think about things in ways I never have before! But this discussion borders on religious fervor. "Every facet of peoples' lives?" Come on, man!
He's intersted in meditation and mindfulness. He's not a native English speaker, so he's using AI to help him write content. He's then using AI text to voice to turn his scripts into YouTube videos. The videos have AI generated artwork too.
My dad is a retired welder in his late 60s. He's as "regular people" as it gets.
I'm a high school teacher and GPT has completely changed teaching. We're using it to help with report writing, lesson planning, resource creation, even for ourselves to get up to speed on new topics quickly.
I'm working on a tool for teachers that's only possible with GPT.
It's by far the single, most transformative technology I've ever encountered.
I'm aware of the HN bias, but in this case, I'm talking regular, non-tech, sportsball or TikTok watching crowd. Just within my closest circles, one person is using ChatGPT for recipes, and they're proficient at cooking so I was surprised when they told me the results are almost always good enough, even with dietary restrictions in place (such as modifying recipes without exceeding nutrient limits). Another person used it for comparison shopping of kids entertainment supplies. Another actually posted a car sale ad and used gen-AI to swap out background to something representative (no comment on ethics of that). Another is evaluating it for use in their medical practice.
(And I'm excluding a hundred random uses I have for it, like e.g. making colorbooks for my kids when they have very specific requests, like "dancing air conditioners" or whatever.)
> work at FAANG, make $400K/yr
I thought the same about adoption (across multiple audiences, not just tech workers and/or young people), was faced with surprising poor knowledge about GenAI when making surveys about it in my company. Maybe investors are asking the same questions right now.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/03/26/americans...
23% said they'd used ChatGPT, 43% said they hadn't, 34% didn't know what it was.
> The Information recently reported that OpenAI’s revenue is now $3.4B, up from $1.6B in late 2023.
and links to
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openais-annualized-r...
That's a lot of $20/month subscriptions. it's not all that but that's a lot of money, regardless.
There are a lot of companies building private GPTs and using their API.
Truck drivers, construction crew, couriers, lawyers, sales people of all kinds, stock brokers, ... Most of the economy that isn't at a desk 996. Pretty big niche, bigger than the non-niche possibly.
You are in a bubble.