Comment on Silicon Valley is buzzing about this new idea: AI compute as compensation
MangoCats@feddit.it 2 days agounlike a work computer, apparently AI subscriptions are not self-evidently worth having
Back in the 1980s it was highly debatable if there was value in desktop PCs beyond playing Solitare.
XLE@piefed.social 2 days ago
1981 was the year of the IBM PC, which was produced for 6 years and became a staple in the business world. Third-party software became widely available within a year. They were famous for the quality of the documentation.
Basically the opposite is true for AI’s flagship LLMs, for every one of rise things. The creators are unable to make money, investors are getting nervous, their functionality is poorly explained to businesses, the list goes on.
MangoCats@feddit.it 1 day ago
Because it was so easily reproduced, well documented, and open to all vendors to build accessories for or clones of.
And, yet, for the first 10+ years of PCs and clones on the market, many were sitting idle on workers’ desks because the workers didn’t know how to do anything productive with them, beyond playing solitare.
Starting with the fact that AI’s LLMs are mostly being produced / consumed as cloud services rather than a chunk of capital equipment taking up a big part of people’s desks.
IBM marketed thier PCs very effectively and launched with a Billion dollar boom, but then lost market share and ultimately lost their ability to sell PCs and/or accessories profitably.
However, IBM’s entry to the market with a billion dollar bang later went on to inspire the .com bubble, which started with absurdity of valuations and eventually corrected into the more realistic world dominating market that it is today.
Will AI / LLMs reproduce this? The market (bubble) thinks they will - I’m not as optimistic as the market, but I do believe they are the fullfilling the promise of a significant advancement in “machine intelligence” that has been “5 years away” since 1980.
XLE@piefed.social 1 day ago
No. Literally from Wikipedia: “Third-party software support grew extremely quickly, and within a year the PC platform was supplied with a vast array of titles for any conceivable purpose.”
Not a million chatbots with flaky guardrails and dubious value, getting pushed on random people. The value of a PC program was explicit and understandable.
… Because the PC Compatible emerged? Yeah I know. That’s evidence of success.
Moving goalposts to a different metaphor (the dot-com bubble) makes me think you realized your first attempt at a metaphor sucked
MangoCats@feddit.it 1 day ago
Who wrote your Wikipedia article, and what’s their source on the uptake of this vast array of titles by actual human beings with PCs supplied to them?
In 1985 I visited a rather highly ranked Nurse in a hospital saddled with one of those new miracle boat-anchors and despite the vast array of titles for any conceivable purpose, her management had supplied her with nada, zip, zilch, the bare OS with no specialty software and no peripherals like a printer. I showed her how to use the - very user UNfriendly - edlin program to be able to type text in and save it, and retrieve it later. That was a huge breakthrough for her since the thing had literally been a chunk of wasted space on her desk capable of absolutely no demonstrable utility for months, despite her asking for help from her management in using it.
Her story was not unique - that Billion $+ surge of successful sales was not driven by people clamoring for things they could use, it was driven by management wanting to get a jump on “the next big thing” - pushing their employees in the deep end with no clue how to swim and no instruction. Uptake took a lot of time, more in some areas than others, but the early 80s in particular had a lot of unused hardware sitting around doing nothing of value.
To a small minority of the population - not just the population in general - the specific population with PC access also.
And imagining a past that didn’t happen is all too easy if you only read company approved histories.