Right - adoption was slower than people expected at the time, but it did happen, and a lot of the stuff that got thrown at the wall back then did eventually stick.
We are absolutely in a hype and market bubble around AI right now - and like the dot com bubble, the growth came not in 2000, but years later. It turns out it takes time for a new technology to percolate through society, and I use the “mom metric” as a bellwether - if your/my mother is using the tech, you’d better believe it has achieved market penetration.
Until 2011 my mum was absolutely not interested in the web. Now she does most of her shopping on it, and spends her days boomerposting.
She recently decided to start paying for ChatGPT.
Sure, it’s a fuzzy thing, but I think the adoption cycle this time around will be faster, as the access to the tech is already in peoples’ hands, and there are plenty of folks who are already finding useful applications for genai.
Robotaxis, whether they end up dominated by Tesla or waymo or someone else entirely, are inarguably here, and the adoption rates (the USA is not the only market in the world) are ramping significantly this year.
I’m not sure I get your point about smartphones? They’re in practically every pocket on the planet, now, they’re not some niche thing.
Well, both the web1.0 and the smartphones were major inflection points in technological development. I argue that the GenAI is not. Steve Jobs did not need to shove the AppStore down anybodys throat, the way Gemini and other crap are being shoved right now. The growth happened organically and exponentially, because everyone instantly saw value in those products. It happened through early adopters and the late majority. Here we have neither. Where are the thousands, well even hundreds of applications that the end users actually want to use? Your mum, based on your description fits more into the category of laggards, and that category never determines anything about a product/technology impact.
> the way Gemini and other crap are being shoved right now. The growth happened organically and exponentially, because everyone instantly saw value in those products.
Nobody shoved Gemini to me - chatGPT sucked and I was curious if Sonnet was the best around there for coding stuff and found Gemini to be excellent. As a side note, it also generates excellent question papers - chatGPT is dog shit compared to that.
Well, someone did to me as well as millions of other Google Workspace users. So you're not using google workspace, good for you! Despite turning the Gemini off in administrative settings, myself and millions of other users get daily "nudges" to consider Gemini summarising our e-mails or do some other superfluous bullshit. And the alternatives are few and between, at least if I want a shot at my email actually being delivered and not sorted into spam.
We are absolutely in a hype and market bubble around AI right now - and like the dot com bubble, the growth came not in 2000, but years later. It turns out it takes time for a new technology to percolate through society, and I use the “mom metric” as a bellwether - if your/my mother is using the tech, you’d better believe it has achieved market penetration.
Until 2011 my mum was absolutely not interested in the web. Now she does most of her shopping on it, and spends her days boomerposting.
She recently decided to start paying for ChatGPT.
Sure, it’s a fuzzy thing, but I think the adoption cycle this time around will be faster, as the access to the tech is already in peoples’ hands, and there are plenty of folks who are already finding useful applications for genai.
Robotaxis, whether they end up dominated by Tesla or waymo or someone else entirely, are inarguably here, and the adoption rates (the USA is not the only market in the world) are ramping significantly this year.
I’m not sure I get your point about smartphones? They’re in practically every pocket on the planet, now, they’re not some niche thing.