Baldur Bjarnason"LLMs are here to stay," is like saying that the modem-based internet of the 90s was forever. It was a largely unusable piece-of-shit tech that was manifestly incapable of delivering beyond a fraction of what the dot-com bubble promised, but it prompted investment in fixing the one thing that prevented that promise: bandwidth.
I can't emphasise strongly enough how this ISN'T happening with LLMs. They are throwing all their money into building ON the broken tech and next to nothing in developing a replacement that has an actual chance at fulfilling the promise LLMs hint at, because there genuinely aren't any plausible pathways to get there from here
The modern AI Bubble is 100% a "modem speeds were good enough and the dot-com companies only failed because they didn't have enough funding to get them over the hump created by the government's regulatory fight with Microsoft" delusion.
Modem speeds are very much not enough and if broadband had proven to be infeasible for some unexpected technical reason, then the web would definitely have faded away into a hobbyist-oriented subculture in the style of ham radio.
fedops 💙💛@baldur modem speeds very much were enough until the enshittification of the web.
Parade du Grotesque 💀@ParadeGrotesque ahem. My first modem was also 2400 bps, and while it was way before the web there very much was an Internet. I remember configuring uucp for mail and inn for netnews in 1991, having blagged access to the modem bank at my student helper job at the time.
@baldur
@baldur
Jeff Grigg@fedops @ParadeGrotesque @baldur
I was reading ASCII text as it came across at 110 baud and was printed on a teletype. 300 baud is faster than you can read text.
I did a fair amount of programming work at 1200 baud. Like all of my college work. Mostly remote.
9600 baud is annoyingly slow for images. But I eventually paid for higher bandwidth in order to download large software packages.
@fedops @ParadeGrotesque @baldur
I curse at our local water company for subjecting me (and everyone else) to full screen full motion video when I just want to login and pay my water bill. Even their own public relations people criticize it for not being very accessible, and for being irrelevant and misleading.
There's a lot of waste — bandwidth, memory, CPU time, disk space.
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But high resolution streaming video is really nice to have!