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Comment by chii | Hacker News Reader

> But then, a lot of people have been excited about VR and blockchains

dunno about blockchains, but i'm sure there isn't 100million VR units sold. Plus you don't need to pay upfront to use chatGPT to try it. And everyone who has tried it has been amazed, or at least, impressed at how good the responses are.

Not saying that the language models and AI hype is to be believed, but there's substance there. If you are an investor, you should be wary of missing out. And if you're not an investor, you should be wary of losing your human advantage in the economy.

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> And everyone who has tried it has been amazed, or at least, impressed at how good the responses are.

This is almost the definition of a novelty effect. Consider, for example, 3D.

Stereoscopic 3D has gone through at least 5 waves of people trying it, saying, "Amazing! This will change everything!" But so far every time everything has not been changed. (The 5 waves I count: Brewster stereoscopes in the 1850s, 3D still viewers in the 1940s, 3D movies in the 1950s, VR in the 1990s, and 3D movies/TV starting in 2009. Assuming that we see the current wave of VR/metaverse hype as still open, of course.)

The question for me is what happens once something gets past "amazing". For example, consider Shazam's music recognition technology. It was widely considered amazing at the time. But in very short order it became boring, as it had basically one use case, one that did not matter much to most people.

Yeah I spent a week or two getting excited playing with ChatGPT but then I got bored. I also bought a Quest 2 a while ago and sold it after a few months, so I guess the novelty just wears off quickly for me.

I think that just puts you ahead of the curve. But perhaps not very far ahead.

I rented the Quest for a couple weeks at Christmastime. The first week everybody thought it was amazing, me included. Things tapered off in the second week, with the kids back on their Switches and the Playstation. When I mailed it back nobody even noticed.

I hear a fair number of anecdotes like that. And I find very few people for whom VR games are a daily driver the way, say, mobile games are.

I feel like blockchain got a lot more real use than VR. Though both were aggressively pitched as solutions in nonsense ways.

ChatGPT is being used by common people in practical ways, not just going "wow." It's already proven itself.

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