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Comment by Uehreka | Hacker News Reader

5 years after Dijkstra’s algorithm was invented, could non-tech people look back and see a huge impact on their everyday lives? No.

Of the things in your list, WiFi is the closest to rising to this level, but even WiFi can’t claim to be as big of a deal as the Internet (unless you’re being extremely cute).

Your list is all A- and B-Tier stuff. Definitely important, but not on the level of like, the personal computer. LLMs are likely on the S-Tier with the other things GP mentioned. Within a month of its release ChatGPT had 100 million users. Everyone in my life can tell me a way they’ve been affected by LLMs.

We can argue about whether LLMs are/will be good for humanity. We cannot argue about whether they’re a big deal, they are undeniable.

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You raise good points and I want to dig into it more.

One counterpoint is that LLMs are still young. I think it's preemptive to proclaim now that LLMs are world-changing when we really don't know how they will affect us in the future. For e.g. the internet, it's undeniable that it changed the world because now everything is so much more interconnected than it was 30 years ago. The internet has become a foundational element of technology. Will LLMs do the same? Surely we don't know.

Second counterpoint: "everyone in my life can tell me a way they've been affected by LLMs". Can they? How are they affected, for real? Everyone is certainly talking about them, does that necessarily mean the impact is large? Honestly for me life is basically the same and I'm a developer! Still go to the same job, SDLC is largely the same, my hobbies are the same, eat the same food, etc. The important day to day is the same. Except that I code a little faster, have a fancier search / problem solving tool, and every now and then I see a crappy AI gen image. Compare to e.g. the internet which has undoubtably changed day to day by drastically reducing physical interaction between people and systems.

Smartphones deserve to be on that list as a technology which fundamentally affected the way we interact, and once you realise that you also understand how important WiFi is.

I'd say it was closer to 25 years from the invention of the personal computer to the point it made an impact on everyday life.

wifi is radio though

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