I sort of agree with the premise of the article. I ask myself, did more non-technical people pick up AI chat bots when they were invented than picked up personal computers in the late 70s/early 80's? I think probably. From my conversations with others.
The very first personal computers came out in 1972. In 1978, we got several. The PC came out in 1981. The computer boom didn't begin until 1992.
My wife is absolutely not technical, and she began using ChatGPT before me.
This is to say, I believe you to be correct here. The LLM adoption rate is many times the computer adoption rate. Non-technical people are immediately seeing the benefit of LLMs where they did not with computers in the 1970s.
Part of this is because we aren’t paying the actual cost of these chatbots. If ChatGPT wasn’t essentially free for casual users then we’d definitely see a much smaller/slower adoption rate. I wonder if a single person using them, even paying for tokens, isn’t substantially subsidized. Probably not but I’m speculating.
If 3D printers could’ve given usage away for years directly in our homes then I bet we would’ve seen wider adoption there too.
I get this may seem nitpicky but that is by definition not free, and good luck running even the lightest LLM’s on 8gb ram consumer hardware. 16gb is barely sufficient and you probably need a new MacBook to really stretch that.
People aren’t going to wait minutes per response for clearly inferior results compared to what they get for free on ChatGPT in browser in seconds, whether it’s logical or not. Not to mention they can’t ask more than a few questions tops before the whole thing crumbles. Expectations and reality are too far apart here.
Let’s also address another real issue: what are they going to use? LM studio? Is that really a user experience most will tolerate?
But certainly indirectly with cash. All the advertised products are more expensive than they could be, due to the costs of advertising. This comes out of everyone's pocket.
