AI is still the only tech in modern human history where people have to talk you into it. No one had to make a hard sell on indoor plumbing, electricity, air travel, or even the smartphone. Humans happily bought in. How many Americans *want* to pay hundreds a month for AI tools?
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When the telephone was invented, 99% of the country had no use for it. The technology was patented in 1876. Three years later, there were basically no telephones in existence. Thirty years later, there were basically no telephones. Household adoption of telephones didn't pass 50% until the 1940s.
AI is 3 years old. A majority of Americans say they use it every week.
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They use it because it was forced onto them with virtually every web and phone application *and* basic versions are free (for now). Ultimately no economic model exists for any of it but Altman said the quiet part out loud when he hoped the federal govt would backstop him
Students use ChatGPT to cheat in class because “it was forced onto them”? They’re cheating against their own will?
Of course, telephones required other users in order to be useful - network effects. AI is used in solitude.
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Ross you should give this a read:
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Matt Shumer
@mattshumer_
Something Big Is Happening
Think back to February 2020.
If you were paying close attention, you might have noticed a few people talking about a virus spreading overseas. But most of us weren't paying close attention. The stock...
AI is NOT 3 yrs old!
OpenAI was incorporated 10 yrs ago
Machine learning research started over 60 yrs ago
The speed is exactly the point. The telephone took decades to reach households. Society needs time to build norms around it. AI reached a societal impact majority in 3 years with zero governance for how it processes human emotions. The main difference from past tech adoptions
not a perfect comparison because telephones couldn't be deployed instantaneously everywhere the way AI could because of the internet.
If you could flip a switch where 3 years after the telephone was invented everyone had one, it would of course be used by everyone constantly
postwar Japan rice cooker adoption just entered the chat and asked to be included as a benchmark
i get ur point but ai is not "3 years old" the *rapid adoption* is 3 years old
From 1995:
“Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.”
This is not a good analogy. A single telephone is useless. Telephones would not & could not take off until there was a network of them
The 2 main q's remain:
1. What will make people pay for AI?
2. When will jobs outside SW eng be replaced?
Interesting comparison, but communication technologies frequently require the networking effect to be valuable. If no one has telephones having a telephone doesn’t do much good. AI does not require take up by others in order to be useful to the individual adopter.
AI (as in LLM) was first conceived sixty years ago.
Also, if telephones could be delivered for free to every home in 1876 there would have been mass adoption. It's a totally different pipeline. Physical infrastructure wasn't there.
No one is forcing AI on people and there are a lot of good use cases but come on with AI is 3 years old. I was building neural nets and genetic algorithms 25 years ago and I promise I wasn’t the first person to create AI
Insights may come from distinguishing between "Use AI" and "Interact with AI"
One is Active: you set out to use it for a task.
One is Passive: it injects itself (repeatedly) into your life without you asking, perhaps in part to drive these adoption numbers?
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ChatGPT was the fastest growing piece of consumer software in history. Paid AI will happen at work as a productivity tool - like Microsoft office. A lot of software industry workers already pay $200/mo Claude subscription and it’s with every penny
Now imagine 20% of the US economy immediately threw itself into telephones for the express reason of dampening wages
To be fair the analogue of the telephone being patented here is more like the beginning of the deep learning revolution about 10 years ago, rather than the release of ChatGPT
Even like 100 years after invention of the steam ship there were stil thousands of clipper ships working various freight routes still. Tech adoption is fascinating.
Yes, and no. I think most people have used the "glorified search" capability of AI, but not yet encountered its truly generative capacity.
I would use zero AI if it wasn't automatically part of phones and search engines
I write about the intersection of intellectual property strategy, venture capital, and private equity on my Substack. If that's your world, it's worth a read.
Speed of adoption depends on pre-existing physical communication infrastructure.
But were they installing telephones into everyone's home and people were still choosing to ignore it?
yeah i mean same with the internet from a commercial and even everyday business perspective (but also persona) had tons of resistance. this is a totally unserious critique. the AI thing is taking off faster than expected if anything.
Derek, what do you attribute this denialism to? Fear,? Hope? Ross is a smart guy, don’t always agree with him but he has a functioning brain.
i mean, its built in google. how are we supposed to not use it?
slop has become synonymous with AI in record time. Pretty sure everybody thought phones were amazing right away.
AI isn't a new technology. It is just a further refinement of something we have been using for decades.
AI is being forced down by our throats. It’s everywhere. Google made it so you can’t turn it off (or at least it’s very hard to). It is also theft if intellectual property on a mass scale. It’s a miserable thing for a miserable time. You’re not going to get around that.
This is a terrible comparison, people don't even have a choice about using AI. It pops into every google search.