Looking for AI use-cases — Benedict Evans
We’ve had ChatGPT for 18 months, but what’s it for? What are the use-cases? Why isn’t it useful for everyone, right now? Do Large Language Models become universal tools that can do ‘any’ task, or do we wrap them in single-purpose apps, and build thousands of new companies around that?
Evans is an analyst, but very experienced and thoughtful I think he well captures the reality of LLMs right now that the existing use cases of real value are quite nice, and a lot of the mainstream focus is over hyped.
I think the analogies to early computing are helpful. Like Evans I remember those days vividly, my early to mid teens. When as I’ve said more than once computers in the kitchen to store recipes was a common use case for the personal computer.
Looking up recipes is indeed a common use case for the Web, and a solid business for many companies. But it is barely a running error when it comes to all the uses we have put computers too since around 1980, so few of which were imagined then, except by perhaps a handful of people like Douglas Englebart and Tim Berners-Lee (a decade before the Web Berners-Lee created ENQUIRE in 1980).
Back then a tiny handful of people, almost entirely male, white, upper middle class, mostly English speakers, with privilege and resources, had any sort of access to computing. Now billions do.
What impact that has on innovation and experimentation it’s not entirely clear now, but surely it must. And where once programming a computer required arcane knowledge difficult to acquire, now these barriers are far lower.
