I've heard anecdotes comparing ChatGPT to the "iPhone moment" that changed mobile computing. iPhone was a hardware and software product, I'm wondering what purely software technology you think had an impact like ChatGPT?
I think this is the most widespread hype I’ve seen. Whether it will pan out in terms of actual usefulness remains to be seen I think, so kind of hard to say what compares yet.<p>Part of me wonders whether there would be this much hype without COVID and the Ukraine war and the economy causing so much gloom. People are yearning for a savior of some kind it feels like (I say that as a comment on human nature and as an atheist, this isn’t a disguised Christpost).
For me it’s as useful as online encyclopedias before Wikipedia. I grew up in third world so we didn’t exactly have nice public libraries with all the knowledge in the world. So, as a kid I’d do my homework and then spend hours just reading as much as I could from those encyclopedia Britannia and others.<p>Anyway I think chatgpt is cool but the issue with these at scale is there’s no way to actually verify or vet its results.<p>It’s trained on some data and exists within those confines. If it doesn’t know it makes up stuff even when you’ve provided a lot of information in the context.<p>Now I’m not doing some meme tier crap like make a function that gives me a color hex code.<p>I’m doing some more complex Postgres debugging and thought I’d use chat gpt and literally getting recommended function names that exist in BigQuery and not in Postgres.<p>Imo, these tools will find their niche in ultra specialized workflows where there isn’t much requirement for intuition or judgment, and only raw output is needed.<p>Making data for testing purposes or helping to write scaffolding for common lcd programming tasks, coming up with some headline text or turning a Charles Dickens novel into a ten minute story. Low risk but huge time sink type of work.
It's impact is going to dwarf everything that came before it, but maybe the invention of the graphical user-interface. It requires no sales pitch, its immediately useful, its utility is obvious, its the fasting growing app in history. It's going to be integrated into everything: your smart-speaker, your ring doorbell, all productivity software (photoshop, visual studio...), search engines... what else... your tesla? McDonalds ordering kiosk... call centers... some system that gives you a social credit score, drones.. what else... a new generation of industrial robots...
Spreadsheets.<p>They were the killer application for personal computers.<p>Whether you were running a Fortune 500 company or a local club or just your own household, updating a single number in a column and immediately seeing the result reflected across all your calculations in a visual way was amazing.
GPT-4 is not purely a software technology, just like the initial iPhone wasn't either. Without massive improvements in industry-grade GPUs like the A100, I'm unsure we'd be able to have these LLMs (at least this early).<p>One software innovation I think we often forget about but that is pretty extensively used day-to-day by almost every trade, is the concept of a wiki, a collaborative knowledge base. It exists most famously as Wikipedia, but many other implementations exists (like Notion, or just a Google Drive/synced folder with text files) and can be found in most places in almost any type of business.
The most impactful single unit of software I can think of would be the C compiler.<p>It’s hard to find anything that runs on a computer today that wasn’t compiled by a C compiler, compiled by something bootstrapped by a C compiler or being executed on some platform compiled by a C compiler.
If you consider punched cards then... <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_machine" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_machine</a> "The first prototype of a Jacquard-type loom was made in the second half of the 15th century"
When Google search blew all the other search engines completely out of the water. Knowing how to effectively use google was a kind of superpower/time saver so it was very refreshing and made you very effective compared to people who were not using it. ChatGPT feels like we're on the edge of that, for certain cases it can accelerate work. Maybe not for everything, but we're still finding out what it can be good at.
If anything it's more like the "Early PC moment", it makes your life a whole lot easier if you use it at work and what you work on can be automated, but for most people it's more of a fun novelty, a nice to have instead of something they can't live without.<p>So if a parallel has to be drawn, I'll say it's WordStar and Visicalc, even the use case is similar, mostly word processing and analysis.
When you extend the term “software”: Maybe Darwin’s ideas? They also existed long before the public caught on. They also were then widely discussed in newspapers and books. Shook society at the core. And attracted lots of charlatans who abused them to bolster their own unsubstantiated conclusions.<p>It’s not quite that magnitude yet. But the direction seems close.
ChatGPT promises to have iPhone-level impact, but as of today (April 16, 2023), its impact has largely been to accelerate existing workflows. Its impact is more akin to Photoshop (still, a monumental impact), than the introduction of the smartphone.<p>This may very well change months and years from now, but as of now it’s too early to claim it has iPhone-level impact.
What exactly are we comparing it to though? Other modern technologies considered 'disruptive' or all software in general? There really is no comparison between something like ChatGPT to software like C lang, UNIX or web servers for example in terms of impact.
Google search,
hotmail webmail,
Online tools - document editor spreadsheet,
(embedded ) Linux and Unix,
Chrome OS on chromebooks,
distributed computing ( APIs )