Hundreds of millions of people have tried ChatGPT, but most of them haven’t been back. Every big company has done a pilot, but far fewer are in deployment. Some of this is just a matter of time. But LLMs might also be a trap: they look like products and they look magic, but they aren’t. Maybe we have to go through the slow, boring hunt for product-market fit after all.

My old boss Marc Andreessen liked to say that every failed idea from the Dotcom bubble would work now. It just took time – it took years to build out broadband, consumers had to buy PCs, retailers and big companies needed to build e-commerce infrastructure, a whole online ad business had to evolve and grow, and more fundamentally, consumers and businesses had to change their behaviour. The future can take a while – it took more than 20 years for 20% of US retail to move online.

… For consumers, ChatGPT is just a website or an app, and (to begin with) it could ride on all of the infrastructure we’ve built over the last 25 years. So a huge number of people went off to try it last year. The problem is that most of them haven’t been back. — Read More

AI isn’t coming for your current job. It’s coming for your next one — and has already wrecked it

… According to a wide variety of institutions and publications, the past two years have featured the strongest labor environment in decades. The Commerce Department announced in February of 2023 that “Unemployment is at its lowest level in 54 years.” When this April’s official numbers showed that the U.S. recorded its 27th straight month of sub-4% unemployment, tying the second-longest streak since World War II, the Center for Economic and Policy Research was but one of a multitude of sources celebrating: “This matches the streak from November 1967 to January 1970, often viewed as one of the most prosperous stretches in US history.” In June, Investopedia practically gushed that “U.S. workers are in the midst of one of the best job markets in history. They haven’t had this much job security since the 1960s, and haven’t seen a longer stretch of low unemployment since the early 1950s.”

Arguments about statistical methodology aside, there’s nothing to suggest that those headline numbers were incorrect to any significant extent. But raw unemployment is considered a lagging economic indicator, and there is quite a bit of evidence supporting the premise that, below the surface, the biggest drivers of new employment — online job listings — have become elaborate façades destined to cause more problems than they solve for those seeking work.  — Read More