I think it's fair to be skeptical of the economic utility in the near term, but cautiously optimistic about the potential in defining and expanding on what exactly it is that causes people to perceive it in this way.
It's usefulness is similiar to searching google and reading the top box if it wasn't filtered.
You can ask it for a story and it will give you a weak rewording of your prompt.
There is nothing more meaningless than talking to it. It's a void
When you ask it to do something simple like chess it whips out crazy illegal moves. "the omnipotent f6 pawn" is already an internet meme [0]. You might now claim that it is a language model and it shouldn't be able to play chess but this is a very real limitation that you are going to pretend doesn't exist later on when it is about "language tasks". If it can't follow basic rules like rooks only moving horizontally or vertically or bishops only moving diagonally which is purely defined by logic then how on earth can it possibly do something that actually requires complex reasoning?
The problem with these large language models is that it gets harder and harder to notice the limitations, but they are still the same regardless of the size of the model. So every iteration you get to hype up more people about the same thing. They will make the same bad projections into the future like everyone else.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/AnarchyChess/comments/10yym4o/why_i... (Context: ChatGPT will play pawn f6 which summons a pawn out of nowhere, beating the queen)
I think in the 80s they sold coffee machines with clocks in them which would start to brew at the time you set.
I rather enjoy standing in the dark for 45 seconds while I toggle my phone’s wifi on and off and wait for my Hue app to try connect and then agree to a surprise 80 page EULA and a lecture about how Philips cares about my privacy so I can turn on my bathroom light to take a piss. If I could just flip a switch I might get used to the convenience and not really appreciate the whole procedure as much.
Sometimes it’s nice to have a million lines of code between you and your lightbulb.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-a-co...
Although making a profit is generally a foreign concept in Silicon Valley, at some point just pouring money into things without an actual path to revenue doesn't work as a business model in the long term.
Most people do not have home automation products at all. Not because they are ludites but because the technology is not evenly distributed and isn't doing as well in all markets.
I live in Tokyo and most of my friends (20s) have some kind of automation in their apartments, mostly using Alexa or Google Home. Again, just another bubble, but its not all Silicon Valley.
Smart thermostats and smart doorbells do seem on the rise, but i have never met anyone who actually has a home assistant. But all the americans i know seem to have one