Much like pg dismissing Facebook as lame when it first launched, I was exponentially mistaken: https://paulgraham.com/swan.html
> History tends to get rewritten by big successes, so that in retrospect it seems obvious they were going to make it big. For that reason one of my most valuable memories is how lame Facebook sounded to me when I first heard about it. A site for college students to waste time? It seemed the perfect bad idea: a site (1) for a niche market (2) with no money (3) to do something that didn't matter.
> One could have described Microsoft and Apple in exactly the same terms.
It's worth remembering that even the big successes often don't realize they're onto something -- you'll be less likely to dismiss the next big wave when you see it forming.
Some were primed to do so by Meta's Galactica: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33611265
> Thanks to Sam Altman (...) for reading drafts of this.
The engineering they put around GPT to make it work as a smart translator and eloquent "brainstormer" and whatnot is impressive, but so far there's no killer app in sight. (The biggest bang for the buck seems to be Copilot.)
I mean the thing you can use in IDEs, some people seem to love it. (And it's great for writing Terraform code for example.)
It's totally permeated many areas of life for people.
>100 million monthly active users in January, just two months after launch, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history
I've used it for some non trivial stuff. Legal advice and advice on launching a crypto project.