When did OpenMicroWave promise to solve every societal problem if we just gave it enough money to built a larger microwave oven?

Microwave sellers did not become trillion dollar companies off that hype

Mostly because the marginal cost of microwaves was not close to zero.

Mostly because they were not making claims that sentient microwaves that would cook your food for you were just around the corner which then the most respected media outlets parroted uncritically.

Even rice cookers started doing this by advertising "fuzzy logic".

Fuzzy logic rice cookers are the result of an unrelated fad in 1990s Japanese engineering companies. They added fuzzy controls to everything from cameras to subways to home appliances. It's not part of the current ML fad.

Yes. My point is that technology fads aren't new and getting mad at them is a bit like getting mad at fashion or taste.

I mean, they were at one point making pretty extravagant claims about microwaves, but to a less credulous audience. Trouble with LLMs is that they look like magic if you don’t look too hard, particularly to laypeople. It’s far easier to buy into a narrative that they actually _are_ magic, or will become so.

I feel like what makes this a bit different from just regular old sufficiently advanced technology is the combination of two things:

- LLMs are extremely competent at surface-level pattern matching and manipulation of the type we'd previously assumed that only AGI would be able to do.

- A large fraction of tasks (and by extension jobs) that we used to, and largely still do, consider to be "knowledge work", i.e. requiring a high level of skill and intelligence, are in fact surface-level pattern matching and manipulation.

Reconciling these facts raises some uncomfortable implications, and calling LLMs "actually intelligent" lets us avoid these.