"World-changing" is "change the world." It's a new way of doing things that is so successful over old ways that the old ways are abandoned. Refrigeration changed groceries. Air conditioning changed geography. Here's an argument about how cell phones changed Africa, and how AI probably won't. Your argument boils down to "provides better search for my father-in-law" which, okay, hire him an assistant. What's that? An assistant is too expensive? Are you sure? Oh, I see. A research assistant won't be as fast. Okay, so now we're talking about incremental productivity gains.

Look. I'm so old I remember when women were secretaries. Watch a few scenes of Mad Men, that shit was real. Then typewriters were electric and... women were still secretaries. Then word processors came out and women suddenly had more time to do shit other than type. Slowly but surely you started to see an integration of women into the workplace, you started to see a rise in daycare standards, you started to see double-income families as the norm. The modern western world owes its existence to the word processor in many ways but I doubt you'd argue that word processors are world-changing. They're an incremental tool that was one of many aspects of computerization that led to the information age.

"Incremental productivity gains" for whom? The most reasonable argument is that LLMs might make that part of your job that you hate less arduous. Okay, great. That's a good thing. fuck yeah Wordstar. My mother used to compose tests for her biology students with a typewriter, a pair of scissors and a copy machine. She did it that way well past the point that word processors existed because she needed diagrams and diagrams in desktop publishing took a dozen years longer so word processors basically bypassed her but for a big chunk of academia they revolutionized things. They didn't give anyone any more free time, though, because the job is the job. If anything, word processors annihilated the mimeograph industry - you poor bastards will never know that particular smell of fresh purple ink and for that i feel sorry for you.

The real matter, however, is that word processing was equally useful to amateurs and professionals alike. i can write like hell and even I lean on spell-check. My daughter basically taught herself to spell by guessing at ways to get rid of the squiggly red line when she typed. Yay word-processing. But if you're a shitty writer and I'm a great writer, LLMs will allow you to crank out mediocre work nobody wants to read while it won't do a damn thing for me because I can crap out better stuff than it can without pausing to sip my coffee. Oh, but that's gonna save the bad writers hours of time. Okay? But who cares? If nobody wanted to read it anyway why does it exist? Bloomberg has had AIs writing finance stories since 2018; that's because the articles are all written for sentiment bots doing high frequency trading anyway and it doesn't fucking matter.

How can you both believe NFTs are already changing the world when the largest use case is improving the bottom line of specific luxury brands through destroying their grey market, yet not seeing LLMs make a dent in the universe?

Because luxury goods are used to evade tariffs, embargoes and sanctions, as well as to provide untraceable bribes. Here's Imran Khan, going to prison over watches. Here's the government of Angola, falling over watches. Here's Wired, arguing in 2020 that this shit is about to be over and here's Rolex, hopping on the blockchain.

"Improving the bottom line of specific luxury brands" is one thing. "locking off a major portion of the shadow economy" is quite another.

LLMs - make it easier for mediocre writers to churn out copy, make it easier for mediocre coders to churn out programming

NFTs - make it harder to bribe governments

Has that sharpened your thinking?