“Hello World, I'm AI.”

I don’t do much, make mistakes, and write adequately.

With the rise of pseudo-sentience, I’ve been replaying my early computer memories.

It was 1981, I was in ninth grade and my school had a computer. That old IBM was as smart as a solar-powered Casio and as big as Jose Canseco on steroids.

1980s baseball player… No? It was the size of an Oldsmobile. No? Three Datsuns? No. Five rear projection TVs? Argh, I hate being this old. Ok, as big as nine Casper mattress boxes.

Scoff all you want but a machine that could chew up punch cards here and print out numbers there was a marvel. By the measures of the day, we were computing.

[Did anyone else hear that last bit in Daniel Stern’s voice as Kevin Arnold? No. Just me. Carrying on.]

Computing was a cottage industry.

Hobbyists had been putting circuit boards into wooden boxes for a few years. Atari much-better known for its gaming console, made a computer. I had one. I could get it to put, “Hello world” on an 8” black and white TV. Riveting.

Nerds and kids flush with Bar Mitzvah money is not a market. Computing had a demand issue. People didn’t *need* a PC because there was no killer app. People didn’t need VisiCalc.

So, in my house, the pitch went something like this…

“You could put your recipes in it,” my dad would tell my mom – repeatedly.

My mom had about 20 recipes written on index cards that she cooked regularly and could recite from memory. She kept them in a small plastic box she bought at five and dime. [No? Dollar-like Store.]

A “real” computer like the TRS-80 from Radio Shack [store that sold batteries and hobby electronics] cost $3450. For ref, a *new* Honda Accord was $1300.

Yesterday, Benedict Evans said AI’s quiet part out loud. There’s no killer app for AI.

He’s been using ChatGPT 3.5 for four plus years. He doesn’t need it. It doesn’t do much, makes mistakes, and writes adequately. He might have been talking about me.

Evans is right. AI doesn’t do anything we *need*. My cousin used ChatGPT to write a wedding toast for his daughter. It was pretty cool. We got bored pretty quickly.

500 startups (and that’s just in Europe) use large language models to do “stuff.” Mostly, that stuff is the Hello World of AI. They’ve co-opted the transitive property. Instead of:

U talking to AI.

U talk to Co who talks to AI.

“Cookie, tell me about recipes.”

Cookie asks ChatGPT gets the answer parrots it back to you.

Taking Computing From Cottage to Cheese

1976: Jobs and Woz build the Apple I

1979: VisiCalc did something a calculator couldn’t do

1980: Radio Shack sells a home computer for the price of 2½ cars.

1981: IBM puts office computing on desktops

1985: Microsoft integrates data with Windows™.

1986: I got my first email address and went “online” to read news.

1989: Tim Berners-Lee creates the HTTP protocol at CERN.

1993: AOL starts flinging go-on-line disks around like Frisbees™.

1998: Pets.com starts (it would got bust three years later).

2004: Facebook launches.

I’ve lived computing from punch cards to mobile phones. A killer app gets business people using it. For computing, that was 20 million units in 1989.

To go from cottage to cheese, you need to convince my mom that she needs it.

*** spoiler alert ***

The killer app for people is connecting them.

My mom bought a computer to play poker online – with other people. Not even for money. Just for fun.

Until AI connects people, it’s a work tool. Nice. Maybe even cool. But, it won’t be huge.

We don’t care about computers (even mobile ones in phones). We care when they connect us to our friends and to shops. When they entertain or inform us.
 
That's the connecting part. Easier is the even bigger part of this.

Easier means taking a picture on your phone and sharing it with people in two clicks. Buying something in one click. Showing me videos I'm going to love in no clicks.
 
In that sense, AI – while powerful – has to leap a really high bar. It has to make social easier. Shopping easier. Entertainment easier.
 
When someone figures out that killer app, AI will be much more than an amusing thing that spits out some average prose.

Epilog.

My high school retired our punch card machine the next year. They replaced it with a DEC Vax-11. It was the size of one Casper mattress box. Our computer teacher, Mr. Shigeishi connected 20 dumb terminals to it. No processing. But you could message other folks.

People would sit inches from each other messaging each other banal crap like, “Hi Tessa, it’s Brian.”

I so should have invented Facebook in 1982. Sigh.