The LLM app layer
the exciting bit
I’m a bit too young to remember the very early days of computers, but everything I’ve read suggests that they didn’t do all that much. Wozniak famously built his hobby project for hobbyists who could write their own programs, and for a while that was enough. Eventually people worked out that building software for other people to run on their computers was a good business. You can still write programs for your own computer that you assemble yourself, but that’s not the exciting bit.
Growing up, I can definitely remember an era when the internet didn’t do much, particularly when compared to today. You could look up information or read the news? Eventually folks realised that SaaS was possible, as well as other products like gaming and streaming. Today you can still “surf the web”, but that’s not the exciting bit.
Before smartphones, phones were just phones. Even before the App Store, smartphones were just phones that you could plug earphones into. Apps led to whole new categories like social media and ride sharing really taking off. You can still use a phone as a phone, but that’s not the exciting bit.
Large language models were pretty bad, until suddenly they were pretty good. But even then, all they did was generate words. It wasn’t until folks worked out that ________1 and ________ were great products with great business models attached, that things really took off. Today you can still chat to an LLM like it’s a chat bot, but that’s not the exciting bit.
Put a gun to my head, I’ll say this is coding. But only because it’s in the lead. I don’t think it’s in the same ballpark as the other examples in this post yet.