alt Hacker NewsThe first prototype of a cellphone was functional in the early 70s. Before that you had walkie talkies and farther back wireless communications.
We're just shy of 10 years since attention is all you need and just a few years past the first commercially viable LLMs. So in cellphones we are something like early 90s.
What they're saying is that mobile phone tech didn't scale at the same rate as LLMs. How fast it takes a technology to unfold into full adoption varies depending on the industry and on what's blocking development at its inception.
Mobile phones were severely constrained by hardware that made them impractically expensive and unwieldy, and also by the time it took to set up wireless networks at a large enough scale. That's why it took mobile phones a few decades to really get going, and this is going to be different for every other technology.
LLMs, for instance, were not as hardware-constrained - we have a lot more compute now, but there wasn't a hardware paradigm shift or anything, things were already pretty good a few years ago - now it's just about scale. LLMs were also always relatively affordable - there wasn't a period where they cost $10/token, so we don't get the same kind of affordability scaling as with phones. They also utilize existing internet infrastructure and don't need to be rolled out in some new worldwide grid.