My favorite comparison right now is to the microwave oven.
It's a novel thing. It's not going anywhere. It makes some things easier, sometimes, in both personal and professional settings. But you're not at a big loss without it and in many cases your choice to do without is a choice that favors quality, control, nuance, and skill refinement.
I will bite, going with your analogy comparing to electricity on the other end of the spectrum.
electricity is not ubiquitous in many parts of the global south full 130 years.
The common definition is- access to electricity source that can provide very basic lighting,
and charge a phone or power a radio for 4 hours per day. Not even grid connected.
Even with this basic definition there is still full 660 million people who don’t have access to even that. It only dropped below a billion in 2015.
You need beyond the basic to be meaningfully transformative, clean cooking fuel access is one proxy used that is still 2Billion people without access for example.
Nobody is denying the transformative nature of electricity or say internet , but even these things take a long long time, more than one life time to propagate and be world changing, and not because of their choice of lifestyle to live disconnected.
If electricity, clean water, sanitation and nutrition and basic healthcare is not available to half the population, what is AI going to do in next 3- 5 years or whatever ridiculous timeframe Sam Altman keeps talking about .
And this is a not productivity problem, there is more than enough food production capacity to feed the world, yet starvation and malnutrition is not solved.
AI may rock your world, it is not going to rock the world anytime soon even if was like electricity.
Something can be transformative long (long) before its "completely available to everyone ". Clearly electricity is transformative despite 660 million people not giving it.
So I guess it all depends on your definition of "transformative".
If a billion people are affected? 2 billion? One continent? All of them?
If something is big in Australia, Asia, Europe and North America, is that enough to describe it is "rock the world"?
I use it for cooking, proofreading, learning German, skimming long documents, shopping advice (by uploading photos), and asking dumb questions about physics that get me [closed] if I were to post on physics stack exchange, in addition to being a coding assistant.
Farming existed before the combine harvester, and like the combine harvester LLMs are very useful tools in these tasks.
You can't get a useful response from German for Dummies if you ask it to rate the email you're writing in German and let you know what needs improvement, human teachers who can are expensive, and friends may not wish to be constantly bothered by a 40 year old asking the kinds of questions a native speaker might have asked their teacher when they were 13.
Course not. I can make the judgement call "this is good at German" by virtue of all the Germans around me using it.
(Conversely, I'm told it's quite bad at, say, Chinese — though mainly by people online, as there aren't many native Chinese speakers in my life right now).
Electricity probably had niche uses for the first few years but as electrical stuff got better it got used in all sorts of things. I imagine AI will go a bit like that if quicker.
Looking back at the history of electricity, there is early stuff from the Greeks and then:
Considering the exponential increases in invention and adoption of new technologies for the past 200 years, I'm not sure that timeline is very close to what I'd expect from a new technology in this era.
I'd argue that we've already passed peak LLM as I think, after been having burned by it a few times, it's usage as a professional or reliable technology has seceded, rather than accelerated, over the past 6 months. Gone are the days of doom sayers talking about AGI taking over the world and LLMs replacing every single job at the call center and in software teams. Now everyone's scaled back to the things you can actually let it do, which is assist with a lot of coddling/verifying.
AI isn't really a fad. It's going to something more like electricity, say.