Internet use grew by 14x between 1997-2007. Mobile phone users grew by 7x between 2000-2010. Smartphones grew by 12x between 2007-2017. In this time we got e-commerce, social networks, online media, taxi and booking apps, educational materials, open source everywhere, the early discoveries in deep neural nets ... Many or most of these were unexpectedly useful and changed society.

We are in a wild west, 2000's bubble period now with AI. I don't think there will be a crash, it's not that, but I think it will take 10 years to see a profoundly transformed world, and 20 years to go beyond our current horizons.

Who will become the rulers of this new era? People like to bet on big corporations because they got the hardware, money and brains. But I think it's misleading. You can run a model on your computer but you can't run 'a Google' on your computer, it will force you to disclose your private data to use it.

But it's possible that AI models will democratise access compared to the centralised internet services. You can install SD or a language model on your own box in privacy. You don't need to wade through spam, you can chat your questions directly to a polite and knowledgeable assistant. Don't need to see any original site at all, or be online for that matter. It's all in the model and maybe a curated corpus of additional content sitting on your drive. Nobody knows what you're doing and they can't put ads in your face. You don't even need to know how to code or know about AI, because its interface is so natural everyone can use it, and use it for new things without needing to reprogram it.

I just described a lifestyle where humans are surrounded by a loyal AI cocoon, a private space for dreaming and creativity that seems to be on the verge of extinction today. That's my dream, what I want to see.