In the early 2000s, there were various attempts at smartphones, but they were just not good enough. Then the iPhone came along in 2007, and actually worked! I remember trying one after having used a couple of proto-smartphones, and it was a revelation. So usable, so functional. Everybody rightly predicted that smartphones would be huge, tech companies poured ludicrous amounts of money into keeping up, and a zillion startups were founded with the premise of doing things on/with your phone.
And for a few years, progress really was great. Photos became so good that you could leave your camera at home, and then video became good, and you could share photos and videos directly on social media. Location became reliable and didn't drain the battery, and you could share it with people. Games got good, and inventive. Swipe typing, fingerprint scanners, car integration. The synergies kept coming.
Then, smartphones peaked. Sure, they keep getting technically better. Gigabytes and megapixels keep going up, nanometers and milliseconds keep going down. But no-one except enthusiasts really care anymore. It hasn't felt like phones have been able to do qualitatively new things for the last ten years or so. And the skills you need to operate them have stayed the same. You go buy the latest iPhone or Pixel or Samsung, and expect it to do what the last one did, just a little better. Therefore, the smartphone brands largely market their phones with lifestyle marketing, rarely mentioning those Gigabytes and Megapixels. In fact, you rarely think about your phone, while you use it all the time. It has become part of you and therefore invisible. Like a part of your body.
What has changed is the rest of the tech stack, and indeed the rest of society. You are now expected to always carry a smartphone and use it for a wide variety of things, from logging onto all your digital services, to editing and signing documents, taking the bus, entering the gym, splitting the dinner bill, keeping up with friends, watching movies, and so on. We're always on our phones. That last sentence felt almost painful to write because it is such a cliché. And it is such a cliché because it is true.
Imagine life without a smartphone in 2025. Yes, you'd be kind of helpless. For perspective on this, try traveling to China without installing a VPN on your phone (so you can access your Western apps) and without installing any of the apps that Chinese society runs on, such as WeChat. You will feel like an alien or a time traveler, suddenly materializing in a society which you lack the basic means of interfacing with.
Some things we were promised from the beginning, like augmented reality based on sensors that rapidly and reliably model the physical world around us and incorporate it into the virtual world, have still not materialized and we don't know when or even if we will ever get there. Connectivity is still not guaranteed, and might cut out in unexpected places. Battery life is still bad. Screens still crack. Videos buffer. Pressure on business models has led to the average new smartphone game arguably getting worse, although the best ones are excellent. There are still spam calls. Remarkably, I still cannot walk into a store and be guided to the shelves where I can find the items on my online shopping list, even if I can find them on the store's webpage.
Now think of ChatGPT as the iPhone moment of Large Language Models (I include multimodal models in this term). Then, LLMs are currently where smartphones were in 2010 or so. Let's follow this thought and see where it leads. What would this mean?
Here are some speculations:
Numbers will keep going up, benchmarks will keep being broken, but this will have little impact on most people's use cases. The models will already be good enough for most things you'd want to do with them. Most people don't prove theorems or write iambic pentameter as part of their daily work or life. So the announcement that Claude 8 or Gemini 7 finally beats the HumanitysLastExamFinalFinalThisOneLatest.docx benchmark will be greeted with a ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, much like the announcement that iPhone 16 Pro finally has Hybrid Focus Pixels for its Ultra Wide camera.
Some of the dominant players might be the same as today, others will change. The cost of entering the market will not increase, because there will be a good supply of components (e.g. data, pretrained models) for cheap or free. Apple and Samsung may be the kings of smartphones, but nobody has a majority of the market globally, and there's a constant churn of competitors, some of them really good.
Costs will come down and stay down. You can buy a no-name phone that's good enough for your daily use for $100, or a brand-name one (Motorola) for $200. Similarly, there will keep being good enough LLMs available for free, and an abundance of choice if you're willing to pay. Differentiation will be hard, as all the useful features will rapidly be copied by competitors.
However, society and our tech stack will wrap itself around the ubiquitous availability of good LLMs. We will use LLM-powered software for everything, all the time. These things will be thought companions for most of us, and we will be expected to be in touch with our LLM-powered companions and agents on a more or less constant basis. Imagine life without LLM-powered software in 2040: you will feel mentally naked, a bit stupid, and out of touch with the world around you.
There will be some things that we were promised from the start that will keep on not materializing. I personally believe that hallucinations and jailbreaks will never be "solved", just learned to reckon with. There will also keep being a "normie bias", where LLMs will output things that feel generic and do better the more similar the tasks are to what they have seen before. Yet, they will be incredibly useful for thousands of things, and at least moderately useful for almost anything that can be put into words.
And of course, AI progress will continue. But the interesting progress may not be in feeding token streams to transformers.
I have no particular evidence that the future will play out like this. This was literally just a random thought I had during lunch that got too long for a tweet, so it became a blog post instead. But given the quality of AI forecasting we see these days, it strikes me as just as good a guess as any of the others.
By the way, if you haven't already, you should absolutely read AI as Normal Technology.
