1.) customers who don't know about the practice, now expect food right away for very cheap price, which bankrupts traditional restaurants that cook from fresh ingredients. An analogy could be off the shelf software or custom software losing sales to vibe coded software
2.) customers who do know about the practice, stops ordering food altogether, due to food issues (prepared ingredients are very low quality, oil could be very dirty) or they could cook prepared food at home in their own microwave for even cheaper. An analogy is programmers coding their own software using vibe coding.
3.) declining quality of food, and less and less people eating out in China. It's gotten so bad that now hotel restaurants, which would be the fine dining options, are setting up food stalls in the street to sell cheap but freshly cooked food, in order to get people into the hotel restaurants. An analogy might be softwares with per seat pricing changing to action based pricing for an initial period.
Almost all the cooking I do are using microwave. While they are not bad, there are certain critical steps microwave cannot do. For example enrich the flavor of garlic and other spices in hot cooking oil. I found microwave is not good at heating vegetable oil and the garlic is more like boiling in lukewarm oil instead of frying. Also it heats food inside out equally as compared to stove which transmit heat from the out layer to inside, as result the food have different textures.
The microwave radio frequency has been selected so the energy will be strongly absorbed by the water molecules contained within the food or drink in the target area.
This frequency does not happen to be absorbed by cooking oils very much.
An approximate rule of thumb is that a nominally powered microwave oven will penetrate an inch to maybe two inches into ordinary food before all the energy has been absorbed so that's about as far as it will heat "toward the inside" rather than from the inside. Unless it's little things like small potatoes where the needed heat forms through-and-through. For much bigger stuff where the deep part can not be energized directly, it can be good to take it easy so the outer target layer can be kept from overheating long enough for the outer layer itself to cook the inside thoroughly.
Or take a break a couple times to stir a large bowl of soup between heating sessions.
The speed oven has kind of taken over a lot of food service. It's how Starbucks offers hot meals, for example. But there will still be a use for steam-jacketed kettles and fryers.
I think LLM is here to stay but cheap output won't have value. We're rapidly tired if its flooding of the zone with spam. The microwave killed some traditional ways of cooking, and the LLM is killing some older ways of communicating. Not because it's better, but because it makes e-mail tiresome.
The microwave oven is a strange choice of metaphor here, considering that even now microwaves sell 100's of millions of units every year, are nearly ubiquitous in households in the western world, are present in nearly every commercial restaurant and kitchen outside fine dining, and reached $5m/year in sales in their first decade, $30m/yr in their second, and doubling basically every decade since, before finally reaching near 100% market penetration and plateauing around $15b year ever since.
I mean, I get the author's point not to over-hype AI, but the microwave oven is one of the most successful inventions in the past 100 years.
How about ... the Segway? I hear whole cities will be designed around them.
The point may be that while AI may become ubiquitous in dev toolboxes, it’s not going to supplant traditional tools and devs who use it only for minor supporting tasks won’t necessarily be at a disadvantage. Kind of like how a chef might use a microwave to soften butter even if they don’t do any actual cooking with one.
That strikes me as a likely outcome. Many other things have played out similarly.
I think the microwave is actually the perfect example, per your data, I, as an AI skeptic don’t think AI is going to go the way of the Segway, I think it will have real solid use cases and quickly grow to sustained usage that will persist. And like the microwave, will plateau long before the “end of all white collar jobs and scarcity” superintelligence, but yeah, a solid $100 billion dollar a year business? Great? But people are investing in it like it will be the only tool ever used for everything, and a multi trillion dollar business.
Ai obviously has solid use cases, it’s just not the whole kitchen.
Microwave oven may not be the best analogy but its a better analogy than Segway because both microwave ovens and LLMs are both definitely not failures. Millions of people pay to use LLMs now. Certain jobs have been entirely eliminated by LLMs (media back office notable - dividing video into distinct scenes, etc).
So the point is even successful new technology can be over-hyped.
Of course, LLMs may or may have a functionality that expands to everything also. Unlike a microwave over, if LLMs have limitations, those limitations aren't visible.
>Today’s microwave can cook a frozen burrito. Tomorrow’s microwave will be able to cook an entire Thanksgiving Dinner.
Actually it went like that in reverse.
They didn't really mass-market microwaves in the 1970's until they were capable of cooking a whole turkey faster than ever, and then developed free microwave cooking lessons well-attended at appliance stores. Where they demonstrated how to cook a whole Thanksgiving dinner, live. You can't make this up. Smelled wonderful :)
There was a very prevalent attitude that the emerging microwave could be nothing less than a major appliance, and there was not yet a concept for launching anything that was not thought capable of replacing a conventional oven right away.
They weighed about 75 pounds and were naturally big enough to hold a turkey.
This is the kind of microwave ovens that Dire Straits was lamenting about delivering at the time, before they got better gigs, with less stress on the hands & fingers.
I didn't find it funny, myself, but I did find it to be a pretty good takedown. It's not funny (to me, anyway) because "humor equals tragedy plus time". It'll be funny in 10 years if/when we're not living in an AI slop hellscape and being constantly bombarded with AI marketing/having it shoved down our collective throats. Right now it's just "ugh, so true".
In China in the year 2025, cooking pre-cooked package in a microwave in a restaurant is now an industry norm. ex.1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oh2_Fj5-m7c. ex.2: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Tp-DfNqDXuo. implications of this are:
1.) customers who don't know about the practice, now expect food right away for very cheap price, which bankrupts traditional restaurants that cook from fresh ingredients. An analogy could be off the shelf software or custom software losing sales to vibe coded software
2.) customers who do know about the practice, stops ordering food altogether, due to food issues (prepared ingredients are very low quality, oil could be very dirty) or they could cook prepared food at home in their own microwave for even cheaper. An analogy is programmers coding their own software using vibe coding.
3.) declining quality of food, and less and less people eating out in China. It's gotten so bad that now hotel restaurants, which would be the fine dining options, are setting up food stalls in the street to sell cheap but freshly cooked food, in order to get people into the hotel restaurants. An analogy might be softwares with per seat pricing changing to action based pricing for an initial period.
I can't blame them for worrying about their health. Hot food and plastic should never mix, unless you want to ingest microplastics.
I can't tell if this is actually about AI or Kubernetes
Almost all the cooking I do are using microwave. While they are not bad, there are certain critical steps microwave cannot do. For example enrich the flavor of garlic and other spices in hot cooking oil. I found microwave is not good at heating vegetable oil and the garlic is more like boiling in lukewarm oil instead of frying. Also it heats food inside out equally as compared to stove which transmit heat from the out layer to inside, as result the food have different textures.
Sounds like the microwave can't deliver enough power. Here's Lan Lam frying capers and shallots in the microwave: https://youtu.be/dJrdXRZ3PUE?t=527.
> Also it heats food inside out equally as compared to stove which transmit heat from the out layer to inside
This is also false, photons don't teleport themselves to the inside of food.
The microwave radio frequency has been selected so the energy will be strongly absorbed by the water molecules contained within the food or drink in the target area.
This frequency does not happen to be absorbed by cooking oils very much.
An approximate rule of thumb is that a nominally powered microwave oven will penetrate an inch to maybe two inches into ordinary food before all the energy has been absorbed so that's about as far as it will heat "toward the inside" rather than from the inside. Unless it's little things like small potatoes where the needed heat forms through-and-through. For much bigger stuff where the deep part can not be energized directly, it can be good to take it easy so the outer target layer can be kept from overheating long enough for the outer layer itself to cook the inside thoroughly.
Or take a break a couple times to stir a large bowl of soup between heating sessions.
This is where inverter microwaves come into play, lower constant power to let the heat conduct evenly.
The speed oven has kind of taken over a lot of food service. It's how Starbucks offers hot meals, for example. But there will still be a use for steam-jacketed kettles and fryers.
I think LLM is here to stay but cheap output won't have value. We're rapidly tired if its flooding of the zone with spam. The microwave killed some traditional ways of cooking, and the LLM is killing some older ways of communicating. Not because it's better, but because it makes e-mail tiresome.
Yeah, we will also not have a tongue anymore to enjoy the taste of good food.
I love microwave, but the usual "if all I have it's a hammer..." is a thing
This, but instead of a microwave, a pressure cooker, one of those new electric ones. I love mine and use it daily.
Microwaves are relatively simple machines with fundamental limitations in how they cook food.
With gen AI, it’s much less clear cut what the long-term limitations are.
I agree microwaves are not really the same kind of thing as AI. Machines in general as in the industrial revolution are probably a better analogy.
> it’s much less clear cut what the long-term limitations are.
Looking back on BERT I can name a handful of dealbreakers that haven't changed and have no solution on the horizon.
Did you read the article? It makes that exact same point.
The microwave oven is a strange choice of metaphor here, considering that even now microwaves sell 100's of millions of units every year, are nearly ubiquitous in households in the western world, are present in nearly every commercial restaurant and kitchen outside fine dining, and reached $5m/year in sales in their first decade, $30m/yr in their second, and doubling basically every decade since, before finally reaching near 100% market penetration and plateauing around $15b year ever since.
I mean, I get the author's point not to over-hype AI, but the microwave oven is one of the most successful inventions in the past 100 years.
How about ... the Segway? I hear whole cities will be designed around them.
The point may be that while AI may become ubiquitous in dev toolboxes, it’s not going to supplant traditional tools and devs who use it only for minor supporting tasks won’t necessarily be at a disadvantage. Kind of like how a chef might use a microwave to soften butter even if they don’t do any actual cooking with one.
That strikes me as a likely outcome. Many other things have played out similarly.
I think the microwave is actually the perfect example, per your data, I, as an AI skeptic don’t think AI is going to go the way of the Segway, I think it will have real solid use cases and quickly grow to sustained usage that will persist. And like the microwave, will plateau long before the “end of all white collar jobs and scarcity” superintelligence, but yeah, a solid $100 billion dollar a year business? Great? But people are investing in it like it will be the only tool ever used for everything, and a multi trillion dollar business.
Ai obviously has solid use cases, it’s just not the whole kitchen.
Microwave oven may not be the best analogy but its a better analogy than Segway because both microwave ovens and LLMs are both definitely not failures. Millions of people pay to use LLMs now. Certain jobs have been entirely eliminated by LLMs (media back office notable - dividing video into distinct scenes, etc).
So the point is even successful new technology can be over-hyped.
Of course, LLMs may or may have a functionality that expands to everything also. Unlike a microwave over, if LLMs have limitations, those limitations aren't visible.
Is this satire??
It's satire describing the current state of AI hype. Pretty accurate in my opinion (although not very funny).
Really? I found it absolutely hilarious.
Um, yeah, but I'm still trying to figure out if it's funny.
This was amusing:
>Today’s microwave can cook a frozen burrito. Tomorrow’s microwave will be able to cook an entire Thanksgiving Dinner.
Actually it went like that in reverse.
They didn't really mass-market microwaves in the 1970's until they were capable of cooking a whole turkey faster than ever, and then developed free microwave cooking lessons well-attended at appliance stores. Where they demonstrated how to cook a whole Thanksgiving dinner, live. You can't make this up. Smelled wonderful :)
There was a very prevalent attitude that the emerging microwave could be nothing less than a major appliance, and there was not yet a concept for launching anything that was not thought capable of replacing a conventional oven right away.
They weighed about 75 pounds and were naturally big enough to hold a turkey.
This is the kind of microwave ovens that Dire Straits was lamenting about delivering at the time, before they got better gigs, with less stress on the hands & fingers.
Don't ask me how I know . . .
If you didn't laugh, I would say "not funny".
I didn't find it funny, myself, but I did find it to be a pretty good takedown. It's not funny (to me, anyway) because "humor equals tragedy plus time". It'll be funny in 10 years if/when we're not living in an AI slop hellscape and being constantly bombarded with AI marketing/having it shoved down our collective throats. Right now it's just "ugh, so true".