In the 1980s, modems were slow. 300 baud - that's about 300 bits per second (half a percent of a 56K modem!). But they had some practical utility at that slow speed. Even at a glacial 300 baud, they were about the speed of a human's reading. Throughout the 1980s, speeds got faster, and were more than 30 times faster by 1987.
My first memory of being "online" was on a family trip, using either a 14.4kbps or 28kbps US Robotics modem. Dial-up hiss and all. At these advanced speeds - 50 to 100 times faster than the early BBS modems - I could do more! Load images, play RuneScape, read game guides on GameFAQs. My current gigabit internet connection - more than three million times faster than those early modems - lets me stream high definition movies, have rich telepresence video calls, and play massive multiplayer high-fidelity games.
Current large language models are a bit faster than human reading speed - I find Claude and ChatGPT to be around ~3x-5x my reading speed.
Imagine we can grow compute capacity at the same exponential rate we grew transmission capacity, just like the fiber rollouts of the late 1990s and early 2000s. What happens when the models are 50x faster? Or 3,000,000x? What's the RuneScape, GameFAQs, and video calling of LLM-land? Sounds cool.