The Magic 8-Ball vs. Gen AI: a surprisingly interesting comparison (opens in new tab)

Two products\. Both fortune-tellers\. Wildly different operating costs\. One Is a Plastic Sphere Filled With Alcohol\. The Other Is a Trillion-Dollar Bet on the Future of Compute\. They Do Roughly the Same Job\. In 1950, Brunswick Billiards commissioned a Cincinnati novelty firm to design a giveaway\. The result was a plastic eight-ball with a 20-sided die suspended in dark blue alcohol and twenty pre-printed answers\. The product cost two dollars and outlasted roughly seven generations of pe...