Much as LLM is essentially industrial strength gaslighting, so is the meta around it.
It's not so important. There's not much there. No it's not going to take your jobs.
I am old enough to remember not only the How Blockchain Is Solving World Hunger articles but the paperless office claims as well -- I was born within a few weeks of the publication of the (in)famous "The Office of the Future" article from BusinessWeek.
Didn't happen.
No, a plausible sentence generator is just that: the next hype.
In fact some of the hustlers behind it are the same as those who have hustled crypto. Someone got to hold the bag on that one but it wasn't the rich white techbros. So it'll be here. Once enough companies get burned when the stochastic parrot botches something badly enough to get a massive fine from a regulator or a devastating lawsuit, everyone will run for the hills. And again... it won't be the VCs holding the bag. Guess who will be. Guess why AI is so badly hyped.
If you think the ChatGPT release happening within a few weeks of the collapse of FTX is a coincidence I have ... well, not a bridge but an AI hype to sell to you and in fact you already bought it.
OpenAI is doing a lot more work than just a LLM, despite that being there headline product for now. I'd rather have OpenAI leading the way than Microsoft or Google in this stuff. Despite it's own issues.
I get your pessimism, but the same has been said about a lot of tech that did go on to change the world, just because a lot of people made a lot of noise about previous tech that failed to come to anything doesn't mean to say this is the same thing, it's completely different tech.
A lot of OpenAI's products are out in the real world and I use them everyday, I never touched Crypto, now maybe LLM's won't live up to the hype, but OpenAi's stuff is already been used in a lot of products, used by millions of users, even Spotify.
'A plausible sentence generator is just that: the next hype' - Maybe, but AI goes far beyond LLM as does the products OpenAI produces.
While it can’t plug and play replace and employee yet in my experience at least every dev I see now has it open on their second screen and send it problems all day.
Comparing it to crypto and building that weird narrative you have is just not at all connected to the reality of what the product can actually do right now today.
It's probabilistic and not factual and so everything it outputs must be treated as something the actual answer might sound like and needs to be counterchecked anyways. If I am researching the actual answer already then why bother?
Either there in house team wins out and Microsoft wins.
Or OpenAI wins out and Microsoft wins with there exclusive deal and 75% of OpenAI profits.
Better to have two horses in the race in something so important, makes it much harder than one of the other companies will be the one to come out top.