"LLMs are here to stay," is like saying that the modem-based internet of the 90s was forever. It was a largely unusable piece-of-shit tech that was manifestly incapable of delivering beyond a fraction of what the dot-com bubble promised, but it prompted investment in fixing the one thing that prevented that promise: bandwidth.
I can't emphasise strongly enough how this ISN'T happening with LLMs. They are throwing all their money into building ON the broken tech and next to nothing in developing a replacement that has an actual chance at fulfilling the promise LLMs hint at, because there genuinely aren't any plausible pathways to get there from here
The modern AI Bubble is 100% a "modem speeds were good enough and the dot-com companies only failed because they didn't have enough funding to get them over the hump created by the government's regulatory fight with Microsoft" delusion.
Modem speeds are very much not enough and if broadband had proven to be infeasible for some unexpected technical reason, then the web would definitely have faded away into a hobbyist-oriented subculture in the style of ham radio.
@baldur @becomethewaifu While something of a detail, I'd be relatively satisfied with the speeds DOCSIS 3.1 is supposed to be capable of giving me symmetrically or even VDSL2+ asymmetrically. Of course literally no one offers either of those properly, the only (barely) adequately maintained & provisioned network infra is fiber.

90s-tier modems sucked though.