Baldur Bjarnason"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.
Carter Nightshade 
And if you think LLMs are "good enough" as they are, then the only thing I can say is I hope you're right because at the moment it looks like the tech industry is trying to bake a broken toy into every aspect of our society in the belief that the only thing that actually "breaks" tech is regulatory interference
Addendum: even if we were on the path towards developing an “actually works” replacement to current era LLMs—which all suffer from the same problems—that hypothetical future tech is not what’s being baked into everything. Even if they did manage to magically come up with an LLM that “works” nobody’d be using it because broken shit will be what’s built into everything.
Responding to “modem speeds are unworkable and if we don’t fix that the internet is a dead end fad” with “the internet is still extremely useful” isn’t a counterargument, it’s self-identifying as a member of the subculture that will remain after the fad peters out
The difference between thinking about how any given tech impacts you individually—harm versus utility—and thinking about how it impacts society if adopted at scale is effectively the difference between concluding that:
“Cars are fine, actually, the bigger the better. So helpful.”
Versus…
“We’re destroying ourselves and our planet because public transport is less profitable than the car industry.”
jakob.pxi@baldur I don't know if I phrased it succinctly enough, but I think there are different and more incentives at play in business adoption than the oft discussed "it need not be able to replace you, just convincing enough for your boss to fire you over the promise of capabilities" and overleveraged data center investments. There is a landgrabbing rush for interface control going on that very much aligns with business tenets of controlling distribution channels.
@jakob Ah, that’s a good point
Cassandrich
DianeI suspect there is an unspoken motive for sticking LLM into everything.
I think they're trying to get us to pay for another tool of oppression. LLMs are effective at manipulating people and automating surveillance so they need fewer secret police to prevent us from overthrowing them as the climate crisis get to be unlivable