I heard someone describe LLMs as useful in the context of being handy plugins which tallies with what you’re saying. In certain situations they’re useful. The problem is that they’re being completely misrepresented and sold as being able to do things that they can’t do consistently or well so the hype and astronomical sums of money being thrown around is problematic.

Well there you go. Another argument in support of AI being not nearly as big of a deal as the fanboys would have people believe.

If you blame the users (e.g. Steve Job’s “you’re holding it wrong”) it rarely ends well.

I suspect part of it is that every company wants to be the one to outlast the competition and become the de facto AI company everyone uses. They want to be the 90’s Microsoft of AI. To this end, they’re all setting fire to giant piles of money.

Maybe I’m wrong but even if one clear winner emerges, I don’t see AI becoming that big of a market. They’re trying the heroin dealer approach of giving away cheap or free product so they can get people hooked and then jack up the prices on a bunch of people who will lie, cheat, and steal to get their next fix. Except AI slop isn’t heroin, it’s just slop.

Slop that produces inaccurate results and then tells you it did no such thing.

I’d rather have neither. Nuclear’s time has passed.