#LLMs feel *exactly* like crypto did in 2017, with nearly daily articles about how it can't possibly work, and a die hard community earnestly pleading "but you just don't UNDERSTAND!"
The main difference is that there *are* reasonable use cases. They're just far smaller than people want to admit.
Been hearing about all the positive use-cases *in the abstract* for years now. Never specifics.
Certainly, no use cases that are mission critical (driving, medical diagnosis, weapons deployment), though, due to the endemic hallucination problem—not without expert human review (such as senior programmers, or scientists) of the output.
Which means, at best, a replacement for a *bunch* of junior-level jobs.
Meanwhile the anthropomorphizing of AI companions proceeds apace.
@Mark_Harbinger @scottjenson LLMs can very obviously replace the first tier of phone tech/chat support--basically walking a checklist but accounting for fuzzy input. They're doing this today on all sorts of websites.
They are almost ready to replace drive thru cashiers--some places rolled it out and it had glitches, but I honestly think they'll be there in the next 12 months. It's not mission critical if the bot screws it up and it's cheaper for the restaurant, so of course it will happen.
Basically they're a strong contender to replace a ton of low level jobs, which is not great.
Prediction: There *will* be a hard push to treat the very disruption (paired with the large portion of the population who are establishing relationships with their own AI companions) as evidence of AI being akin to AGI, and use that as reason to secure them rights as legal persons.
At that point, they become a liability buffer for all their corporate owners. That's the endgame.
@Mark_Harbinger @scottjenson I don't see how that would work. You can't punish an AI. You can't recoup damages or enforce jail time. It seems too obviously like a Get Out of Jail Free card.
How is that any different than with the 'legal personhood' of corporations, now?
@Mark_Harbinger @scottjenson Corporations can suffer consequences--you can take their money, or in cases of malfeasance the responsible parties can still go to jail.