I feel like LLMs are the same as the leap from "world before web search" to "world after web search." Yeah, in google, you get crap links for sure, and you have to wade through salesy links and random blogs. But in the pre-web-search world, your options were generally "ask a friend who seems smart" or "go to the library for quite a while," AND BOTH OF THOSE OPTIONS HAD PLENTY OF ISSUES. I found a random part in an old arduino kit I bought years ago, and GPT-4o correctly identified it and explained exactly how to hook it up and code for it to me. That is frickin awesome, and it saves me a ton of time and leads me to reuse the part. I used DeepResearch to research car options that fit my exact needs, and it was 100% spot on - multiple people have suggested models that DeepReearch did not identify that would be a fit, but every time I dig in, I find that DeepResearch was right and the alternative actually had some dealbreaker I had specified. Etc., etc.
In the 90s, Robert Metcalfe infamously wrote "Almost all of the many predictions now being made about 1996 hinge on the Internet’s continuing exponential growth. But I predict the Internet, which only just recently got this section here in InfoWorld, will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse." I feel like we are just hearing LLM versions of this quote over and over now, but they will prove to be equally accurate.
Generic. For the Internet, more complex questions would have been "What are the potential benefits, what the potential risks, what will grow faster" etc. The problem is not the growth but what that growth means. For LLMs, the big clear question is "will they stop just being LLMs, and when will they". Progress is seen, but we seek a revolution.
In the 90s, Robert Metcalfe infamously wrote "Almost all of the many predictions now being made about 1996 hinge on the Internet’s continuing exponential growth. But I predict the Internet, which only just recently got this section here in InfoWorld, will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse." I feel like we are just hearing LLM versions of this quote over and over now, but they will prove to be equally accurate.