We - including the companies - don’t know what the real “billion dollar application” of them is other than the unproven claim it makes everyone more productive in some general sense. When it doesn’t work people continue to say “it’s your fault not the tool’s.” Meanwhile investors are getting skittish and not one AI company is profitable yet. Companies that laid people off for LLM’s are regretting their decisions, leadership (and educators) is dealing with unvetted writing and having to waste their time cleaning it up, the list goes on. “Slop” is still a huge and growing problem.
LLM’s are here to stay, but IMO it’ll be more relevant in the long run than 3D printers yet less revolutionary than the internet. Everyone will touch them at various points but this whole-life, every-industry-disrupted integration still seems far fetched to me. Pricing is still a huge unsolved problem - everyone is still subsidized and despite gains in using fewer resources, it’s still too much to run these locally, even small models (not even getting into tooling and knowledge required to use them in a productive way).
When we zoom out and look at the whole picture, LLM’s have mostly made everyone’s online experience worse while the VC funded companies behind them are playing municipal and state governments’ for suckers a la Amazon getting so many cities to trip over each other giving away land and tax breaks, but far worse. Those are the biggest contributions so far aside from anecdotes from coders about “1000x productivity.” Again, I think they’re here to stay. But it’s called “AI hype” for a reason.
LLM’s have mostly been a problem creator IME rather than a “disruptor.” Never really seen “revolutionary technology” quite like it.
But hey, I’ll admit it’s useful to have a meh local model when I’m writing TTRPG stuff and have writer’s block. Though then I remember how it was trained, a whole other subject I haven’t even touched, so that kind of sucks too.