You get a "consultant" whose every word has to be verified against an independent second source, and an """artist""" containing a digest of essentially everything actual human artists have ever uploaded to the web, who's somehow still only able to generate derivative slop utterly undifferentiated from what it's spitting out for everybody else.

LLMs are useful tools, but if they don't lead to something you can actually somewhat rely on to generate correct/consistent/factual results (see e.g. the recent Air Canada chatbot lawsuit) then the hype is a bust. TBD.

> You get a "consultant" whose every word has to be verified against an independent second source So, no different from YouTube Videos or [insert any website here]? That’s still a ton of value to capture and repackage. Especially when it’s packaged into an interface that humans find much more natural (ie. “conversation”) than the existing offerings.

Hence why I said "LLMs are useful tools". But the current hype pitches them as much, much more than ancillaries to traditional web search, hence why I said "[...] then the hype is a bust. TBD."

I just don't believe that LLM's have to reach the impossible bar you set of near-perfect correctness in order to be world changing. Thus, I disagree that any outcome less than that should be considered a "bust".

I'm not sure what else you can call a scenario in which LLMs, currently hyped as (among other things) near-term replacements for human workers in all sorts of professions and positions, are not eventually able to satisfactorily (and cost-effectively) replace even the most low-skilled, largely script-driven customer service workers.

The bar I'm setting is far from "impossible"; even human children generally won't seamlessly confabulate when you ask them a question they don't know the answer to. Again citing the recent Air Canada case, these models can't even reliably answer simple questions that are definitively and objectively answered in documentation that is presumably made as freely available to them as is technically possible under the limitations of current technology.

>LLMs, currently hyped as (among other things) near-term replacements for human workers in all sorts of professions and positions

No well-informed sources are saying that. If you're saying that mainstream reporting and other non-tech folks are wrong about what the possibilities are then... obviously.

> No well-informed sources are saying that.

Yes they are, actually! I've talked to people who obsessively read practically every LLM paper that passes through the arxiv, with undeniably deep and broad knowledge of the current state of this tech, who seriously believe it's going to surpass humans within a year or two. That it may already have, in the deep dark top secret labs beneath OpenAI HQ.

However,

> If you're saying that mainstream reporting and other non-tech folks are wrong about what the possibilities are then... obviously.

If it was obvious then why are you still replying to my comments, which have very obviously been specifically addressing the mismatch between hype and reality? If the current approach doesn't scale, the hype will have been a bust! Objectively! That's what I've been talking about this whole time!

"Mainstream reporting and other non-tech folks" is a bit disingenuous, though. The primary drivers of the current unrealistic hype are software vendors and associated clingers-on looking to make a quick buck. They'll say anything, regardless of whether it's true, and as a result of those mostly-falsehoods our public lives will be flooded with awful AI tools that make everything shittier and more difficult. I can't wait!