It's more like "We were promised, over and over again, that the squirrel would be autonomous grand master level. We spent insane amounts of money, labour, and opportunity costs of human progress on this. Now, here's a very expensive squirrel, that still needs guidance from a human grandmaster, and most of it's moves are just replications of existing games. Oh, it also can't move the pieces by itself, so it depends on Piece Mover library."
even a squirrel that needs guidance from a human grandmaster, is heavily inspired by existing games, and who can use Piece Mover library is incredible. 5 years ago the squirrel was just a squirrel. then it was able to make legal moves. now it can play a whole game from start to finish, with help. that is incredible
Any way you slice it: LLMs provide real utility today, right now. Even yesterday, before Opus/Codex were updated. So the money was not all for naught. It seems very plausible given the progress made so far that this new industry will continue to deliver significant productivity gains.
If you want to worry about something, let's worry about what happens to humanity when the world we've become accustomed to is yanked out from underneath us in a span of 10-20 years.
For reference, I use LLMs daily for coding. I do think they are useful.
I am speaking about corporations and sales tactics, because this VERY experiment was done by exactly such a corporation. How about you think about how "this whole thing works", and apply it to their post? What did they not write? How many worse experiments did they not post about to not jeopardize investments?
I don't find this impressive, because it doesn't do anything I'd want, anything I'd need, anything the world needs, and it doesn't do anything new compared to my personal experience. Which, just to reiterate, is that LLMs are useful, just not nowhere close to as world shattering/ending as the CEOs are selling it. Acknowledging that has nothing to do with being a luddite.
To be a bit pedantic, I'm not accusing you of being a Luddite. That would mean that you were fundamentally opposed to a new technology that's obviously more useful.
Instead, in my opinion you are not giving enough grace to what is being demonstrated today.
This is my analogy: you're seeing electrical demonstrations in front of your very eyes, but because the charlatans who are funding the research haven't quite figured out how to harness it, you're dismissing the wonder. "That's all well and good, but my beeswax candles and gas lamps light my apartment just fine."
It is very impressive indeed, but impressiveness is not the same as usefulness.
If important further features can’t get implemented anymore
The usefulness is pretty limited.
And usefulness further needs to be weighed against cost.
