My most optimistic take on all this is that at least it’s an innoculative response. These LLMs are all a very poor fit for the tasks that are being demanded of them but it’s at least shown us what an effort to implement AI is going to look like. The effects that capitalism will have on its development over that of purely scientific research. Who is going to embrace it and why, and how they intend to use it.

Inwardly I ask myself what it is I think I would even want out of AI at this point and it’s honestly very little. Generative and general AIs even in their theoretical form do not address any of the actual problems I have in my day to day life. I cannot even fit an ideal version into my worldview and maybe that’s a lack of imagination on my part, but having grown up reading decades of sci-fi, I don’t believe so.

When something truly new and transformative is invented, we will know. The inevitability will not need to be explained to us.