That's a fair distinction. That being said, at their core llms are just big functions. You could cover a dartboard in subfields of physics, toss a dart randomly, and I'd bet money you hit a field that finds use for the bessel functions for instance. I am not informed enough on the specifics of llms to say either way, but there's definitely precedent for "we found this really powerful function and it turns out it accurately predicts 10 shitloads of unrelated systems."

To double down on my devils advocacy, the projects I have personally seen or been consulted for that fit the form "use llm to solve non-nlp problem" are 99% propelled by "funding for Ai buzzwords flows freely" and "understanding of the limitations of different kinds of ai is rare"

Yeah. That's the most frustrating part of it to me. Statistical learning is really limited in the applications it's good at, but it excels wildly where it excels. Its a specialized scalpel, but the people who are the public face call it "ai" and market it as a cure all for the pesky problem of having to pay workers