The AI we've had for over 20 years is not an LLM. LLMs are a different beast. This is why I hate the "AI" generalization. Yes, there are useful AI tools. But that doesn't mean that LLMs are automatically always useful. And right now, I'm less concerned about the obvious hallucination that LLMs constantly do, and more concerned about the hype cycle that is causing a bubble. This bubble will wipe out savings, retirement, and make people starve. That's not to mention the people currently, right now, being glazed up by these LLMs and falling to a sort of psychosis.

The execs causing this bubble say a lot of things similar to you (with a lot more insanity, of course). They generalize and lump all of the different, actually very useful tools (such as models used in cancer research) together with LLMs. This is what allows them to equate the very useful, well studied and tested models to LLMs. Basically, because some models and tools have had actual impact, that must mean LLMs are also just as useful, and we should definitely be melting the planet to feed more copyrighted, stolen data into them at any cost.

That usefulness is yet to be proven in any substantial way. Sure, I'll take that they can be situationally useful for things like making new functions in existing code. They can be moderately useful for helping to get ideas for projects. But they are not useful for finding facts or the truth, and unfortunately, that is what the average person uses it for. They also are no where near able to replace software devs, engineers, accountants, etc, primarily because of how they are built to hallucinate a result that looks statistically correct.

LLMs also will not become AGI, they are not capable of that in any sort of capacity. I know you're not claiming otherwise, but the execs that say similar things to your last paragraph are claiming that. I want to point out who you're helping by saying what you're saying.

So it’s really both.

LLMs may always hallucinate, bad actors are also going to poison models they have control over, but even “good” or “neutral” LLMs are useful to fascists. Because part of the fascist playbook it’s to remove meaning and facts from the language they use. Often their appeal to recruits is that they are telling them what they want to hear or feel, sometimes based on a truth or fact, but it doesn’t matter to the fascists, just like it doesn’t matter to the LLMs.

Nah don't put words in my mouth, I'm mad so much money is wasted on this useless LLM shit. I didn't use the word "AI" once on my post, so the fact that we've had AI for 20 years is beside the point.

The dream of the tech oligarchs is to privatize and centralize everything. LLM's is their tool. Fuck techbros and their Large language bullshit