The only answer I need from an AI is 42.

Those things are being solved by other forms of AI, not LLMs. AlphaFold is about the most useful thing AI has done so far and it's not a chatbot.

We get access to entertainment AI, but there could be different forms of AI in use in medical science that have nothing to do with image or text generation.

I think the dream of AI is a servant (or slave) with unlimited potential that can solve, until now, unsolvable problems

Yeah, that's the hype. The reality is that with current LLM tech, it's a slightly more capable text-prediction algorithm.

I've actually worked professionally in the field for a couple of years since it was interesting to me originally. I've built RAG architecture backends for self hosted FOSS LLMs, i've fine tuned LLMs with new data, And I've even took the opposite approach where I embraced the hallucinations as I thought it could be used for more creative tasks. (I think this area still warrants research). I also enjoy TTS and STT use cases and have FOSS models for those on most of my devices.

I'll admit that the term AI is extremly vauge. It's like saying you study medicine, it's a big field. But I keep coming to the conclusion that LLMs and predictive generative models in general simply do not work for the use cases that it's being marketed for to consumers, CEOs, and Governments alike.

This " AI race" happened because Deepseek was able to create a model that was more or less equivalent to OpenAI and Anthropic models. It should have been seen as a race between proprietary and open source since deep seek is one of the more open models at that performance level. But it became this weird nationalist talking point on both countries instead.

There are a lot of things the US is actually in a race with China in. Many of which are things that would have immediate impact. Like renewable energy, international respect, healthcare advances, military sufficiency, human rights, food supplies, and afordible housing, just to name a few.

The promise of AI is that it can somehow help in the above categories eventually, and that's cool. But we don't need AI to make improvements to them right now.

I think AI is a giant distraction, while the the talk of nationalistic races is just being used for investor buy in.

There's a lot of indication that LLMs are peaking. It's taking exponentially more compute and data to get incremental improvements. A lot of people are saying OpenAI's new model is a regression (I don't know, I haven't really played with the new model much). More foundational breakthroughs need to be made, and these kinds of breakthroughs are often the result of "eureka" moments which can't be manifested by just throwing more money at the problem. It's possible it will take decades before someone discovers a major breakthrough (or it could be tomorrow).

You see a new technology with flaws and just assume that those flaws will always be there and the technology will never progress.

Say you start with a prototype for a perpetual-motion machine. Then those flaws will always be there and the technology will never progress.

It is intrinsic in some technologies tthat they're a dead end. That doesn't mean all of them are, but some are just worthless crap and throwing more good money after bad isn't going to change that.

Feelings don't care about logic. It's that easy.