I'm someone that used both BERT and GPT-2 5 years ago, and am incredibly disappointed by how little progress the industry has made in that time. GPT-J and GPT-NEO are still arguably competitive with the latest AI models you can use today; that's sad.

Cryptocurrency apologists also used this line of logic. "Yes, today the value of crypto is nothing... but imagine where it will be in five years!" Then we all wait 5 years, and cryptocurrency is still the victim of it's own mindset. Like cryptocurrency, I think LLMs have "technically" solved what they set out to do; generate readable text. But you need more than a solution in search of a problem; there isn't really that much demand for marginally truthful text in the same way completely decentralized currency isn't really necessary for the average well-meaning civilian. I'd even go further and argue that introducing AI into our daily lives requires you to replace something else, something that was probably more accurate and better-designed than the AI replacing it.

If 5 years is a "blink of an eye" for the industry, the entire field will be dead within 18 months. VC just moves that fast.