LLMs are like the capacitive touchscreen that the iPhone introduced. A novel way to interface with computers. It’s being hyped like it’s the iPhone itself. But it’s really just one piece of it.
It also feels kind of garbage at some major tasks we actually want to use it for - just like typing text on a capacitive touchscreen.
Maybe like the Pentium back in the day?
Yes, exactly. Which is why I still think LLMs are here to stay (in local-only form, none of these hosted solutions). We worked around capacitive touchscreen's limitations and quirks. But the hype and valuations around LLMs at the moment is about as ridiculous as if we were to hype whatever company was behind the iPhone's touchscreen back in 2007. And now these touchscreens can be bought by anyone off Aliexpress.
LLMs don’t feel like a transformative piece of tech. It’s more like the CD changer system you can install in the trunk of your car - “oh yeah that’s cool” but still CDs and sometimes it would lock up.
That's to be expected. We are not plugging anything to it.
Try to do that with a capacitive screen.
Or they're like the 3D TV screen. Something revolutionary and awesome which eventually fades into irrelevance.