> It’s obvious there’s a “there” there with LLMs (in a way there wasn’t with, say, Web 3.0, or “the metaverse,” or some of the other weird fads recently)

There is a "there" with those other fads too. VRChat is a successful "metaverse" and Mastodon is a successful decentralized "web3" social media network. The reason these concepts are failures is because these small grains of success are suddenly expanded in scope to include a bunch of dumb ideas while the expectations are raised to astronomical levels.

That in turn causes investors throw stupid amounts of money at these concepts, which attracts all the grifters of the tech world. It smothers nacant new tech in the crib as it is suddenly assigned a valuation it can never realize while the grifters soak up all the investments that could've gone to competent startups.