LLMs are transformative, but a lot of the tools around them already treat them as opaque function calls. Instead of piping text to sed, awk, or xargs, we’re just piping streams to these functions. This analogy can stretch to cover audio and video usage too. But that’s boring and doesn’t explain why you suddenly have to pay more for Google Work Suite just to get bombarded by AI slop.
This isn’t to undermine the absolutely incredible achievements of the people building this tech. It’s to point out the absurdity of the sales pitch from investors and benefactors.
But we’ve always been like this. Each new technology promises the world, and many even manage to deliver. Or is it that they succeed only because they overpromise and draw massive attention and investment in the first place? IDK, we’ll see.