As someone working in a field that has used NLP for quite some time - yeah, I generally agree that those investments are worth their weight in gold... which is unfortunate because before ChatGPT came along they were viewed as niche unprofitable money-sinks. The astronomical investments we've seen lately have been in general models which can be leveraged to outperform some of our older models but had we wanted purely to improve those models there were much more efficient ways to do so.

Hopefully we can retain a lot of this value when the bubble bursts but I just haven't seen any really good success stories of converting these models into businesses. If you try and build as a middleman where you leverage a model to solve someone's problem they can always just go to the model runner and get the same results for cheaper - and the model runners seem (so far - this may change) to be unable to price model usage at a level that actually makes it sustainable.

Those older models running specialized tasks seem to be trucking along just fine for now - but I remain concerned that when the bubble bursts it's going to starve these necessary investments of capital.