> You seem to have an axe to grind
Unless you are vested in the highly unlikely commercial success of LLM companies, you should have one to grind too. I have been running my own business for quite some time, with quite some success. However if we lied to our customers the way the AI companies outright lie, if we just once promised with definitive authority to deliver something major within a specific timeframe - and then did not deliver - we'd have been out of business a long time ago. We'd also be out of business a long time ago if we had miniscule revenues compared to our expenses, i.e. if we we had a relation of expense to income of 20:1, like LLM vendors mostly do. So yes, I do have an axe to grind when it comes to liars and manipulators to which these classic rules of capitalism apparently do not apply any more, because something something "China"/AI race/bullshit .
> you're going to have a hard time arguing LLMs did not have a disruptive effect on the world
"Disruptive" as we commonly came to understand the word as popularised in the 2010s or so, means something with impact, perhaps removing an entire industry, but replacing it with something that has a positive end-effect for the end customers. Uber was disruptive to the taxi industry, but delivered some kind of improvement for the end-user (the ethics of on whose expense aside). But it's hard to argue it did deliver some kind of value. Or low-cost airlines, etc.
LLMs are nothing like that. For whom do they deliver a palpable improvement in value? Why the fuck does everyone who is pushing them always coming up with some bullshit creative explanations about the benefits, always very theoretical and never in the present. Give me one fucking sensible use case, beyond the typical office worker using it as a life boat to navigate their meaningless job by producing more powerpoint slides.