I'm not open-minded to arguments about utility, given that I personally witnessed LLMs evolve from interesting but useless toys to insanely helpful tools I use every day.
So the claim is the cost isn't coming down enough to make it make sense for a lot of uses in the long term. When I hear that next to the most wild claims, some by influential people, that the entire white collar workforce is going to be replaced very shortly, it's a bit of a useful reality check.
If I had someone giving me free access to cranes and excavators, I'd be raving about how easy it was to build houses now. But tomorrow when I have to pay full price for them, I'm going to be making very different calculations about return on investment.
The question we need to be asking is "what is the likely full-price cost we'll have to pay for these tools, and is that cost likely to be worth paying?"
What Ed's pointing to is that the full-price cost will have to cover the capital expenditures that have been invested, or the companies which risked that capital will go bust. That gives us a floor for what the full price cost will be, and that floor seems higher than the value being offered by the tools.
Is reading comprehension really this bad nowadays?