>> Virtually every day I get excited about a new thing I could do with it.

That is pretty much the definition of a hype cycle. I am old enough to remember the flury of microwave cookbooks that came out in the 90s when the microwave became commonplace. People were finding out new things they could do with the microwave each day. These days it is mostly used for warming up food and microwave popcorn

But we all have a microwave… because ultimately they are really useful

Yes they are useful, just not for cooking five course meals. AI will have it use, the only question is for what.

The question is what __else

It already has so many uses. That’s my point. There will be more, unknown uses, but there are a lot right now that are already potentially world changing.

All things in a hype cycle have this characteristic but not all this that have this characteristic are a hype cycle. The iPhone is an example. I remember iPads people laughed “it’s a giant phone! So silly!” Etc. To the point made, something can be in a hype cycle because it is obviously useful, but for what we aren’t sure - so there’s a huge creative grasping, and convergence of hucksters and con artists, that boils down into what is the long lasting utility. (Ala microwave)

The thing is the utility is realizes right now by a lot of folks and the only tool folks are using is a crappy web UI onto a chat bot. Crypto had no utility ever, just some crypto anarchist dream of a world without the Treasury. VR is neat but rarely useful.

The microwave oven was a byproduct of inventing radar, and radar was not invented for the purpose of heating food.

Radar continued to evolve (klystron, traveling-wave tube, etc.) and eventually led to huge technological developments like satellite communications and WiFi, while microwave ovens stagnated since their first commercial release in 1947.

In the 1970s they got cheaper/smaller/more reliable, but those 70s models are functionally identical to ones we use today. Half a century has passed and either model will safely heat up your dinner, in the same way, in the same amount of time.

LLMs are radar. ChatGPT is the microwave oven, or perhaps just a radar dish crudely pointed at a pizza. We will see a lot more uses for LLMs beyond things like ChatGPT.