I don't buy it, it's a better chat bot and has serious problems with fabricating facts that may never be overcome. We've been through hype cycles of chat bots before (remember 'agents' being all the rage on MSN chat in the mid 2000s?) and they move the needle in very small ways.

> I don't buy it, it's a better chat bot

It feels like this is a category error that is causing you to miss the reason there is so much excitement.

It like saying “I don’t get it, the model T is just another car. We have had them before, and most of them are better than what Ford is selling”. The revolution wasn’t that model T cars were way better than what came before - it was that the way they were built enabled huge new markets.

LLMs seem vastly more powerful than the technology previous chat bots were built on. Plus, there is a whole ecosystem of generative techniques being applied to images, videos, sound, and others.

No they don't seem vastly more powerful. They're stochastic parrots--there is no 'intelligence' or problem solving, logic, comprehension, etc. They generate a stream of BS and the applications for that kind of tool are far more limited than the hype implies.

The exact same arguments you make were said about NFT and blockchain. It would revolutionize finance, it would empower people with decentralized finance, that the art world would be totally revolutionized with digital artifacts. All of it was just vapid hype. Much of the same people making those silly claims are doing the same for AI now...

>No they don't seem vastly more powerful.

This is just nonsense, no chatbots before LLM were powerful enough to help me during coding (in any meaningful way); the difference that turns a nerdy pastime into an actual and very useful piece of software.

> No they don't seem vastly more powerful. They're stochastic parrots--there is no 'intelligence' or problem solving, logic, comprehension, etc.

This doesn’t feel like a coherent argument to me. The statement “There is no “intelligence” in LLMs” does not demonstrate that LLMs are not more powerful than previous chat bots. Same for every other loosely defined subjective word you claimed LLMs are not.

Leave aside the question of whether LLMs do comprehension or whether they are a path to AGI. Just ask if they are a more powerful tool than what came before.

Microsoft invested $10 billion in Generative AI (that we know about). As far as we know, they invested nothing in NFTs. Google has been using Generative AI for years, and rewrote their entire Google I/O keynote to talk about it. They've spent billions on it. As far as I know, they spent nothing on blockchain. Amazon has already pre-announced support for Generative AI in AWS. They actually do have a blockchain product, but they certainly don't hype it like they do their AI product. And since they've announced they are building their own foundational model (Titan), you know they are spending at least a billion dollars building it.

So sure, maybe it's all hype, but the big tech companies with the money are certainly putting their money behind AI in a way they did never did with blockchain.

> Microsoft invested $10 billion in Generative AI

1/6th of 2021's profits, btw. If they lost all of it they would still be fine.

While that is true, I think you're missing the point. That they are betting way bigger on AI than they ever did on blockchain.

They've been "betting on AI" for the last two decades.

High accuracy is not vital for all applications. I’d offer code completion bots as a perhaps familiar example of LLMs delivering meaningful value today.

“Thou shalt not doubt”

If it's transformational, measurement will be unecessary.