Yesterday I heard Cory Doctorow talk about a bunch of pro bono lawyers using LLMs to mine paperwork and help exonerate innocent people. Also a big win.
There's good stuff - engineering - that can be done with the underlying tech without the hyperscaling.
An essay writing machine is cool. A machine that can competently control any robot arm, and make it immediately useful is a world-changing prospect.
Moving and manipulating objects without explicit human coded instructions will absolutely revolutionize so much of our world.
That's really the only value those technologies provide, so if people aren't seeing costs come down there really is zero value coming from those technologies.
Maybe it could be a little bit more accurate, it would be nice if it ran a little faster, but ultimately it's 95% complete software that can be free forever.
My guess is very many AI tasks are going to end up this way. In 5-10 years we're all going to be walking around with laptops with 100k cores and 1TB of RAM and an LLM that we talk to and it does stuff for us more or less exactly like Star Trek.
It's better than Whisper, and faster, while running on CPU on my ten year old ThinkPad.
I had Claude make me Python bindings for it and add it to my voice typing app.
We live in the future.
Now I run it through whisper in a couple minutes, give one quick pass to correct a few small hallucinations and misspellings, and I'm done.
There are big wins in AI. But those don't pump the bubble once they're solved.
And the thing that made Whisper more approachable for me was when someone spent the time to refine a great UI for it (MacWhisper).