If everybody in society “votes” that kind of stuff “down”, the hype will eventually die down and, once the dust has settled, we’ll see what this is really useful for. Right now, it can’t even do fucking chatbots right (see the Air Canada debacle with their AI chatbot).

Not every invention is as significant as the Internet. There’s thing like crypto which are the butt of every joke in the tech community, and people peddling that shit are mocked by everyone.

I honestly don’t buy that we’re on the edge of a new revolution, or that LLMs are close to true AGI. Techbros have been pushing a lot of shit that is not in alignment with regular folks’ needs for the past 10 years, and have maintained tech alive artificially without interest from the general population because of venture capital.

However, in the case of LLMs, the tech is interesting and is already delivering modest value. I’ll keep an eye on it because I see a modest future for it, but it just might not be as culturally significant as you think it may be.

With all that said, one thing I will definitely not do is spend any time setting up things locally, or running a LLM on my machine or pay any money. I don’t think this gives a competitive edge to any software engineer yet, and I’m not interested in becoming an early adopter of the tech given the mediocre results I’ve seen so far.