That is a problem for the VC’s that bet wrong, not for the world at large.
The models exist now and they’ll keep being used, regardless of whether a bunch of rich guys lost a bunch of money.
These companies are heavily subsidized by investors and their cloud service providers (like Microsoft and Google) in an attempt to gain market share. It might actually work - but this situation, where a product is sold under cost to drum up usage and build market share, with the intent to gain a monopoly and raise prices later on - is sort of the definition of a bubble, and is exactly how the mobile app bubble, the dot-com bubble, and previous AI bubbles have played out.
How? I get that many devs like using them for writing code. Personally I don't, but maybe someday someone will invent a UX for this that I don't despise, and I could be convinced.
So what? That's a tiny market. Where in the landscape of b2b and b2c software do LLMs actually find market fit? Do you have even one example? All the ideas I've heard so far are either science fiction (just wait any day now we'll be able to...) or just garbage (natural language queries instead of SQL). What is this shit for?
Not since the advent of Google have I heard people rave so much about the usefulness of a new technology.
My company uses them for a fuckton of things that were previously too intractable for static logic to work (because humans are involved).
This is mostly in the realm of augmented customer support (e.g. customer says something, and the support agent immediately gets the summarized answer on their screen)
It’s nothing that can’t be done without, but when the whole problem can be simplified to “write a good prompt” a lot of use cases are suddenly within reach.
It’s a question if they’ll keep it around when they realize it doesn’t always quite work, but at least right now MS is making good money off of it.
Microsoft turned itself into a trillion dollar company off the back of enterprise SAAS products and LLMs are among the most useful.
Various minor thing so far. For example I heard about ChatGPT being evaluated as a tool for providing answers for patients in therapy. ChatGPT answers were evaluated as more empathetic, more human and more aligned with guidelines of therapy than answers given by human therapists.
Providing companionship to lonely people is another potential market.
It's not as good as people at solving problems yet but it's already better than humans at bullshiting them.
I could see this being useful in a "dark pattern" sense, but only if it's incredibly cheap, to increase the cost to the user of engaging with customer support. If you have to argue with the LLM for an hour before being connected to an actual person who can help you, then very few calls will make it to the support staff and you can therefore have a much smaller team. But that only works if you hate your users.
