Blind to Disruption – The CEOs Who Missed the Future

Let us see how this will age. The current generation of AI models will turn out to be essentially a dead end. I have no doubt that AI will eventually fundamentally change a lot of things, but it will not be large language models [1]. And I think there is no path of gradual improvement, we still need some fundamental new ideas. Integration with external tools will help but not overcome fundamental limitations. Once the hype is over, I think large language models will have a place as simpler and more accessible user interface just like graphical user interfaces displaced a lot of text based interfaces and they will be a powerful tool for language processing that is hard or impossible to do with more traditional tools like statistical analysis and so on.

[1] Large language models may become an important component in whatever comes next, but I think we still need a component that can do proper reasoning and has proper memory not susceptible to hallucinating facts.

It may be that LLM-AI is a dead end on the path to General AI (although I suspect it will instead turn out to be one component). But that doesn't mean that LLMs aren't good for some things. From what I've seen, they represent a huge improvement in (machine) translation, for example. And reportedly they're pretty good at spiffing up human-written text, and maybe even generating text--provided the human is on the lookout for hallucinations (and knows how to watch for that).

You might even say LLMs are good with text in the same way that early automobiles were good for transportation, provided you watched out for the potholes and stream crossings and didn't try to cross the river on the railroad bridge. (DeLoreans are said to be good at that, though :).)