Oh, yeah, I hear you on that as well. It's still a really cool tool! Probabilistic algorithms and other types of decision layering was mostly theory when I was in University. Seeing it go from a "niche class for smart math students" to breaking headlines all over the world is definitely pretty wild.
You are correct that nothing like this was even possible a couple decades ago. From a pure progress and innovation perspective, this is pretty incredible.
I can be skeptical, one of my favourite quotes is "they were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should". I like to protect innovation from pitfalls is all. Maybe that makes me too skeptical, sorry if that affected my wording.
I have some experience in the other direction: everyone around me is hyperskeptical and throwing around the “stochastic parrot”.
Meanwhile completely ignoring how awesome this is, what the potential of the whole field is. Like it’s cool to be the “one that sees the truth”.
I see this like a 70’s computer. In and of itself not that earth shattering, but man.. the potential.
Just a short while ago nothing like this was even possible. Talking computers in scifi movies are now the easy part. Ridiculous.
Also keep in mind text is just one form of data. I don’t see why movement, audio and whatever other modality cannot be tokenized and learned from.
That’s also ignoring all the massive non-LLM progress that has been made in the last decades. LLMs could be the glue to something interesting.