The way I wrap my head around all the Large Language Model stuff (and I toss image generation - things like stable diffusion - into the same pot) is that they are some early simulation of the hive mind.
If you watch enough Star Trek you run into the “Borg”. Some kind of race of half-machines that scoop up living things and assimilate them into a collective consciousness. The thoughts of an individual become part of the collective and an individual no longer has their own thoughts.
Frankly that’s unworkable. If you have a million voices in your head you’d be non functional.
But then, LLMs can write very decent text. Yes they have limitations. Those are not important limitations. A few of those oligarchs are going to throw some spare change at the problem and our anchoring point for “limitations” will scoot upwards by a few thousand miles.
When Google first began to provide the search result AI summary I used to skip them just like I skipped the SEO crap and the advertisement crap.
Then the AI summary got better. It got better to the extent that I began to actually trust it. It took me just 6 months to do this 180.
There’s always the possibility that the summary gets things wrong, but it is useful enough as a first pass. If I have to rely on something, I go to the sources and cross check. But the main thing was now I had a summary and a short list of links. A pretty good map of the information I was looking for.
This is no longer a search engine. It is no longer an index. It is an oracle. It is the mashed together opinions and facts of a billion people on the internet. It should be a recipe for disaster. All we should get is a giant mass of meaningless text. Perhaps well written, but it should be just goop.
But it’s not.
It’s a God-damn summary of the stuff that is coherent, cogent and has the damn citations. It’s real time automatic Wikipedia for what ever subject you want.
It is already good enough that millions of people use that hive mind summary written in excellent and commanding English to plan vacations, weddings and appliance purchases. I’ve used it to solve computer problems.
There is some magic sauce there that I don’t understand, but whatever it is, it probably scales. There is somebody there tweaking parameters somewhere to get that goop to come out as an edible dish and damned if I know how it works, but it works.