This time, it feels different
Geez people. Please learn to identify hypes, but most importantly the causes of hypes.LLM is fundamentally information processing technology. Not the path to AGI, not an emerging sentience.The reason "this time" feels so amazing is that the unwashed masses suddenly got access to new information processing technology in a context where their tools been stagnant for decades.Not because it was not possible, but because there was no money in it.To understand my argument and its implications, humor me for a moment and imagine a universe in which everyone was already using linux computers and for a decade now published papers of ML/DL were available for people to use. So  there were various crowdsourced indices and models of all sorts, which people incrementally embedded in their information processing workflows.In that universe there would be no room for the delirious reaction we have here. It would be incremental evolution of search, knowledge bases, algorithmic content generation etc.What we have experienced instead in these past decades is information tool starvation. These incrementally improving tools, while nothing but known and ultimately mundane algorithms were not available except within a tiny elite.In fact, people's information processing capability arguably declined as the desktop platforms got downgraded, adtech toxic waste covered the information landscape etc.What is happening now is that a socioeconomic and artificially induced scarcity is now being broken (for reasons that require serious piecing together of events).So while on the surface this hype is as distastful as any illustration of
human lemming behaviour, there is enormous silver lining if we succeed to read its causes.These tools are here, have been here for a while and they can be inserted into our ever growing information processing toolkit. The risks are there to match the opportunities.The biggest risk of them all is precisely what has led to the current situation. Technology not diffusing normally, but controlled by gatekeepers.