Comment by baq
4 days ago
LLMs would be transformative technology if all progress stopped today if only for their NLP capabilities, but the recent models obviously do so much more than that. Winter isn’t coming in that regard; what might happen if models won’t get smarter from here is a race to the bottom in token prices, which would still be not bad at all for token buyers.
Agreed. I've said exactly the same thing before. If GPT-4 from two years ago had turned out to be the endgame of LLM technology, and we collectively spent the following 20 years integrating those capabilities throughout the economy, even that would be a profound change to the world as we know it.
If we froze LLM technology at present-day capabilities and spent the next 20 years on that, I'd expect it to ultimately look transformative in a similar way to the Internet. I mean if you told me in fall 2022 that 2.5 years later I'd be building software by meta-prompting and meta-meta-prompting AI agents to write code overnight while I slept, I'd assume that we were fictional characters in a Black Mirror episode.