Comment by m0llusk

It seems that innovators, researchers, and founders all work at a fast pace, but adoption of new technology, especially LLMs, ends up being done by companies as is convenient. When an open position can go unfilled or a group can scale up without hiring then companies might move forward with a commitment to LLMs.

Even with strong adoption it may take many years for LLMs available now to reach their potential utility in the economy. This should moderate the outlook for future changes, but instead we have a situation where the speculative MIT study that predicted "AI" could perform 12% of the work in the economy is widely considered to not only be accurate, but inevitable in the short term. How much time is needed dramatically changes calculations of potential and what might be considered waste.

Also worth keeping in mind that the Y2K tech bust left behind excess network capacity that ended up being useful later, but the LLM boom can be expected to leave behind poorly considered data centers full of burned out chips which is a very different legacy.