Comment by HarHarVeryFunny

> LLMs are literally technology that can only reproduce the past.

That's incorrect on many levels. They are drawing upon, and reproducing, language patterns from "the past", but they are combining those patterns in ways that may have never have been seen before. They may not be truly creative, but they are still capable of generating novel outputs.

> They're cool, but they were way cooler 4 years ago.

Maybe this year has been more about incremental progress with LLMs than the shock/coolness factor of talking to an LLM for the first time, but the utility of them, especially for programming, has dramatically increased this year, really in the last 6 months.

The improvement in "AI" image and video generation has also been impressive, to the point now that fake videos on YouTube can often only be identified as such by common sense rather that the fact that they don't look real.

Incremental improvement can often be more impressive that innovation, whose future importance can be hard to judge when it first appears. How many people read "Attention is all you need" in 2017 and thought "Wow! This is going to change the world!". Not even the authors of the paper thought that.