> hype for whatever reason

"I need others to buy into LLMs in order for my buy-in to make sense," i.e. network effects.[1]

> Most dot-com companies incurred net operating losses as they spent heavily on advertising and promotions to harness network effects to build market share or mind share as fast as possible, using the mottos "get big fast" and "get large or get lost". These companies offered their services or products for free or at a discount with the expectation that they could build enough brand awareness to charge profitable rates for their services in the future.

You don't have to go very far up in terms of higher order thinking to understand what's going on here. For example, think about Satya's motivations for disclosing Microsoft writing 30% of their code using LLMs. If this really was the case, wouldn't Microsoft prefer to keep this competitive advantage secret? No: Microsoft and all the LLM players need to drive hype, and thus mind share, in the hope that they become profitable at some point.

If "please" and "thank you" are incurring huge costs[2], how much is that LLM subscription actually going to cost consumers when the angel investors come knocking, and are consumers going to be willing to pay that?

I think a more valuable skill might be learning how to make do with local LLMs because who knows how many of these competitors will still be around in a few years.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble#Spending_tenden... [2]: https://futurism.com/altman-please-thanks-chatgpt

I wish we'd measure things less against how hyped they are. Either they are useful, or they are not. LLMs are clearly useful (to which extent and with what caveats is up to lively debate).