Agreed, from what I can see pushing the size of models higher and higher gets you better results but also scales up problems at the same rate. Smaller models are more controllable and more predictable, and just like anything else, specialization tends to produce better results than having one jack-of-all-trades tool that handles everything.
There are fundamental weaknesses with LLMs that aren't present in other approaches. There are strengths to LLMs too, but that's the whole point. I am much more optimistic about the potential to get multiple models focusing on different problems to coordinate with each other than I am about the possibility of getting a single LLM to just be good at everything.
There's a lot of really unbelievably hard problems that are showing up just with GPT-3, and as the model gets bigger, those problems are going to get worse, not better because in some ways they are a consequence of the model being so large. But like... there are domains where you don't care about those downsides, or where those downsides only matter for one specific part of whatever application you're building. So if you can away with just not having GPT-3 involved in that part of your process and doing something else... Don't pound in a nail with a screwdriver.
There are fundamental weaknesses with LLMs that aren't present in other approaches. There are strengths to LLMs too, but that's the whole point. I am much more optimistic about the potential to get multiple models focusing on different problems to coordinate with each other than I am about the possibility of getting a single LLM to just be good at everything.
There's a lot of really unbelievably hard problems that are showing up just with GPT-3, and as the model gets bigger, those problems are going to get worse, not better because in some ways they are a consequence of the model being so large. But like... there are domains where you don't care about those downsides, or where those downsides only matter for one specific part of whatever application you're building. So if you can away with just not having GPT-3 involved in that part of your process and doing something else... Don't pound in a nail with a screwdriver.