It kind of reminds me of the Y2K scare. Leading up to that, there were a lot of people in groups like comp.software.year-2000 who claimed to be doing Y2K fixes at places like the IRS and big corporations. They said they were just doing triage on the most critical systems, and that most things wouldn't get fixed, so there would be all sorts of failures. The "experts" who were closest to the situation, working on it in person, turned out to be completely wrong.
I try to keep that in mind when I hear people who work with LLMs, who usually have an emotional investment in AI and often a financial one, speak about them in glowing terms that just don't match up with my own small experiments.
I used to believe that until, over a decade later, I read stories from those ""experts" who were closest to the situation", and it turns out Y2K was serious and it was a close call.
I just want to pile on here. Y2K was avoided due to a Herculean effort across the world to update systems. It was not an imaginary problem. You'll see it again in the lead up to 2038 [0].
I try to keep that in mind when I hear people who work with LLMs, who usually have an emotional investment in AI and often a financial one, speak about them in glowing terms that just don't match up with my own small experiments.