My whole life, I've always found myself excited about new technologies, especially growing up, and how they allowed us to solve real problems. I've always loved being on the cutting edge.

I'm not excited about what we call AI these days (LLMs). They are a useful tool, when used correctly, for certain tasks: summarizing, editing, searching, writing code. That's not bad, and even good. IDEs save a great deal of time for coders compared to a plain text editor. But IDEs don't threaten people's jobs or cause CEOs to say stupid shit like "we can just have the machines do the work, freeing the humans to explore their creative pursuits" (except no one is paying them to explore their hobbies).

Besides the above use case as a productivity-enhancement tool when used right, do they solve any real world problem? Are they making our lives better? Not really. They mostly threaten a bunch of people's jobs (who may find some other means to make a living but it's not looking very good).

It's not like AI has opened up some "new opportunity" for humans. It has opened up "new opportunity" for very large and wealthy companies to become even larger and wealthier. That's about it.

And honestly, even if it does make SWEs more productive or provide fun chatting entertainment for the masses, is it worth all the energy that it consumes (== emissions)? Did we conveniently forget about the looming global warming crisis just so we can close bug tickets faster?

The only application of AI I've been excited about is stuff like AlphaFold and similar where it seems to accelerate the pace of useful science by doing stuff that takes humans a very very long time to do.