Ironically, LLMs are exactly what drives a lot of curiosity and learning without a purpose. I see it all the time on twitter — people getting chatbots into weird mental states, toying around with different systems on top of them, jailbreaking. More for the fun of the game than anything else.

You can't keep that curiosity and at the same time see one of the most wonderful and awe-inspiring technologies of the last decades as something threatening.

The technology itself isn't threatening. The fact that it's currently concentrated in the hands of a very few large US corporations is what's ... less than stellar from my point of view.