Honestly, if you have any actual interest in LLMs or other generative ai variants, just go after a concrete goal post that you yourself set with measurable metrics to gauge your progress. Then the predicted timeline from podcasts and blog posts will become irrelevant. Experts and non-experts have both been terrible at predicting timelines since the dawn of ai. Self driving cars and llms are no exception. When you are making predictions based solely on intuition and experience it is mostly an extrapolation. It is not useless. It always helps to ask questions and try to frame the future within the bounds of our current understanding. But at the same time it is important to remember that this is just speculation, not empirical science. That is also why there is such varied opinions on the topic of ai timelines. Relax and enjoy witnessing a major leap in our understanding of natural language, vision, and high dimensional probabilistic vector spaces ;-)