And I'm not an AI doomer, but hell no, give me another space program/station over this every single time and pretty please. We are not pioneering new engineering science or creating a pipeline of hard research and innovation that will spread in and better our everyday lives for the decades to come. We are overbuilding boring data centers packed with single-purpose chips that WILL BE obsolete within a couple years, for what? For the unhinged hope that LLM chatbots will somehow develop intelligence, and/or that people by the billions will want to pay a hefty price for dressed-up plagiarism machines. There is no indication that LLMs are a pathway to meaningful and transformative AI. Without that, there is no technical merit for the data centers being built currently to constitute future-proof infrastructure like highways and railroad networks did. There is no economical framework in which this somehow trickles down to or directly empowers the individual. This is a sham of ludicrous proportions, a sickening waste.

>There is no indication that LLMs are a pathway to meaningful and transformative AI.

Reality check, they are already astoundingly meaningful and transformative AI. They can converse in natural language, recall any common fact off the top of their heads, do research online and synthesize new information, translate between different human languages (and explain the nuances involved), translate a vague hand wavey description into working source code (and explain how it works), find security vulnerabilities, and draw SVGs of pelicans on bicycles. All in one singularly mind-blowing piece of tech.

The age of computers that just do what you tell them to, in plain language, is upon us! My God, just look at the front page! Are we on the same HN?