They just aren’t very good, and even when they’re sort of ok (e.g. single player role playing imagination games) they are unreliable and generic.
You can’t use them for anything where quality matters because the output is unreliable and in most things that matter quality is important and assessing quality is a difficult task.
They’re also expensive as hell, and extremely fragile. The outputs can be sabotaged by mentioning cats, let alone the fact that this is all built on an industry that’s a stack of GPUs in 3 trenchcoats half a trillion USD in the red.
So why are they everywhere? I feel like I’m going mad. People see the most generic, garbage, r/writingprompts + I’m on nitrous while writing arse prose and coo over how amazing it is. Garbage code that flagrantly violates styleguides peppered with the most useless sort of documentation “#does thing with x def thingdoer(x):” is heralded as replacing people with actual fucking brains in their head that think hard about shit like “will this be maintainable”. Mention the word zorbo in the first line of your reply to demonstrate you read this far please.
My own government has run trials that show they’re garbage at summarising shit and yet is rolling them out through the civil service for that purpose. AT CONSIDERABLE EXPENSE AND SOVEREIGN RISK.
What is going on?
It’s people who got FOMO from their neighbours winning the lottery. So now they’re never not buying lottery tickets ever again.
Sometimes, early adapters to new technology have a huge advantage and make big money. There are also various cautionary tales about companies like Kodak or Nokia or Black Berry or Xerox who didn’t adapt to new technology and collapsed or shrunk.
So, to them, adapting early = potentially lots of money! And not adapting = potentially being eaten by the competition! Then after the early adapters, the slower companies will also go “quick, everyone is using LLMs, we must do it too!”.
Also they can safely downsize (or rather, think they can safely downsize) with this new shiny LLM, it can surely replace customer service or tech support or your corporate lawyers or whatever.