Let's ignore the hype and marketing and truly consider LLM as the first stage of "something". The truth is that I've heard a lot of speculation, but no inching towards any of the speculated objective on a practical scale.
For anything else, any such first stage was usually constrained on a very small scale while the glaring issues were ironed out. Now a lot of us are being forced to tolerate what is essentially a prototype or toy in tools and systems that were fine before.
Perhaps LLMs are in the Model T stage? The experience is terrible. Its slow. The roads are muddy and full of ruts. You are bound to break your arm when you spin the crank. But, still, it offers something ever so slightly more than the horse that you put up with it anyway.
More like a Model T that goes fast in the wrong direction, don't respond to the steering wheel, decide to reverse on random occasions,... The road may be bad and the horse is not that great, but no one would hop on that particular model unless for entertainment purposes.
There is nothing fast about LLMs. That is their biggest pain point of all when used in an engineering context. Even if they offered perfect production, you can still do it faster yourself by a significant margin.
> but no one would hop on that particular model unless for entertainment purposes.
Sounds about right. It might be the "in" thing in tech circles, but the people I encounter on an everyday normal basis have never used LLMs. Many of them don't even know what an LLM is. And that's with LLMs being freely available! Imagine if you had to pay to use them. It would be a handful of people at best.
> Natural language is a terrible interface to interact with a computer
And period. It is terrible when interacting with people to. Its only saving grace is that it is widely supported.
> You fundamentally cannot get it significantly better.
It will when we flip the script. The trouble right now is that we're trying to do it backwards. Eventually we'll settle on a programming language as the de facto language of LLMs, that can be translated to natural language for interfacing with the pesky humans still running in legacy mode. That is when transformation will occur.
For anything else, any such first stage was usually constrained on a very small scale while the glaring issues were ironed out. Now a lot of us are being forced to tolerate what is essentially a prototype or toy in tools and systems that were fine before.