Fair. I don't mean to suggest LLMs have no use, but I do mean to suggest that we are in a period of gross overfitting.
At the end of this all, I think they'll be best suited as massive noise generators. Human beings already generate waaaaaay more data than we know what to do with. With LLMs at our disposal, we'll be able to do so to the Nth degree. It will be the age of spam.
As for real applications, sure it can get you started, but you still have to review and massage the output. In some cases this may help you get past the "fear of the blank page" but in others just doing it yourself to begin with instead of finding clever ways to prompt the LLM to get what you really want would have been more efficient in the long run anyway when you factor in output reworking.
Yeah, I agree with you on the overfitting, but I think when the dust settles the working uses for it will emerge and the rest will be trashed. To your point, I think its fully open-ended uses such as a chatbot will relatively fade. I predict the real value will come out in converting user-intent in some subdomain into a deterministic set of options. The schedule conversion in the article is a common example of this.
If you build these small, domain-specific use cases into a user interface, things just get easier for the user. A big benefit of this is that you already have a ton of context, so the user doesn't have that burden.
At the end of this all, I think they'll be best suited as massive noise generators. Human beings already generate waaaaaay more data than we know what to do with. With LLMs at our disposal, we'll be able to do so to the Nth degree. It will be the age of spam.
As for real applications, sure it can get you started, but you still have to review and massage the output. In some cases this may help you get past the "fear of the blank page" but in others just doing it yourself to begin with instead of finding clever ways to prompt the LLM to get what you really want would have been more efficient in the long run anyway when you factor in output reworking.