No, 3D printers are the backbone of modern physical prototyping. They're far more important to today's global economy than LLMs are, even if you don't have the vantage point to see it from your sector. That might change in the future, but snapping your fingers to wink LLMs out of existence would change essentially nothing about how the world works today; it would be a non-traumatic non-event. There just hasn't been time to integrate them into any essential processes.
No, not even close. By 2006 all sorts of load-bearing infrastructure was relying on Google (e.g. Gmail). Today LLMs are still on the edge of important systems, rather than underlying those systems.
Things like BERT are a load bearing structure in data science pipelines.
I assume there are massive number of LLM analysis pipelines out there.
I suppose it depends if you consider non determinist DS/ML pipelines "loadbearing" or not. Most are not using LLMs though.
3D parts regularly are used beyond prototyping though as tooling for a small company can be higher than just metal 3D parts. So I do somewhat agree but the loss of productivity in software prototyping would be a massive hit if LLMs vanished.
