LLMs do have purposes, and they had purposes before this current crop of chatbots dubbed “AI” came along. The problem is with “generative AI”.

Cory Doctorow has a great article about it here. It’s an “emperor wears no clothes” situation.

In the 500+ employee businesses Suresh studied, the only people who were promoted — or even spared from being fired — were people who professed “religious declarations of faith” about “the transformative power of AI.” Employees who voiced honest, informed objections to AI in the workplace were passed over for promotions or targeted for layoffs.

This has created a situation in which everyone — “boards, executives, employees, vendors, consultants” — has a strong incentive to lie about how much AI is delivering for their companies. Suresh says he’s seen announcements from publicly traded companies about their AI triumphs that he knows for a fact never took place.

Suresh says he’s never seen a successful enterprise AI project: “Every single one — we have seen 0% success in a year and a half.”

Additionally, all of the AI companies are still operating in the red. They still aren’t turning a profit 4 years after the release of ChatGPT.