LLMs are not the Thing.

LLMs are not the Thing. They're a part of the Thing.

What is the Thing? We don't know yet!

LLMs are magical duct tape that can be used to build the Thing.

Chat bots are a very natural medium for LLMs, and humans have been willing to meet them where they are so far.

LLMs are good enough at it that the interaction pattern feels less like "interacting with a frustratingly baroque and limited phone tree" of previous chat bots.

But it's still not necessarily the most natural interaction pattern for many types of real work for humans.

The "kick off a conversation and then let the LLM drive it wherever it's going to go" is like a leap of faith in the LLM's abilities on a given task.

Other approaches use LLMs not as an autonomous vehicle that drives itself, but as an engine in a car, driven by someone or something else.

We'll look back on this era and say, "why were we so obsessed with chat bots as the Thing?"