[maiar]

Right. The fundamental difference is that LLMs are a technical achievement that almost no one expected to come this fast. Neural networks were long considered a dead approach—not anymore. In 2015, most of us thought we’d be where we are today in NLP circa 2040.

The business fad will no doubt end in a fiery crash as people discover the hard way the limitations of LLMs, but the underlying achievement is still real. This is more like 2001. Lots of dot-coms died either because they were silly or tragically ahead of their time, but the Internet never went away. (Unfortunately, it does seem to be evolving into a worse version of itself due to platform decay, but that’s another topic entirely.)