LLMs aren’t the end all be all of anything. But they’re clearly a step towards augmenting human cognition and in giving machines the ability to perform cognitive tasks. And when Google says a quarter of its code is being written by LLMs, and DeepMind is making tremendous progress on protein folding and DNA understanding with fundamentally the same technology, it seems pretty clear that we’d miss out on a lot without this.

Full disclosure: I think protein folding and DNA prediction could quite possibly the biggest advancements in medicine, ever. And still, all the critiques of LLMs being janky and not nearly sufficient to be generally intelligent are true.

So yes, I think it’s absolutely on the scale of electrification.