Remember when people thought crypto and NFTs were the new oil... lol. LLMs will have staying power, there's just a day where this seems like it's all going to run on our laptops. OpenAI's fear of that and tanking the RAM market was just a temporary setback.

Oils probably a poor metaphor but between the ubiquity of companies deriving significant value from data + analytics on larger than memory datasets and the recent mad rush for training data I don't think that is the wildest tech prediction ever.

I think LLMs are more likely to end up as something boring we don't think about like cloud computing but I don't think comparisons with crypto etc are fair as it's a much more generalisable technology.

But they were right? For good or ill data and digital services are more valuable and just as ubiquitous as oil.