@dalias Nice summary. This is far outside my expertise, so I only have to offer a crude analogy:
The trope used to be that data is the new oil, so by that analogy LLMs would be the distilled gasoline?
(Note how this analogy implies that the result powers a huge speedup in e.g. commerce and warfare. Plus brutal battles over control of the oil fields / data warehouses, often ending with autocrats in charge.)
@moritz_negwer @dalias Per @emilymbender publication with Chirag Shah, the proper analogy for LLMs is an oil spill in a fragile ecosystem
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3649468#fn30