I agree, it makes sense for Microsoft to aim for the search big bucks and if it means making Confidently Incorrect ClippyTayGPT they'll do it. My guess is that we'll look back in a few years and say "remember when they introduced LLMs to the world with Sydney? LOL".

But I'd also wager that these short-term affinity hunts won't matter; the cat is out of the bag, Bing/Sydney feels to me like the Napster of tomorrow, and I'm more interested in what the Spotify of LLMs looks like. It might be better to discuss around an extended version of what I wrote earlier:

Any of these tasks can be done by someone who knows what they're doing

...as I think that summarizes where we agree. I hadn't thought of these AIs as the erosion of skill yet but that is indeed what it is: you don't need to know the details, here's a mediocre version that can pass, maybe. It draws a line in the sand where on one side of the line you have people enough in the know to see the difference, and on the other hand you have the clueless who gaze upon the MiG weld in astonishment. Given time and text to churn through, LLMs will inevitably improve and push that line a bit further. Or a lot further. Hard to tell now.

I'm wondering, though, how many people's work will end up at the wrong side of the line. How much white collar work boils down to 'refactor information'? A cousin of mine attempted a job at an investment firm. She'd spent all her day reading patents and applications, and her job was to summarize that (technical, jargon laded) information for the investors to judge easily. Her PhD was needed to apply, yet that job is already on the chopping block with the current models because ChatGPT is almost as good a UI to academically based patents than a PhD-carrying human is.

I'm inclined to draw a parallel that feels trite, so shoot it down if you see the flaw with it: isn't the march of progress almost inevitably towards higher abstractions that can be used by more people? Chris Sawyer famously wrote Transport Tycoon and Rollercoaster Tycoon in Assembly. Today you whip up a generic Game World™ in Unity 5 and plop down assets from a library. It's easier, it's much more accessible, and it almost certainly performs for the worse. My excitement for Felt comes from its fantastic UI for GIS. It makes a set of abilities accessible to a broader audience. At the same time, my old uni has whittled geomatics down from a full department to a small graduate degree years ago because who the fuck needs to know how satellites work when you want to draw five X's on a map?

Fast forward a few years. Oh, shoot, nobody knows how it actually works anymore. Everything is mediocre now. There are more people who can create, but there are fewer people who can do so at the highest level of skill. You need subtitles because nobody does proper audio anymore, your online map doesn't quite put the X where you intended it, your Unity game isn't that fun but it's passable, your AI generated text has some weird phrasing but it does summarize 240 pages of technical patent jargon in less time than it takes you to get out your wallet.