Dot-com boom/bubble all over again. A whole bunch of the current leaders will go bust. A new generation of companies will take over, actually focused on specific customer problems and growing out of profitable niches.
The technology is useful, for some people, in some situations. It will get more useful for more people in more situations as it improves.
Current valuations are too high (Gartner hype cycle), after they collapse valuations will be too low (again, hype cycle), then it'll settle down and the real work happens.
The existing tech giants will just hoover up all the niche LLM shops once the valuations deflate somewhat.
There's almost a negligible chance any one of these shops stays truly independent, unless propped up by a state-level actor (China/EU)
You might have some consulting/service companies that will promise to tailor big models to your specific needs, but they will be valued accordingly (nowhere near billions).
Yeah, that's probably true, the same happened after the dot-com bubble burst. From about 2005-15 if you had a vaguely promising idea and a few engineers you could get acqui-hired by a tech giant easily. The few profitable ones that refused are now middle-sized businesses doing OK (nowhere near billions).
I don't know if the survivors are going to be in consulting - there is some kind of LLM-base product capability, you could conceivably see a set of LLM-based products building companies emerge. But it'll probably be a bit different, like the mobile app boom was a bit different from the web boom.
That's been the 'endgame' of technology improvements since the industrial revolution - there are many industries that mechanized, replaced nearly their entire human workforce, and were never terribly profitable. Consider farming - in developed countries, they really did replace like 98% of the workforce with machines. For every farm that did so, so did all of their competitors, and the increased productivity caused the price of their crops to fall. Cheap food for everyone, but no windfall for farmers.
If machines can easily replace all of your workers, that means other people's machines can also replace your workers.
Yeah, the overblown hype is a feature of the hype cycle. The same was true for the web - it was going to replace retail, change the way we work and live, etc. And yes, all of that has happened, but it took 30 years and COVID to make it happen.
LLMs might lead to AGI. Eventually.
Meanwhile every company that is spruiking that, and betting their business that that's going to happen before they run out of VC funding, is going to fail.
The technology is useful, for some people, in some situations. It will get more useful for more people in more situations as it improves.
Current valuations are too high (Gartner hype cycle), after they collapse valuations will be too low (again, hype cycle), then it'll settle down and the real work happens.