LLM Inflation is an interesting choice of terminology. Like with many things in our contemporary society there is a temptation to assign absolute, quantitative value to everyday concepts but realistically we should know this to be a fallacy. Many concepts actually have no "on paper" value but still manifest significant social value. Marketing is the typical example, and yet we don't refer to advertising as inflation (though maybe we should).
This concept probably applies to lots of work in the "AI" space right now. The idea of using huge amounts of compute to generate lifelike voices for LLMs comes to mind as being recently maligned (something many users may not want). Or people upset about getting AI summaries in search that they didn't ask for. And yet, swaths of capital has been invested in these ideas and perhaps its a worthwhile use of resources. I am not sure personally. Time will tell. But I suspect its more complicated than the author is implying here.
This concept probably applies to lots of work in the "AI" space right now. The idea of using huge amounts of compute to generate lifelike voices for LLMs comes to mind as being recently maligned (something many users may not want). Or people upset about getting AI summaries in search that they didn't ask for. And yet, swaths of capital has been invested in these ideas and perhaps its a worthwhile use of resources. I am not sure personally. Time will tell. But I suspect its more complicated than the author is implying here.