I’m somewhat surprised that I haven’t seen more vigorous commercialization of language models and commercial applications that seem to reliably add real value beyond novelty; this is some update toward thinking that language models are less impressive than they seemed to me, or that it’s harder to translate from a capable model into economic impact than I believed.
Minor point here, but I think this is less to do with the potential commercial utility of LLMs and more relating to the reticence of large tech companies to publicly release a LLM that poses a significant risk of social harm. It is my intuition that in comparison with people on LW, the higher ups at the likes of Google are relatively more worried about those risks and the associated potential PR disaster. Entirely safety proofing a LLM in that way seems like it would be incredibly difficult as well as subjective and may greatly slow the release of such models.
Minor point here, but I think this is less to do with the potential commercial utility of LLMs and more relating to the reticence of large tech companies to publicly release a LLM that poses a significant risk of social harm. It is my intuition that in comparison with people on LW, the higher ups at the likes of Google are relatively more worried about those risks and the associated potential PR disaster. Entirely safety proofing a LLM in that way seems like it would be incredibly difficult as well as subjective and may greatly slow the release of such models.