The technology itself is not useful. What they're really selling is the data it was trained on. Most of which was generated by students and the working class. So there's a unique extra layer of exploitation in these pricing models.
...I don't understand where this take keeps coming from.
You can be upset that the models were trained without compensating the people who made the training data. You can also believe that AI is overhyped, and/or that we're already near the top of the LLM innovation curve and things aren't going to get much better from here.
But I've had LLMs write entire custom applications for me, with the exact feature set I need for my own personal use case. I am sure this software did not somehow exist fully formed in the training data! The system created something new, and it's something that has real value, at least to me personally!
> I am sure this software did not somehow exist fully formed in the training data!
I'm sure it did exist in the training data. It's trained on Github and Stackoverflow. You "custom" application has already been written many times before.
And every time I tested a feature and changed my mind about the minutia of how it should work, and I gave the AI new instructions and it complied--every permutation of that already existed in some GitHub repository somewhere?
I'm sorry, I just find that exceedingly hard to believe. There is a lot of legacy code out there in the world, but not that much!
