And they are no better than answering machines for customer service. Sure, they can answer basic questions, but so can the automated phone systems.

This is what drives nuts the most about it. We had so many incredibly efficient, purpose-built tools using the same technologies (machine learning and neural networks) and we threw them away in favor of wildly inefficient, general-purpose LLMs that can’t do a single thing right. All because of marketing hype convincing billionaires they won’t need to pay people anymore.