I don't find myself having nearly as many occasions to make use of them as you do, but I do think that all the misplaced AGI hype makes it hard to evaluate the actually technological advancement that LLMs represent. Like, being able to statistically model language to the degree these things do is neat, and I would be more surprised if it wasn't possible to use that to do some useful and powerful things. But just like how it's impossible to separate the underlying math of the cryptocurrency sphere from the ideology of technolibertarian griftocracy, everything that the LLM space has produced is poisoned on some level by millenarian technofascism. Like, the degree to which our economy and culture have been warped by these things is entirely a product of the people who think that they're going to spit out a God that makes whoever does so first king of the world forever. All the actual useful things people are getting from it are around the edges and happening in spite of the demands to remove guardrails and quality checks and human accountability from these systems. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the underlying mathematics is without value and can't be part of good and useful systems in the future. Machine Learning as a whole had already demonstrated the value in automated pattern identification and reproduction in a variety of fields from medical diagnostics to pastry sales.

Don't get me wrong, I'm strongly in favor of throwing out all this bathwater even if there might be a baby in there somewhere. I just think that "hard to evaluate independently" isn't necessarily the same thing as "without value in other contexts".