@sun i figure the next stage and longer tail of the commercial end after the outrageous debt and speculation in the consumer market pops is latching onto workflow data to provide company- or domain-specific finetunes or strapon autoencoders. i'm sort of surprised on a longer term scale that isn't already the case, that the foundation models can be 'good enough', the economics restrictive enough where the ai giants are not licensing weights, the ui problem where people gravitate towards their favorite box, etc. haven't made that more of a thing yet. it's all still selling prefilled context windows at best, and all those businesses are doing terribly. i do wonder if the consumer market has been too poisoned by the chatbot modality to be able to adopt the 'whole life surveillance/whole life product surface' shift that google and microsoft have been trying to push, and these kinds of economically viable domain-specific products will always just look like Hated Work SaaS App.
if you stretch the boundaries of what you consider "AI" to include an assemblage of purpose-built models and algorithms, then at the outer limits there you start to get back to "normal computing." the language | program interface is still, as far as i can see, an intractable one in the general sense, where the leap from text generation to tool calling can land you somewhere but it can also yeet you off into space. i would say on latest model anthropic and openapi models i get about a 50/50 chance of whether the thing is capable of spawning a subagent or whether it fails and makes excuses about it (and sometimes even simulates the output of a subagent but in the debug logs you can see it failed the tool call). That's a non-negotiable barrier that doesn't have an easy technological solution in sight that prevents the wildest subdomain takeover scenarios, but in the meantime a lot of stuff sort of works and for most people that seems to be alright.
but yeah if one gets past all the sentient god-machine occultism, it's not hard to imagine this generation of tech giants going the same way at the prior (current?) gen, spinning off their magic product into a thousand derivatives that capture a lot of cash, displace a lot of labor, provide some useful services as a byproduct, etc.
most of my serious reservations come from the economic and epistemic violence of it all, and i definitely do active research into the failure modes, but of course they do some things, and as you say it's important to stay appraised of the real capabilities both to calibrate criticism and appreciate what can be done.
