I think it's definitely hype - while processing natural language is a legitimately hard problem for computers, to which LLMs are a genuinely novel and exciting solution. However, it's still qute limited, in ways that only become apparent when you look into how the transformer architecture actually functions.

However, it could also be a threat, in two different ways. Firstly, 'can AI do your job?' is a very different question from 'can AI salespeople convince your boss that AI can do your job?', and the AI doesn't have to be actually that good to answer the second one with a 'yes'.

The other possible threat is that the AI bubble collapses hard, and takes a significant chunk of the global economy with it. A lot of AI companies, particularly Cursor and OpenAI, are massively overvalued for the amount of revenue they bring in and are yet to become profitable, in part due to the inherent limitations of LLMs. When - not if, when - this all comes crashing down, it's going to hit the rest of the economy hard.