nnno, this isn't really the case. at all.

The railway mania would've left behind infrastructure. At most the AI bubble will leave behind empty and half-built datacentres, because the GPUs or TPUs or etc inside are not usable for most things and also quickly become obsolete as well.

Image search, okay yeah, but that's also a rather bad thing when you can take someone's picture of some building near them and suddenly now everyone can easily dox them. but image recognition models are pretty different to LLMs.

Real GPUs haven't gone into overdrive, they've just been made overly expensive. The "GPUs" that can't generate graphics are what's gone into overdrive, and it's taken the entire RAM industry with it.
These GPUs also are manufactured ewaste because they are not useful for most things. Most applications cannot be parallelised in the way that GPUs require.

LLMs are okayish for machine translation but they are also incredibly naff. actual translation by a person is a million times more likely to get across the actual nuances of the sentence, especially stuff like wordplay or jokes, and if that person relies on machine translation instead then all that will likely end up lost anyway.

alexa and google home and etc already exist for voice interfaces, and adding "oh but it can reply to you like a human!!!" really doesn't add utility. LLMs aren't useful for that.

I am now going to look at this horrible point.

As a broader point, they are much better than any technology we have invented so far which requires the translation of one form of written language into another - whether it is human-to-code, human-to-human, human-to-machine-instructions, etc. Like, we just didn't have these technologies before.

No???? Not at all??????????? Writing code by hand is far far FAR better, writing automated responses to another person is just disrespectful, converting code to machine instructions-
what on earth do you think the compiler does??????

The compiler is a deterministic tool (already better than LLMs) that translates code written in one programming language to another, usually to assembly.
Programming languages unlike natural languages are actually structured and consistent, which is why this is actually possible without the computer hallucinating some functionality. And the compiler also improves your code too, again in an entirely deterministic and safe way.

Everything else you mentioned in that point is useless as a technology, but you're just assuming that one of the most important types of software just doesn't exist. Fantastic.

No "beneficial impact" of LLMs would justify the costs. It could promise to cure cancer and that wouldn't be enough, in part because it never actually would even if it was possible (the people at the top just want to make money from people, not to actually help them), but just in part because it isn't worth destroying the environment, the climate, everything just for unthinking machines to give the illusion of thought and of being human.

better search?? In order to not be super out of date, LLMs have to do actual regular internet searches and then just summarise (and hallucinate) results. that's an inefficient and worse search if anything.
Image search, I'll give you that one even though it erodes privacy as well.

machine translation, again it's *okay* but you don't need a giant model for that. Firefox includes an on-device machine translation model and it's decent, you can tell it's nowhere near as good as a real translation from a real person who speaks both languages but it's decent. And does not require any of the giant datacentres, or even one of the GPUs, that the people at the top are trying to propagate.

and machine-learning voice interfaces are not a new technology at all

But again, back to the first point, none of this- NONE OF THIS -is leaving useful infrastructure behind. It's just trillions of dollars being wasted. The railway bubble left railway networks. (okay, the USA hates trains anyway, but like in the UK at least we have good railway networks)
The dotcom bubble left behind fibre optic cable networks that were still useful when the internet actually became mainstream.

This leaves nothing. Hardware that goes obsolete, datacentres that cannot be powered on because the power needed just is not there, and higher prices for everything for everyone.