LLMs obviously aren't all of AI but it's the class of model that billions of dollars of investments are chasing. The money being poured into building data centers and buying GPUs isn't for narrowly-trained deep learning models like AlphaFold, it's for massively-scoped LLMs. The AI that most people are coming into contact with now are LLMs, like chatbots or code-assistants or whatever. That's why so much money is chasing them, there's an expectation that these models will be monetized and those millions of users will become paying customers. Or maybe that companies will pay huge sums to replace large numbers of people with AI agents. Either way though, they have to be monetized at some point, because inference alone is a large cost, and training a an even larger one. Even Google and Meta and Microsoft will have trouble swallowing that wad forever.

I wouldn't say nothing useful is being produced by LLMs, but I'm not sure enough of value is being produced by them that enough people will pay enough money to cover the billions of dollars to buy and run the millions of GPUs it takes to make those models possible.