It is refreshing to see problems being solved by AI that are not LLMs. There are so many day-to-day challenges that we could solve using data, machine learn and some creativity.
It's well established that machine learning excels at solving classification problems, or those that can be reduced to one.
It saddens me that we're wasting so much of that potential on those stupid stochastic parrots that solve all those non-problems that no one has ever had. It saddens me even more that so many people are absolutely sure that LLMs are "smart", or that they can "think", or even that they're somewhat conscious. And that even if they're not quite that, one more order of magnitude of scale will definitely give us an AGI. Oh that didn't help? Then one more, that will definitely be it.
One real problem that LLMs have solved is that they made natural language processing as a discipline obsolete. They also usually don't suck at summarizing long texts, except when they sometimes do. But that's it, really.