Some thoughts about LLMs
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I read canfoods recent article about how, sometimes, you 
suddenly feel like an era is over and something new begins.
This is a feeling i can very much relate to. For me, such
moments where when the Berlin Wall was teared down (at that
time i was a bit too young to get the weight of what was 
happening... but it felt like a massive change), the next
such thing was when i first chatted with a classmate (who
at that time was an exchange student in the US) back in the
early 90s over some BBS (or was it already IRC?) - it felt
like the world got much, much smaller in an instant. 

My wife, who is from vietnam, has many, many talents. 
Learning languages is not among them. She struggled since 
her arrival for studying here in germany (about 16 years 
ago) to this day to get fluent in german. Yes, she can get
around and finished her degrees absolutely well - but it is
a thing that is constantly bothering her. At end of last 
year she tried out ChatGPT and since then her german began
to improve massively. 

Why?

Well, because ChatGPT (or any other LLM) can be a language
teacher that is never tired, that gets never bored or gets
frustrated if you need to repeat the same lesson, fail at
the same points or needs to ask the same question a 
thousand times over. 

In a way it feels a bit like the time the internet got 
adopted by a wider audience, things like Wikipedia and 
Youtube started to appear and the whole knowledge of the
human civilisation began to get very accessible. I mean, 
one thing Youtube is amazing at is to show you how to do 
stuff, how to repair something, how to build something, how
to get the damn backlight replaced in your damn baking oven
that is out of production for 20 years. 

Its one thing to read how something is done, but sometimes
(especially with physical things) it is much better to see
how it is done. Now, having the opportunity to see a master
craftsman do something over and over again, having the 
option to pause the video, wind back a few seconds, view it
again... until you have UNDERSTAND how it is done - that is
a learning opportunity not even an apprenticeship can give
you.

Or getting back even a bit more:

What must it have been for the knowledgable person back in
ancient times, back when knowledge was transported by 
word from master to student, when the first real writing 
systems appeared? What a lever for knowledge that must have
been... being able to read on knowledge some far of sholar 
has acquired, without traveling to this sholar, let alone
being accepted as a student by him! 

I don't know how you, dear reader, may be acquainted with
the Star Wars lore, or more specifically, with the whole
"extended universe" that appeared as literature since the
orginal trilogy. In this lore there is a fictional device
called a Holocron where a jedi master records his knowledge
in - something like an interactive wiki including a
digital representation of the recording person - to be able
to teach and give on his knowledge long after passing.

Or to use another sci-fi franchise:

In the TNG Episode 3x06 "Booby Trap" La Forge lets the 
Holodeck recreate a digital representation of one of the
engineers who constructed the Enterprise to get a better
understand on how to solve the technical problem the ship
has.   

If you transfer this to the O'Reily books canfood 
mentioned: Well, my hope for the future of AI / LLM's is 
that the usage of them will evolve in a way that is more 
akin to an interactive book or the fictional holocron - a
device where i may ask a digital representation of a Dennis
Ritchie or a Brian Kerningham why something in C is done in
this special way, or if the way i assemble a regex is truly
the only way or let this digital ghost show me how it could
be done better. 

Not as a tool for faking competence or replace the 
knowledgeable human, but as a lever for acquiring knowledge
better and as an enabler to ask questions to an author far 
away or even gone entirely.