Are we at the beginning of a new era?
As a species we've been through many large scale technological shifts, more recently in our history the industrial revolution, the invention of the car, the computer(silicon chips) and the internet. Artificial Intelligence feels like it could be the next shift. Depending on how it takes shape it could change the way we live, work and interact with both each other and technology.
For innovative changes to actually take hold and be adopted by the masses, they need to be simple, easy to use but also tangibly better than what currently exists. Thats why cars came after horses and smartphones after phones with keyboards(and keyboards before that, typewriters even before that , you get the idea) there should be a clear improvement in speed and convenience but not such a jump that people can't understand it.
We know change is coming and in tech bubbles the embrace of large lagnuage models is gathering momentum but what about everyone else? Often people in tech forget that the rest of the world is not nearly as enthusiastic about technology as we are.
Will people welcome a faceless AI API intersecting with every day life? Will they even know it's there? Will they care? I suspect we will know soon enough, but the shift is here, we just don't know what its final form will be, yet. But it is here to stay and today is the worst it will ever be.
Perhaps it is more ampt to call this the age of leveraged LLMs.