Sure, I agree, but enabling or tolerating assholes is different than, as the original poster mentioned, “like seeing the pain they cause.” That’s all I was disagreeing with. I still believe their beliefs and who they support are wrong, but I don’t think most of them think they’re causing pain, or like it if they do.
I have similar feelings.
I discovered LLMs before the hype ever began (used GPT-2 well before ChatGPT even existed) and the same with image generation models barely before the hype really took off. (I was an early closed beta tester of DALL-E)
And as my initial fascination grew, along with the interest of my peers, the hype began to take off, and suddenly, instead of being an interesting technology with some novel use cases, it became yet another technology for companies to show to investors (after slapping it in a product in a way no user would ever enjoy) to increase stock prices.
Just as you mentioned with the dotcom bubble, I think this will definitely do a lot of good. LLMs have been great for asking specialized questions about things where I need a better explanation, or rewording/reformatting my notes, but I’ve never once felt the need to have my email client generate every email for me, as Google seems to think I’d want.
If we can just get all the over-hyped corporate garbage out, and replace it with more common-sense development, maybe we’ll actually see it being used in a way that’s beneficial for us.