I watched the Welch Labs video about the 'bitter lesson' and I think it shifted how I think about LLMs a bit.

The perspective of the bitter lesson is that we've taken a shortcut in bootstrapping models with all of our written data, rather than having them learn from pure experience of the world.

No individual human learns out of pure experience. But it you take humanity collectively than all of our writing has emerged from that experience. So if you look at it on that timeline of development, LLMs get to jump in after the hard work of deriving all of that knowledge has already been done.

It makes me feel prouder of humanity, I think? And more like LLMs are an outgrowth of work already done, rather than a new alien force.

This of course does not change or necessarily make more fair the effects LLMs have on society, that's an issue of policy and decisions we make now. Though I think it is a perspective that argues the benefits should be widely distributed since it is built upon a base we all put together collectively.