Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes

[ thank you to claude fable 5.1, holden saberhagen, gabriel kammer, andres erbsen, alice mckean, and tristan wylde-larue for comments on this post ]

i'll begin with a few theses for the reader to chew on:

taken together, it appears that for most domains LLMs will continue to look like a cracked intern: quick and effective in the hands of an adult but not given run of the place. most firms will not be able to adopt fully autonomous AI, not for problems of skill issue or lagging technology diffusion but rather for structural reasons seemingly endemic to current architectures. the classes of firms that can accept the use of fully autonomous LLMs are few, by my count just three: