This is exactly why I believe LLMs are a technological dead end. Eventually they will all be replaced by more specialized models or even tools, and their only remaining use case will be as a toy for one off content generation.
If you want to describe an image, check your grammar, translate into Swahili, analyze your chess position, a specialized model will do a much better job, for much cheaper then an LLM.
I think we are too quick to discount the possibility that this flaw is slightly intentional, in the sense that the optimization has a tight budget to work with (equivalent of ~3000 tokens) so why would it waste capacity on this when it could improve capabilities around reading small text in obscured images? Sort of like humans have all these rules of thumbs that backfire in all these ways but that's the energy efficient way to do things.
Even so, that doesn’t take away from my point. Traditional specialized models can do these things already, for much cheaper and without expensive optimization. What traditional models cannot do is the toy aspect of LLM, and that is the only usecase I see for this technology going forward.
Lets say you are right and these things will be optimized, and in, say, 5 years, most models from the big players will be able do things like reading small text in an obscure image, draw a picture of a glass of wine filled to the brim, draw a path through a maze, count the legs of a 5 footed dog, etc. And in doing so finished their last venture capital subsidies (bringing the actual cost of these to their customers). Why would people use LLMs for these when a traditional specialized model can do it for much cheaper?
> Why would people use LLMs for these when a traditional specialized model can do it for much cheaper?
This is not too different from where I see things going. I don't think a monolithic LLM that does everything perfectly is where we'll go. An LLM in a finite-compute universe is never going to be better at weather forecasting than GraphCast. The LLM will have a finite compute budget, and it should prioritize general reasoning, and be capable of calling tools like GraphCast to extend its intelligence into the necessary verticals for solving a problem.
I don't know exactly what that balance will look like however, and the lines between specialist application knowledge and general intelligence is pretty blurred, and what the API boundaries (if any) should be are unclear to me. There's a phenomenon where capabilities in one vertical do help with general reasoning to an extent, so it's not a completely zero-sum tradeoff between specialist expertise and generalist abilities, which makes it difficult to know what to expect.
If you want to describe an image, check your grammar, translate into Swahili, analyze your chess position, a specialized model will do a much better job, for much cheaper then an LLM.