I've done no such thing.

I called it half-decent, spooky, and admirable.

That turns out to be good enough, for a bunch of applications. Even the parts that are just a chatbot fooling people are useful. And massively better than the era you're comparing this to.

We have to deal with this honestly. Neural networks have officially caught on, and anything with examples can be approximated. Anything. The hard part is reminding people what "approximated" means. Being wrong sometimes is normal. Humans are wrong about all kinds of stuff. But for some reason, people think computers bring unflinching perfection - and approach life-or-death scenarios with this sloppy magic.

Personally I'm excited for position tracking with accelerometers. Naively integrating into velocity and location immediately sends you to outer space. Clever filtering almost sorta kinda works. But it's a complex noisy problem, with a minimal output, where approximate answers get partial credit. So long as it's tuned for walking around versus riding a missile, it should Just Work.

Similarly restrained use-cases will do minor witchcraft on a pittance of electricity. It's not like matrix math is hard, for computers. LLMs just try to do as much of it as possible.

Your example of catastrophic failure is... e-mail? Spam filters are wrong all the time, and they're still fantastic. Glancing in the folder for rare exceptions is cognitively easier than categorizing every single thing one-by-one.

If there's one false negative, you don't go "Holy shit, it's the actual prince of Nigeria!"

But sure, let's apply flawed models somewhere safe, like analyzing medical data. What?

And it doesn’t matter if it gets it wrong one time in a hundred, that one time is enough to completely negate all potential positives of the feature.

Obviously fucking not.

Even in car safety, a literal life-and-death context, a camera that beeps when you're about to screw up can catch plenty of times where you might guess wrong. Yeah - if you straight-up do not look, and blindly trust the beepy camera, bad things will happen. That's why you have the camera and look.

If a single fuckup renders the whole thing worthless, I have terrible news about human programmers.