The development of LLM's required access to huge amounts of decent training data.

It could very well that the current generation of AI has poisoned the well for any future endeavors of creating AI. You can't trivially filter out the AI slop and humans are less likely to make their handcrafted content freely available for training. In fact violating GPL code to train models on it might be ruled to be illegal as well generally stricter rules on which data you are allowed to use for training.

We might have reached a local optimum that is very difficult to escape from. There might be a long, long AI winter ahead of us, for better or worse.

> the world isn’t going back to what it was before AI. This is it, forever.

I feel this so much. I though my longing for the pre-smartphone days was bad but damn we have lost so much.