This false dichotomy is still frustratingly all over the place. LLMs are useful for a variety of benign everyday use cases, that doesn't mean that they can replace a human for anything. And if those benign use cases is all they're good at, then the entire AI space right now is maybe worth $2B/year, tops. Which is still a good amount of money! Except that's roughly the amount of money OpenAI spends every minute, and it's definitely not "the next invention of fire" like Sam Altman says.
Even these everyday use-cases are infinitely varied and can displace entire industries. E.g. ChatGPT helped me get $500 in airline delay compensation after multiple companies like AirHelp blew me off: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45749803
This single niche industry as a whole is probably worth billions alone.
Now multiply that by the number of niches that exist in this world.
The consider the entire universe of formal knowledge work, where large studies (from self-reported national surveys to empirical randomized controlled trials on real-world tasks) have already shown significant productivity boosts, in the range of 30%. Now consider their salaries, and how much companies would be willing to pay to make their employees more productive.
