For lots of jobs of “text querying” they do good enough of a job to be on par with humans (which are not infallible either).
And there are applications where you don’t have/wouldn’t pay another human, and the job that an AI does for mere cents is good enough most of the times. Like doing an analysis on a legacy codebase. I’ll read and verify, but running that “query” then saved me a lot of time.
Not everything needs to be deterministic to be of value.
I agree, they can be "practical tools for the job", that's where I ended my comment. The disagreement seems to be that "practical tool for the job" is the same as "right tool for the job". A hammer can be a practical tool for the job of screwing a nail into a wall (once, at least) but few would call it the right tool for that job. An LLM can be a practical tool for a text query (at least as a first pass, at least with review and a grain of sand), but if you need reliability or repeatability or the ability to send results directly to a customer without a human in the loop it may not be the right tool for the job.
There's obviously a value in practical tools, deterministic or not. It's just worth making the distinction that a practical tool is not always fit for purpose as the "right" tool if you really are seeking the (most) right tool for the job.
And there are applications where you don’t have/wouldn’t pay another human, and the job that an AI does for mere cents is good enough most of the times. Like doing an analysis on a legacy codebase. I’ll read and verify, but running that “query” then saved me a lot of time.
Not everything needs to be deterministic to be of value.