This understanding of the social value of LLMs—as NLP interfaces—gets lost in all the arguing about intelligence.

Thanks to finding the term in Leif Weatherby’s “Language Machines,” I now refer to attempts to commoditize NLP as “language as a service” and note that the giant tech companies seem to be adopting new naming conventions for their products to reflect this shift. Consider the marketing terms recently introduced by Microsoft for its Azure services: AI Search, AI Language, and AI Foundry. They dropped Azure Cognitive Services sometime this summer, I think.

Henry Farrell’s joke that this is the management singularity gets funnier every day, because it gets truer. The revolution will be banal, but that does not make it any less complicated or important.