Very nice writeup. My only critique is the need to “lay off workers to stop inflation.” I have no doubt that some (many?) managers etc… believed that to be the case, but there’s rampant evidence that the spike of inflation we’ve seen over this period was largely due to corporate greed hiking prices, not due to increased costs from hiring too many workers.
Machine learning has many valid applications, and there are some fields genuinely utilizing ML tools to make leaps and bounds in advancements.
LLMs, aka bullshit generators, which is where a huge majority of corporate AI investment has gone in this latest craze, is one of the poorest. Not to mention the steaming pile of ethical issues with training data.