But, for the next few quarters at least, I'm sure the profit margins of mediocre Beatles covers will continue to be optimal...

Taking something alive - like the music of the Beatles - and fixing it in glass, as if it is an artifact, is a spell of mediocrity. Classical music has gone through this for some time now, and the result is an ecosystem struggling to sustain itself.

This is not ragging on the Beatles at all - nor the actual incredible covers of them that fuse their music with a panoply of styles and musical inspiration. But, I've yet to hear John Bayless or Brad Mehldau in a department store or gas station.

Cynically, I know there are two major reasons this happens. (1) money, (2) cultural conservatism (a bit ironically). Beatles music is "safe" and pleasing to a general audience - and a cover, requiring only a simple mechanical license, is far cheaper than licensing the original.

It's a bit like hearing a student perform a piece by Bach, fully by the book, if we also had recordings of Bach performing them. It's no doubt good practice for the student - but hardly something worth broadcasting to an audience (beyond their friends and parents).

It is remarkable how fast things change, yet how little things that matter do. Happy birthday-ish, Beethoven.

Any risks they pose (and they do) are *actually* posed by the humans who use them. There is of course room for ethics or regulation or oversight - but the target and accountability needs to always be on the operator.

LLMs are artificial, but fail to check the "I" of AI. This isn't to say they don't solve some rather interesting and challenging tasks - but the most appropriate mental model for them is "huge statistical confabulator", *not* "super-genius Skynet end-times-bringer."

Language and intelligence mutually reinforce one another - symbolic reasoning especially is critical to understanding the universe.

But language was never the fundament. Intelligence in life is based on something else (adaptation to environments, perhaps).