Yes in a certain sense pandora’s box has already been opened. That’s the reason for things like the chip export restrictions to China. It’s safe to assume that even if copyright prohibits private company LLMs governments will have to make some exceptions in the name of defense or key industries even if it stays behind closed doors. Or role out some form of ubi / worker protections. There are a lot of very tricky and important decisions coming up.

But for now at least there seems to be some evidence that our current approach to LLMs is somewhat plateauing and we may need exponentially increasing training data for smaller and smaller performance increases. So unless there are some major breakthroughs it could just settle out as being a useful tool that doesn’t really need to completely shock every factor of the economy.