Apropos of Pantheon, it is interesting how few science fiction novels explored finding human meaning in a non-dystopian world with advanced LLM-like conversational AIs (But no AI main character) Banks' Culture is obvious but who else? Becky Chambers? Early Stross? Egan? Doctrow?

Very long traditions of AIs trying to find mesning themselves (Leckie, Murderbot & many more), and in dealing with cold logical AIs that know everything (Asimov and many others) or post-scarcity worlds without serious AI (Star Trek), but not a vision of an LLM future.

The fulcrum in so many of these novels is that the AI lacked something human - emotional intelligence, creativity, the ability to make art, the ability to understand human feelings. Nobody expected AIs would be trained from the corpus of human language & get this stuff quickly.

Douglas Adams was the most prophetic science fiction author when it comes to LLMs (ht @petergoldstein for reminding me)