The jury very much still seems out on this. Computationally speaking, I believe Mamba is Turing complete, while transformers aren't (they can't do loops), so technically Mamba is more expressive. But of course, the question is always whether it ends up with lower loss.
My comment was mostly about the current trend. In just 4 years we went from GPT-2 to GPT-4, and the pace seems accelerating. Only a fool points to the limits of current technology to make claims about future technology, the less foolish look at trend lines. The even less foolish have causal models, but even in this case, ChatGPT’s user trendline is faster growing than Reddit’s. Though this tells you little about whether they’re substitutes.
I used to use Reddit for this purpose, but many of the things I’d try to look up on Reddit, I can more readily ask ChatGPT about. This form of network effect of reddit will likely weaken over time.
Edit: So in some sense all that information has magically migrated to a new platform through the mystical power of DL.
It would probably be at least a more meaningful protest if the moderators went on strike instead of privating their subreddits. But I don’t think many have the stomach for this.