It is the former.
When LLMs blew up a few years ago I was pretty excited about the novelty of the software, and that excitement was driven by what they might do rather than what they did do.
Now, years and many iterations later, the most vocal proponents of this stuff still pitch what it might do with a volume loud enough to drown out almost any discussion of what it does. What little discussion of what it does for individuals usually boils down to some variation of “it gives me answers to the questions for which I do not care about the answers”, but, —how ridiculous, wasteful, and contrary to the basic ideas of knowledge and reasoning that statement is aside— even that is usually given with a wink and a nod to suggest that maybe one day it will give answers to questions that matter.