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Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

dmitriid.com

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Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#2
"It's crypto all over again"

Crypto is a lifeline for me, as I cannot open a bank account in the country I live in, for reasons I can neither control nor fix. So I am happy if crypto is useless for you. For me and for millions like me, it is a matter of life and death.

As for LLMs — once again, magic for some, reliable deterministic instrument for others (and also magic). Just classified and sorted a few hundreds of invoices. Yes, magic.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#3
Similar argument to https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2025/trusting-your-own-judge..., but I like this one better because at least it doesn’t try to pull the rhetorical trick of slipping from “we can’t know whether LLMs are helping because we haven’t studied the question systematically” to “actually we do know, and they’re shit”.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#4
post #2

"It's crypto all over again" Crypto is a lifeline for me, as I cannot open a bank account in the country I live in, for reasons I can neither control nor fix. So I am happy if crypto is useless for you. For me and for millions like me, it is a matter of life and death. As for LLMs — once again, magic for some, reliable deterministic instrument for others (and also magic). Just classified and sorted a few hundreds of…

Can you elaborate on your situation? Which country are you in? How is crypto used there?

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#6
I think that the disparity comes between people that are too in the weeds believing that their use cases apply to everyone. The reality is this world is made up of people with a wide array of different needs and AI is yet to proliferate into all usage applications.

Sure some of this comes from a lack of education.

But similar to crypto these movements only have value if the value is widely perceived. We have to work to continue to educate, continue to question, continue to understand different perspectives. All in favor of advancing the movement and coming out with better tech.

I am a supporter of both but I agree with the reference in the article to both becoming echo chambers at times. This is a setback we need to avoid.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#7
post #2

"It's crypto all over again" Crypto is a lifeline for me, as I cannot open a bank account in the country I live in, for reasons I can neither control nor fix. So I am happy if crypto is useless for you. For me and for millions like me, it is a matter of life and death. As for LLMs — once again, magic for some, reliable deterministic instrument for others (and also magic). Just classified and sorted a few hundreds of…

Said this in another thread and I'll repeat it here:

It's the same problem that crypto experiences. Almost everyone is propagating lies about the technology, even if a majority of those doing so don't understand enough to realize they're lies (naivety vs malice).

I'd argue there's more intentional lying in crypto and less value to be gained, but in both cases people who might derive real benefit from the hard truth of the matter are turning away before they enter the door due to dishonesty/misrepresentation- and in both cases there are examples of people deriving real value today.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#8
Ok. Claude Code produces most code at Anthropic. Theres an enterprise code base, with acute real needs. There are real, experienced SWEs. How much babysitting and reviewing is undetermined; but the Ants seem to tremendously prefer the workflow.

Even crypto people didn’t dogfood their crypto like that, on their own critical path.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#9
The best way I’ve heard this described: AI (LLMs) is probably 90% of the way to human levels of reasoning. We can probably get to about 95% optimizing current technology.

Whether or not we can get to 100% using LLMs is an open research problem and far from guaranteed. If we can’t, it’s unclear if it will ever really proliferate the way things hope. That 5% makes a big difference in most non-niche use cases…

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#10
I follow Emily Bender on LinkedIn. She cuts through the AI hype and is also the author of The AI Con book - https://thecon.ai/

Of course people will either love AI or hate AI - and some don’t care. I am cautious especially when people say ‘AI is here to stay’. It takes away agency.

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