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Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

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Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#301

Post by satyrun »

98eb1d0ff7fb96 wrote: post #90
garciasn wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well; I can't speak to your specific experience (current or past) but I'm telling you that while I'm skeptical as hell about EVERYTHING, it's blowing my expectations away in every conceivable way. I built something in less than 24h that I'm sure would have taken us MONTHS to just get off the ground, let alone to the polished version it's at right now. The most impressive thing is that it can do all of the things that…

See, your comment is a good example of what's going wrong. The OP specifically mentioned "mission critical things" - My interpretation of that would be things that are not allowed to break, because otherwise people might die, in the worst case - and you were talking about just SOMETHING that got "done" faster. No mention about anything critical. Of course, I was playing around with claude code, too, and I was fascina…

We haven't even come up with different methodology yet to leverage these tools that well.

At some point one would have to think the idea of coming up with one design will seem outdated if the model is producing a 1000 different versions at once and then testing to find the best design. Then working on improving and tightening the design 24/7 365.

Most of what I read on here seems like knocking the automobile while proclaiming the virtues of the horse. It only makes sense because we can't see all the paved roads, gas stations and highways yet that make the horse a complete relic for travel.

At some point, it will make as much sense to pay a human to write code as it does to take a horse on the interstate.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#302

Post by assuagering »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #299
assuagering wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your economic analysis depends on "one of those super-rich players to pay" for it to work, it isn't as much analysis as wishful thinking. All the 100s of billions of $ put into the models so far were not donations. They either make it back to the investors or the show stops at some point. And with a major chunk of proponent's arguments being "it will keep getting better", if you lose that what you got? "This thing…

The economic analysis is not mine, and I though it was pretty well-known by now: Meta is not in the compute biz and doesn't want to be in it, so by releasing Llamas, it denies Google, Microsoft and Amazon the ability to build a moat around LLM inference. Commoditize your complement and all that. Meta wants to use LLMs, not sell access to them, so occasionally burning a billion dollars to train and give away an open-w…

You understand that according to what you just said, economically the current SOTA is untenable?

Which, again, leads to a future where we're stuck with local models corrupting data about half the time.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#303

Post by thunky »

georgemcbay wrote: post #211
thunky wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The item lost is pipeline of talent in all of this though. Totally agree. However, I think this pipeline has been taking a hit for a while already because juniors as a whole have been devaluing themselves: if we expect them to leave after one year, what's the point of hiring and training them? Only helping their next employer at that point.

Its the employers who are responsible for the fact that almost everyone working in tech (across all skill levels) will have a far easier time advancing in both pay and title by jumping jobs often. Very few companies put any real thought into meaningful retention but they are quick to complain about turnover.

Yes I agree it works both ways. Employment is a transaction and both sides are trying to optimize outcomes in their own best interest. No blame.

The health of the job market is a big factor as well.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#304

Post by assuagering »

atemerev wrote: post #258
harel wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I am a Russian immigrant in Switzerland. As of right now, all Swiss banks block all Russian bank accounts until their owners can provide a valid physical residence permit card, due to sweeping sanctions (meanwhile, Russian-owned companies continue to freely trade crude oil from here, as they use Swiss nominal directors — the hypocrisy is through the roof). My residence permit is on renewal now and the case is being d…

Are you paid for work and able to pay for rent and groceries with cryptocurrency?

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#305

Post by exe34 »

hotpotat wrote: post #293
exe34 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but my productivity was still at least 3x How do you measure this?

Mean time to shipping features of various estimated difficulty. It’s subjective and not perfect, but generally speaking I need to work way less. I’ll be honest, one thing I think I could have done faster without AI was to implement CRDT-based cloud sync for a project I have going. I think I’ve tried to utilize AI too much for this. It’s good at implementing vector clock implementations, but not at preventing race con…

Are you sure it wasn't just stealing from open source projects? If so, you could just cut out the middle man.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#306

Post by TeMPOraL »

assuagering wrote: post #302
TeMPOraL wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The economic analysis is not mine, and I though it was pretty well-known by now: Meta is not in the compute biz and doesn't want to be in it, so by releasing Llamas, it denies Google, Microsoft and Amazon the ability to build a moat around LLM inference. Commoditize your complement and all that. Meta wants to use LLMs, not sell access to them, so occasionally burning a billion dollars to train and give away an open-w…

You understand that according to what you just said, economically the current SOTA is untenable? Which, again, leads to a future where we're stuck with local models corrupting data about half the time.

No, it just means that the big players have to keep advancing SOTA to make money; Llama lagging ~6 months behind just means there's only so much they can charge for access to the bleeding edge.

Short-term, it's a normal dynamics for a growing/evolving market. Long-term, the Sun will burn out and consume the Earth.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#307

Post by atemerev »

assuagering wrote: post #304
atemerev wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a Russian immigrant in Switzerland. As of right now, all Swiss banks block all Russian bank accounts until their owners can provide a valid physical residence permit card, due to sweeping sanctions (meanwhile, Russian-owned companies continue to freely trade crude oil from here, as they use Swiss nominal directors — the hypocrisy is through the roof). My residence permit is on renewal now and the case is being d…

Are you paid for work and able to pay for rent and groceries with cryptocurrency?

Yes, I am paid for work in crypto (I am a consultant), and I can exchange it for cash and pay for rent and groceries in cash, just like people did in the previous century.

In some other Swiss cantons like Zug, you can pay some of the bills and even some taxes with crypto directly, but not here yet.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#308

Post by TeMPOraL »

deepsquirrelnet wrote: post #198
martinald wrote: post #33

I personally don't really get this. _So much_ work in the 'services' industries globally comes down to really a human transposing data from one Excel sheet to another (or from a CRM/emails to Excel), manually. Every (or nearly every) enterprise scale company will have hundreds if not thousands of FTEs doing this kind of work day in day out - often with a lot of it outsourced. I would guess that for every 1 software e…

Making a comparison to crypto is lazy criticism. It’s not even worth validating. It’s people who want to take the negative vibe from crypto and repurpose it. The two technologies have nothing to do with each other, and therefore there’s clearly no reason to make comparative technical assessments between them. That said, the social response is a trend of tech worship that I suspect many engineers who have been around…

> Look at it this way: now your friend with a novel app idea can be told to do it themselves. That’s at least a win for everyone.

For now, anyways. Thing is, that friend now also has a reasonable shot at succeeding in doing it themselves. It'll take some more time for people to fully internalize it. But let's not forget that there's a chunk of this industry that's basically building apps for people with "novel app ideas" that have some money but run out of friends to pester. LLMs are going to eat a chunk out of that business quite soon.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#309

Post by TeMPOraL »

saulpw wrote: post #233
martinald wrote: post #33

I personally don't really get this. _So much_ work in the 'services' industries globally comes down to really a human transposing data from one Excel sheet to another (or from a CRM/emails to Excel), manually. Every (or nearly every) enterprise scale company will have hundreds if not thousands of FTEs doing this kind of work day in day out - often with a lot of it outsourced. I would guess that for every 1 software e…

Each FTE doing that manual data pipelining work is also validating that work, and they have a quasi-legal responsibility to do their job correctly and on time. They may have substantial emotional investment in the company, whether survival instinct to not be fired, or ambition to overperform, or ethics and sense to report a rogue manager through alternate channels. An LLM won't call other nodes in the organization to…

> An LLM won't call other nodes in the organization to check when it sees that the value is unreasonable for some out-of-context reason, like yesterday was a one-time-only bank holiday and so the value should be 0.

Why not? LLMs are the first kind of technology that can take this kind of global view. We're not making much use of it in this way just yet, but considering "out-of-context reasons" and taking a wider perspective is pretty much the defining aspect of LLMs as general-purpose AI tools. In time, I expect them to match humans on this (at least humans that care; it's not hard to match those who don't).

I do agree on the liability angle. This increasingly seems to be the main value a human brings to the table. It's not a new trend, though. See e.g. medicine, architecture, civil engineering - licensed professionals aren't doing the bulk of the work, but they're in the loop and well-compensated for verifying and signing off on the work done by less-paid technicians.

Re: Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking

#310

Post by ath3nd »

farts_mckensy wrote: post #206
ath3nd wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever people claim that LLMs are capable of reasoning, I put them into a category of people who are themselves able to reason as much as an LLM.

You chuckled silently to yourself as you posted this.

I did, I have to reluctantly admit.
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