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LLM Inevitabilism

tomrenner.com

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Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#41

Post by jdiff »

HPsquared wrote: post #8
NBJack wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, this is exactly the technique for arguing that the blog mentions. Remember the revolutionary, seemingly inevitable tech that was poised to rewrite how humans thought about transportation? The incredible amounts of hype, the secretive meetings disclosing the device, etc.? That turned out to be the self-balancing scooter known as a Segway?

1. The Segway had very low market penetration but a lot of PR. LLMs and diffusion models have had massive organic growth. 2. Segways were just ahead of their time: portable lithium-ion powered urban personal transportation is getting pretty big now.

Massive, organic, and unprofitable. And as soon as it's no longer free, as soon as the VC funding can no longer sustain it, an enormous fraction of usage and users will all evaporate.

The Segway always had a high barrier to entry. Currently for ChatGPT you don't even need an account, and everyone already has a Google account.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#42

Post by johnfn »

NBJack wrote: post #5
delichon wrote: post #2

If in 2009 you claimed that the dominance of the smartphone was inevitable, it would have been because you were using one and understood its power, not because you were reframing away our free choice for some agenda. In 2025 I don't think you can really be taking advantage of AI to do real work and still see its mass adaptation as evitable. It's coming faster and harder than any tech in history. As scary as that is w…

Ironically, this is exactly the technique for arguing that the blog mentions. Remember the revolutionary, seemingly inevitable tech that was poised to rewrite how humans thought about transportation? The incredible amounts of hype, the secretive meetings disclosing the device, etc.? That turned out to be the self-balancing scooter known as a Segway?

Oh yeah I totally remember Segway hitting a 300B valuation after a couple of years.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#43

Post by keithwhor »

It’s also possible for LLMs to be inevitable, generate massive amounts of wealth and still be mostly fluff in terms of objective human progress.

The major change from my perspective is new consumer behavior: people simply enjoy talking to and building with LLMs. This fact alone is generating a lot (1) new spend and (2) content to consume.

The most disappointing outcome of the LLM era would be increasing the amount of fake, meaningless busywork humans have to do just to sift through LLM generated noise just to find signal. And indeed there are probably great products to be built that help you do just that; and there is probably a lot of great signal to be found! But the motion to progress ratio concerns me.

For example, I love Cursor. Especially for boilerplating. But SOTA models with tons of guidance can still not reliably implement features in my larger codebases within the timeframe it would take me to do it myself. Test-time compute and reasoning makes things even slower.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#44

Post by Sabinus »

sampl3username wrote: post #20
mlsu wrote: post #6

I hate AI. I'm so sick of it. I read a story about 14 year olds that are adopting AI boyfriends. They spend 18 hours a day in conversation with chatbots. Their parents are worried because they are withdrawing from school and losing their friends. I hate second guessing emails that I've read, wondering if my colleagues are even talking to me or if they are using AI. I hate the idea that AI will replace my job. Even if…

I'm just hoping for a huge solar flare to reset this once and for all.

Billions will die from starvation and conflict in that future. Be careful what you wish for.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#46

Post by Animats »

There may be an "LLM Winter" as people discover that LLMs can't be trusted to do anything. Look for frantic efforts by companies to offload responsibility for LLM mistakes onto consumers. We've got to have something that has solid "I don't know" and "I don't know how to do this" outputs. We're starting to see reports of LLM usage having negative value for programmers, even though they think it's helping. Too much effort goes into cleaning up LLM messes.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#47

Post by mekael »

mattigames wrote: post #37
delichon wrote: post #2

If in 2009 you claimed that the dominance of the smartphone was inevitable, it would have been because you were using one and understood its power, not because you were reframing away our free choice for some agenda. In 2025 I don't think you can really be taking advantage of AI to do real work and still see its mass adaptation as evitable. It's coming faster and harder than any tech in history. As scary as that is w…

For the way you speak you seem to be fairly certain that they still gonna need you as it's user, that they aren't going to find a better monetization than selling it to people like you (or even small companies in general), I wouldn't be so sure, remember we are talking about the machine that is growing with the aim of being able to do do every single white-collar job.

And with everyone constantly touting robotics as the next next frontier, every blue collar job as well.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#48

Post by theideaofcoffee »

mlsu wrote: post #6

I hate AI. I'm so sick of it. I read a story about 14 year olds that are adopting AI boyfriends. They spend 18 hours a day in conversation with chatbots. Their parents are worried because they are withdrawing from school and losing their friends. I hate second guessing emails that I've read, wondering if my colleagues are even talking to me or if they are using AI. I hate the idea that AI will replace my job. Even if…

I agree with you wholeheartedly. I feel the same way, though I want to nit with one point you made:

> but at least we’ll all have a ton of money?

I just don’t see it going that way. The only ones that are going to win if this stuff actually makes it out of the primordial AI swamp are the ones training and running the models. It’s like any other capitalistic thing, the ones owning the means (the models and infrastructure and whatnot) make all the money.

The only thing I see in all of this is widening the wealth gap. Sure, there may be some performative, pity pennies thrown in the direction of a lucky few, to keep the envy alive, but it’s just going to enable amassing more and more wealth and resources to those that already have a pile of gold too large to spend even in one hundred thousand lifetimes.

I’ll tend to my tomatoes.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#50

Post by Mistletoe »

mlsu wrote: post #6

I hate AI. I'm so sick of it. I read a story about 14 year olds that are adopting AI boyfriends. They spend 18 hours a day in conversation with chatbots. Their parents are worried because they are withdrawing from school and losing their friends. I hate second guessing emails that I've read, wondering if my colleagues are even talking to me or if they are using AI. I hate the idea that AI will replace my job. Even if…

I don’t think we will all have a ton of money in that Blade Runner future unless you mean everything will have inflated like Zimbabwe dollars, and that may be the case.
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