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LLM Inevitabilism

tomrenner.com

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Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#61

Post by visarga »

freshtake wrote: post #30
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…

The issue, unfortunately, is that society has failed to recognize the real dangers of social technologies (social media, social AI, perhaps AI in general). 30 years from now if we're lucky, we'll be watching senate hearings with AI billionaires being asked how they didn't realize their products were so harmful.

I am more and more convinced that social networks are causing the increased political instability and breakdown of communication. In the past media was centralized. So the powers that be focused on it and controlled the message. We had a kind of common understanding and language. Some idealize BBC or the great newspapers of the past, but they have been lying to us since forever. Remember the WMD discussions leading to Iraq war?

But now, because everyone can publish, they lost control. So instead they are bombarding us with all sorts of contradictory theories and conspiracies. We have come to be unable to communicate. And maybe that is the intended goal. If you can't control the message, make communication itself worthless. People choose emotionally and based on tribal allegiances. It has become an identity war. We can't even communicate with our parents now, there is an "explanatory gap" between identity tribes.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#62

Post by trash_cat »

This concept is closely reated to politics of inevitability coined by Timothy Snyder.

"...the politics of inevitability – a sense that the future is just more of the present, that the laws of progress are known, that there are no alternatives, and therefore nothing really to be done."[0]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/16/vladimir-putin-...

This article in question obviously applied it within the commercial world but at the end it has to do with language that takes away agency.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#63

Post by lsy »

I think two things can be true simultaneously:

1. LLMs are a new technology and it's hard to put the genie back in the bottle with that. It's difficult to imagine a future where they don't continue to exist in some form, with all the timesaving benefits and social issues that come with them.

2. Almost three years in, companies investing in LLMs have not yet discovered a business model that justifies the massive expenditure of training and hosting them, the majority of consumer usage is at the free tier, the industry is seeing the first signs of pulling back investments, and model capabilities are plateauing at a level where most people agree that the output is trite and unpleasant to consume.

There are many technologies that have seemed inevitable and seen retreats under the lack of commensurate business return (the supersonic jetliner), and several that seemed poised to displace both old tech and labor but have settled into specific use cases (the microwave oven). Given the lack of a sufficiently profitable business model, it feels as likely as not that LLMs settle somewhere a little less remarkable, and hopefully less annoying, than today's almost universally disliked attempts to cram it everywhere.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#64

Post by maz1b »

It seems to me from a cursory glance of the blog post that because certain notable humans / individuals are "framing" the modern AI/ML (LLM) era in a more inevitable way, which I totally get, but isn't that how human life works?

The majority of humans will almost always take the path of least resistance, whether it's cognition, work (physics definition), effort. LLMs are just another genie out of the bottle that will enable some certain subset of the population to use the least amount of energy to accomplish certain tasks, whether for good or bad.

Even if we put the original genie back in the bottle, someone else will copy/replicate/rediscover it. Take WhatsApp locked secret passphrase chats as an example - people (correctly) found that it would lead to enabling cheaters. Even if WhatsApp walked it back, someone else would create a new kind of app just for this particular functionality.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#66

Post by athrowaway3z »

The quotes in the post are made by people in an attempt to sound profoundly predictive on some vague super-ai future. Its good to call out that bullshit.

On the other end of the spectrum is that people - demonstrably - like access to the ability to have a computer spew out a (somewhat coherent) relevant suggestion.

The distance between those is enormous. Without a vocabulary to distinguish between those two extremes people are just talking past each other. As demonstrated (again) in this thread.

Consequently one side has to pull out their "you're ignoring reality" card.

All because we currently lack shared ideas and words to express an opinion beyond "AI yes or no?"

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#67

Post by inopinatus »

godelski wrote: post #7
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…

If you told someone in 1950 that smartphones would dominate they wouldn't have a hard time believing you. Hell, they'd add it to sci-fi books and movies. That's because the utility of it is so clear. But if you told them about social media, I think the story would be different. Some would think it would be great, some would see it as dystopian, but neither would be right. We don't have to imagine, though. All three o…

the idea that we could have a stilted and awkward conversation with an overconfident robot would not have surprised a typical mid-century science fiction consumer

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#68

Post by fendy3002 »

lsy wrote: post #63

I think two things can be true simultaneously: 1. LLMs are a new technology and it's hard to put the genie back in the bottle with that. It's difficult to imagine a future where they don't continue to exist in some form, with all the timesaving benefits and social issues that come with them. 2. Almost three years in, companies investing in LLMs have not yet discovered a business model that justifies the massive expen…

LLMs need significant optimization or we get significant improvement on computing power while keeping the energy cost the same. It's similar with smartphone, when at the start it's not feasible because of computing power, and now we have one that can rival 2000s notebooks.

LLMs is too trivial to be expensive

EDIT: I presented the statement wrongly. What I mean is the use case for LLM are trivial things, it shouldn't be expensive to operate

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#70

Post by mg »

In the 90s a friend told me about the internet. And that he knows someone who is in a university and has access to it and can show us. An hour later, we were sitting in front of a computer in that university and watched his friend surfing the web. Clicking on links, receiving pages of text. Faster than one could read. In a nice layout. Even with images. And links to other pages. We were shocked. No printing, no shipping, no waiting. This was the future. It was inevitable.

Yesterday I wanted to rewrite a program to use a large library that would have required me to dive deep down into the documentation or read its code to tackle my use case. As a first try, I just copy+pasted the whole library and my whole program into GPT 4.1 and told it to rewrite it using the library. It succeeded at the first attempt. The rewrite itself was small enough that I could read all code changes in 15 minutes and make a few stylistic changes. Done. Hours of time saved. This is the future. It is inevitable.

PS: Most replies seem to compare my experience to experiences that the responders have with agentic coding, where the developer is iteratively changing the code by chatting with an LLM. I am not doing that. I use a "One prompt one file. No code edits." approach, which I describe here:

https://www.gibney.org/prompt_coding

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