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LLM Inevitabilism

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Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#91

Post by godelski »

energy123 wrote: post #27
godelski wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> But if you told them about social media, I think the story would be different. It would be utopian, like how people thought of social media in the oughts. It's a common pattern through human history. People lack the imagination to think of unintended side effects. Nuclear physics leading to nuclear weapons. Trains leading to more efficient genocide. Media distribution and printing press leading to new types of prop…

  > It would be utopian
People wrote about this. We know the answer! I stated this, so I'm caught off guard as it seems you are responding to someone else, but at the same time, to me.

London Times, The Naked Sun, Neuromancer, The Sockwave Rider, Stand on Zanzibar, or The Machine Stops. These all have varying degrees of ideas that would remind you of social media today.

Are they all utopian?

You're right, the downsides are harder to imagine. Yet, it has been done. I'd also argue that it is the duty of any engineer. It is so easy to make weapons of destruction while getting caught up in the potential benefits and the interesting problems being solved. Evil is not solely created by evil. Often, evil is created by good men trying to do good. If only doing good was easy, then we'd have so much more good. But we're human. We chose to be engineers, to take on these problems. To take on challenging tasks. We like to gloat about how smart we are? (We all do, let's admit it. I'm not going to deny it) But I'll just leave with a quote: "We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard"

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#92

Post by bee_rider »

mbgerring wrote: post #45

Wasn’t crypto supposed to have replaced fiat currency by now, or something?

I never really get the cryptocurrency comparison. AI has an application beyond grift. Like, even if they stopped developing it now, an AI “style hints” in the style of spellcheck and grammar rule check would be a no-brainer as a thing to add to an office suite.

The valuations are totally and completely nuts. But, LLMs have little legitimate applications in a way that cryptocurrencies never will.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#93

Post by ehnto »

keithwhor wrote: post #43

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…

> 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.

Importantly it also takes you guiding it to complete the task. Meaning you still need to pay a human and the cost of the LLM, so it's slower and a bit more expensive.

I am not convinced either that AI working on complex programming tasks could be guided by less skilled devs, meaning you still need to pay the skilled dev.

In my experience so far, the cost analysis doesn't work for more complex application development. Even if the cost of the LLM was free it is often wasting the skilled dev's time.

All these metrics will change over the years and maybe the math works out eventually, or in specific circumstances, and I forsee LLMs assisting in development into the future.

I am not seeing the cataclysmic wholesale replacement of humans in the workforce some are predicting, at this stage.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#94

Post by oblio »

scubbo wrote: post #83
mg wrote: post #70

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 shipp…

> Hours of time saved Come back in a week and update us on how long you've spent debugging all the ways that the code was broken that you didn't notice in those 15 minutes. Usually I don't nitpick spelling, but "mimnutes" and "stylisitic" are somewhat ironic here - small correct-looking errors get glossed over by human quality-checkers, but can lead to genuine issues when parsed as code. A key difference between your…

> they'll still do harm when "working-as-intended" [..] to consolidation of wealth and capital.

Fairly sure you didn't mean this :-D

LLMs will probably lead to 10x the concentration of wealth.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#95

Post by godelski »

inopinatus wrote: post #67
godelski wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Honestly, I think they'd be surprised that it wasn't better. I mean... who ever heard of that Asimov guy?

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#96

Post by [deleted] »

__d wrote: post #26

The majority of the comments here reflect an acceptance of or even an enthusiasm for an LLM-using future. An embracing of the technology regardless of its downsides. A disregard of those who question whether it’s all a desirable future. I’d have thought perhaps we’d learn the lessons of eg. smart phones, social media, cloud, VR, crypto, NFTs, etc, and think a little more deeply about where and how we want to go as a…

[deleted]

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#97

Post by mbgerring »

bee_rider wrote: post #92
mbgerring wrote: post #45

Wasn’t crypto supposed to have replaced fiat currency by now, or something?

I never really get the cryptocurrency comparison. AI has an application beyond grift. Like, even if they stopped developing it now, an AI “style hints” in the style of spellcheck and grammar rule check would be a no-brainer as a thing to add to an office suite. The valuations are totally and completely nuts. But, LLMs have little legitimate applications in a way that cryptocurrencies never will.

Lots of crypto boosters said that crypto had use cases beyond grift and that anyone who couldn’t see that was a moron.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#98

Post by dasil003 »

Two things are very clearly true: 1) LLMs can do a lot of things that previous computing techniques could not do and we need time to figure out how best to harness and utilize those capabilities; but also 2) there is a wide range of powerful people who have tons of incentive to ride the hype wave regardless of where things will actually land.

To the article's point—I don't think it's useful to accept the tech CEO framing and engage on their terms at all. They are mostly talking to the markets anyway. We are the ones who understand how technology works, so we're best positioned to evaluate LLMs more objectively, and we should decide our own framing.

My framing is that LLMs are just another tool in a long line of software tooling improvements. Sure, it feels sort of miraculous and perhaps threatening that LLMs can write working code so easily. But when you think of all the repetitive CRUD and business logic that has been written over the decades to address myriad permutations and subtly varying contexts of the many human organizations that are willing to pay for software to be written, it's not surprising that we could figure out how to make a giant stochastic generator that can do an adequate job generating new permutations based on the right context and prompts.

As a technologist I want to understand what LLMs can do and how they can serve my personal goals. If I don't want to use them I won't, but I also owe it to myself to understand how their capabilities evolve so I can make an informed decision. I am not going to start a crusade against them out of nostalgia or wishful thinking as I can think of nothing so futile as positioning myself in direct opposition to a massive hype tsunami.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#99

Post by tayo42 »

Probably true for ai

I don't think we have that kind of ai right now with llms. Is there a reason to believe it's right around the corner?

Some ai tool hallucinated a bazel config option today for me. Maybe bazel is to hard even for agi lol

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#100

Post by twelve40 »

> “AI will not replace humans, but those who use AI will replace those who don’t.” – Ginni Rometty

wait, i thought it was Watson that was supposed to replace me

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