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LLM Inevitabilism

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Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#101

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.

Also I’m going to go ahead and say that “it’s slightly better than classical NLP for grammar check but requires 10,000x as much compute resources” is not an improvement

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#102

Post by godelski »

tines wrote: post #75
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…

> Some would think it would be great, some would see it as dystopian, but neither would be right. No, the people saying it’s dystopian would be correct by objective measure. Bombs are nothing next to Facebook and TikTok.

I don't blame people for being optimistic. We should never do that. But we should be aware how optimism, as well as pessimism, can so easily blind us. There's a quote a like by Feynman

  The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.
There is something of a balance. Certainly, Social Media does some good and has the potential to do more. But also, it certainly has been abused. Maybe so much that it become difficult to imagine it ever being good.

We need optimism. Optimism gives us hope. It gives us drive.

But we also need pessimism. It lets us be critical. It gives us direction. It tells us what we need to fix.

But unfettered optimism is like going on a drive with no direction. Soon you'll fall off a cliff. And unfettered pessimism won't even get you out the door. What's the point?

You need both if you want to see and explore the world. To build a better future. To live a better life. To... to... just be human. With either extreme, you're just a shell.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#103

Post by mlsu »

godelski wrote: post #36
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…

It's insane too. Because many of us working on AI were working on it for different reasons. To me, it was to liberate us. To let me go spend more time outside, to stare at trees, and ask people "can I pet your dog?" We use language and images because they are easier to evaluate. Because we don't know what to actually evaluate. So it's as good of a direction as any, right? I'm not sure if another direction would have…

My intellectual strategy to get to the bottom of these grand questions is very straightforward: look at my own life and evaluate what’s important.

In my life, I have found the answer to these questions. Telling a joke and making a colleague laugh. Looking at my 1yo niece crawling toward me. Hanging out in the garden with my wife and my dogs.

I look at these things, and it’s just so obvious. AI boyfriends? Ai email readers or AI taxi drivers or AI app makers? I can talk to a Tesla robot behind the counter at Wendy’s instead of a bored teenager? And that’s gonna ~transform~ my life? What?

You are right to point out that these questions are not adequately resolved. They never will be, not in the abstract and certainly not by technology. In some sense this dialogue has been happening for thousands of years, starting with Plato or before. “What is the point?”

When I was younger I used to wonder a lot intellectually about this stuff as many do but I’ve realized pretty recently that the answer is right here in my own short life and it has god damn nothing to do with technology.

I like solving puzzles and programming and I have a half built robot in the garage. But I will never confuse that with my living breathing niece. They just aren’t the same, my god isn’t it obvious!?

> now we're trying to create AGI by turning humans into robots

Very succinctly put.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#104

Post by boogieknite »

troupo wrote: post #14
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…

Literally from the article --- start quote --- Anyone who sees the future differently to you can be brushed aside as “ignoring reality”, and the only conversations worth engaging are those that already accept your premise. --- end quote --- Mass adoption is not inevitable. Everyone will drop this "faster harder" tech like a hot potato when (not if) it fails to result in meaningful profits. Oh, there will be forced ma…

what i like about your last jokey comment is that discussions about ai, both good and bad, are incredibly boring

went to some tech meetups earlier this year and when the topic came up, one of the organizers politely commented to me that pretty much everything said about ai has been said. the only discussions worth having are introductions to the tools then leaving an individual to decide for themselves whether or not its useful to them. those introductions should be brief and discussions of the applications are boring

back in the bar scene days discussing work, religion, and politics were social faux pas. im sensing ai is on that list now

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#105

Post by barbazoo »

rafaelmn wrote: post #90
scubbo wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>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. This so much - can't believe how much of these "I am not even reading the LLM code anymore it is that good" comments I am reading. Either you are all shit programmers or your "You are an expert senior software developer" prompts are hitting the LLM harder. Because I'm…

For me it’s a constant nudging the LLM in the right direction either one off like removing this over ambitious configuration value or something permanent via its internal rule system (e.g. cursor rules) like here’s how to always run this command.

I’m still telling it pretty much exactly what to do but it’s fuzzy enough to save a lot of time often.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#106

Post by TeMPOraL »

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…

Yeah, that sounds very much like the arguments parents gave to those of us who were kids when the web became a thing. "Cool walls of text. Shame you can't tell if any of that is true. You didn't put in work getting that information, and it's the work that matters."

Except it's turns out it's not a problem in practice, and "the work" matters only in less than 1% of the cases, and even then, it's much easier done with the web than without.

But it was impossible to convince the older generation of this. It was all apparent from our personal experience, yet we couldn't put it into words that the critics would find credible.

It took few more years and personal experience for the rest to get up to speed with reality.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#107

Post by keiferski »

One of the negative consequences of the “modern secular age” is that many very intelligent, thoughtful people feel justified in brushing away millennia of philosophical and religious thought because they deem it outdated or no longer relevant. (The book A Secular Age is a great read on this, btw, I think I’ve recommended it here on HN at least half a dozen times.)

And so a result of this is that they fail to notice the same recurring psychological patterns that underly thoughts about how the world is, and how it will be in the future - and then adjust their positions because of this awareness.

For example - this AI inevitabilism stuff is not dissimilar to many ideas originally from the Reformation, like predestination. The notion that history is just on some inevitable pre-planned path is not a new idea, except now the actor has changed from God to technology. On a psychological level it’s the same thing: an offloading of freedom and responsibility to a powerful, vaguely defined force that may or may not exist outside the collective minds of human society.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#108

Post by trashchomper »

fendy3002 wrote: post #68
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…

Calling LLMs trivial is a new one. Yea just consume all of the information on the internet and encode it into a statistical model, trivial, child could do it /s

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#109

Post by justanotherjoe »

This is something I think about, only my framing is that of predictionism; what I mean is society's occupation with predicting things.

This is important because predictions are both 1) necessary to make value judgments of the present and 2) borderline impossible for many things. So you have people making value judgments that hinge on things they have no right to know.

I also classified predictions into three categories, based on difficulty. The easiest being periodic things like movements of planets. The second being things that have been known to happen and might happen again in the future, like war. And the third are novel phenomenas that have never happened before, like superintelligence. Even the second one is hard, the third is impossible.

There are so many predictions that fall in this third category that people are making. But no matter how many 'models' you make, it all falls into the same trap of not having the necessary data to make any kind of estimate of how successful the models will be. It's not the things you consider, it's the things you don't consider. And those tend to be like 80% of the things you should.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#110

Post by lblume »

fendy3002 wrote: post #68
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…

Imagine telling a person from five years ago that the programs that would basically solve NLP, perform better than experts at many tasks and are hard not to anthropomorphize accidentally are actually "trivial". Good luck with that.
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