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LLM Inevitabilism

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Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#141

Post by gonzric1 »

bgwalter wrote: post #113
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…

Smartphones are different. People really wanted them since the relatively primitive Nokia Communicator. "AI" was introduced as an impressive parlor trick. People like to play around, so it quickly got popular. Then companies started force-feeding it by integrating it into every existing product, including the gamification and bureaucratization of programming. Most people except for the gamers and plagiarists don't wa…

Chatgpt Has 800 million weekly active users. That's roughly 10% of the planet.

I get that it's not the panacea some people want us to believe it is, but you don't have to deny reality just because you don't like it.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#142

Post by TeMPOraL »

hosh wrote: post #111
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…

While the Internet and LLMs are huge turning points — the metaphor that comes to mind are phase change thresholds, from solid to gas, from gas to solids — there is a crucial difference between the internet and LLMs. The early internet connected personal computing together. It built on technology that was democratizing. LLMs appear to be democratizing, but it is not. The enshittification is proceeding much more rapidl…

> Many of us remember the rise of the world wide web, and perhaps even personal computing that made the internet mainstream.

I do. The web was the largest and most widespread enshittification process to date, and it started with the first sale made online, with the first ad shown on a web page - this quickly went into full-blown land grab in the late 90s, and then dotcom and smartphones and social media and SaaS and IoT and here we are today.

The "propensity for enshittification" is just called business, or entrepreneurship. It is orthogonal to AI.

I think comparing rise of LLMs to the web taking off is quite accurate, both with the good and bad sides.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#143

Post by petetnt »

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…

There’s always a distinct lack of the names in the posts like this. What was the library that was being changed to what? You say it had ”no good documentation”, but it clearly has some sort of documentation considering the LLM did such a good job on the rewrite. Do you understand the ”large library” now?

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#144

Post by imiric »

nperez wrote: post #84

It's inevitable because it's here. LLMs aren't the "future" anymore, they're the present. They're unseating Google as the SOTA method of finding information on the internet. People have been trying to do that for decades. The future probably holds even bigger things, but even if it plateaus for a while, showing real ability to defeat traditional search is a crazy start and just one example.

> They're unseating Google as the SOTA method of finding information on the internet.

Hardly. Google is at the frontier of these developments, and has enough resources to be a market leader. Trillion-dollar corporations have the best chances of reaping the benefits of this technology.

Besides, these tools can't be relied on as a source of factual information. Filtering spam and junk from web search results requires the same critical thinking as filtering LLM hallucinations and biases. The worst of both worlds is when "agents" summarize junk from the web.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#145

Post by ccortes »

Earlier today I was scrolling at the “work at a startup” posts.

Seems like everyone is doing LLM stuff. We are back at the “uber for X” but now it is “ChatGPT for X”. I get it, but I’ve never felt more uninspired looking at what yc startups are working on today. For the first time they all feel incredibly generic

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#146

Post by andrewstuart »

And yet, LLM assisted programming is absolutely not only inevitable but the present AND the future.

Embrace it.

The unbelievers are becoming ever more desperate to shout it down and frame the message such that LLMs can somehow be put back in the bottle. They can not.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#147

Post by lynx97 »

bradly wrote: post #121
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…

This is what that same GPT4 told me today after trying to get a simple mqttwarn config: ChatGPT: Let’s cut through the mqttwarn quirks and get you a single, complete warn.ini that I’ve actually tested with mqttwarn 0.32 Me: that "I’ve actually tested with mqttwarn 0.32:" How did you perform this test? ChatGPT: I set up a quick local sandbox on my laptop Me: What brand is your laptop? What store did you buy it at? Cha…

This is the future, this is inevitable.

(Sorry, couldn't resist)

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#148

Post by ezst »

dheera wrote: post #78
mbgerring wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve tried to use AI for “real work” a handful of times and have mostly come away disappointed, unimpressed, or annoyed that I wasted my time. Given the absolutely insane hard resource requirements for these systems that are kind of useful, sometimes, in very limited contexts, I don’t believe its adoption is inevitable. Maybe one of the reasons for that is that I work in the energy industry and broadly in climate tec…

That's how people probably felt about the first cars, the first laptops, the first . People like you grumbled when their early car broke down in the middle of a dirt road in the boondocks and they had to eat grass and shoot rabbits until the next help arrived. "My horse wouldn't have broken down", they said. Technologies mature over time.

We have been in the phase of diminishing returns for years with LLMs now. There is no more data to train them on. The hallucinations are baked in at a fundamental level and they have no ability to emulate "reasoning" past what's already in their training data. This is not a matter of opinion.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#149

Post by chadcmulligan »

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…

Any code thats easy to define and tedious I just get AI's to do it now, and its awesome. Saves me so much work, though you have to read the code, it still puts in odd stuff sometimes.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#150

Post by jstummbillig »

bigiain wrote: post #136
mdavid626 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’ll have to split up software development between such AI coders and proper developers. Let AI coders suffer in their own mess.

I think the thing that finally might drive union membership in the software development industry, is going to be the need to be able to tell your boss "No. I will not debug or add features to any AI coded or assisted codebase."

The historical precedent for ludism working is slim.
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