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LLM Inevitabilism

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Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#191

Post by hosh »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #142
hosh wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have seen people conduct business that doesn’t enshittify. Though rare, it is not an universal trait for conducting business.

The process of creating the AIs require mobilizing vast amount of energy, capital, and time. It is a product of capital with the expectation of locking down future markets. It is not orthogonal to enshittification.

Small web was still a thing through the 90s and early ‘00s. Web servers were not so concentrated as they are with hardware capable of running AI, let alone training them.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#192

Post by killerstorm »

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…

LLM can give you thousands of lines of perfectly working code for less than 1 dollar. How is that trivial or expensive?

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#193

Post by tete »

Of course!

Just like like we have been using what we now call VR goggles and voice input since the 80s, oh and hand gestures and governments all around use Blockchain for everything, we also all take supersonic planes while we travel, also everyone knows how to program, also we use super high level programming languages, also nobody uses the keyboard anymore because it has been replaced by hundreds if not thousands better inputs. Books don't exist anymore, everyone uses tablets for everything all the time, ah and we cook using automatic cooking tools, we also all eat healthy enriched and pro-biotic foods. Ah and we are all running around in Second Life... err Meta I mean, because it is the inevitable future of the internet!

Also we all use IPv6, have replaced Windows with something that used to be a research OS, also nobody uses FTP anymore EVER. The Cloud, no Docker, no Kubernets, no Helm, no, I mean Kubernetes Orchestrators made it trivial to scale and have a good, exact overview of hundreds, no thousands, no millions of instances. And everything is super fast now. And all for basically free.

Oh and nobody uses and paper wipes or does any manual cleaning anymore, in fact cleaning personnel has switched into obscurity people mostly don't know about anymore, because everyone sells you a robot that does all of that way better for five bucks, basically since the middle of the century!

Also we all have completely autonomous driving, nobody uses licenses anymore, use hyper fast transport through whatever train replacement, we also all have wide spread use of drone cabs and drone package delivery 24/7.

We also are SO CLOSE to solving each health issue out there. There is barely anything left we don't completely understand, and nobody ever heard of a case where doctors simply didn't know precisely what to do, because we all use nanobots.

Email also has been completely replaced.

All computers are extremely fast, completely noiseless, use essentially no energy. Nothing is ever slow anymore.

Oh and thanks to all the great security company, products, leading edge, even with AI nobody is ever victim to any phishing, scam, malware, etc. anymore.

Also everything is running secure, sandboxed code all the time and it never makes any problems.

People somehow seem to think the first 10% take 90% of the time or something. We have seen only very marginal improvements of LLMs and every time any unbiased (as in not directly working for a related company) researcher looks at it they find that LLMs at best manage to reproduce something that the input explicitly contained.

Try to create a full (to the brink) wine glass and try to have even the most advanced LLM to do something really novel especially add or change something in existing project.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#194

Post by johnb231 »

baxuz wrote: post #151
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…

The thing is that the data from actual research doesn't support your anecdotal proof of quality: - https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o... - https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/29/ai_agents_fail_a_lot/ But more importantly, it makes you stupid: - https://www.404media.co/microsoft-study-finds-ai-makes-human... - https://archive.is/M3lCG And it's an unsustainable bubble and wishful thinking, muc…

Dude in 1972 looking at Atari Pong: “computer graphics will never achieve realism”

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#195

Post by com2kid »

oblio wrote: post #82
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…

The thing is: what is the steady state? We kind of knew it for the internet and we basically figured it out early (even if we knew it was going to take a long time to happen due to generational inertia - see the death of newspapers). For LLMs it looks a lot like deindustrialization. Aka pain and suffering for a lot of people.

Computers ruined entry level jobs for a lot of people. Heck Outlook and PowerPoint put a lot of people out of work. Personal secretary used to be a solid reliable job for many women. Art teams used to exist to make real life presentations on actual paper. Large companies had their own private libraries and librarians to fetch documents.

Arguably we already saw some of the socially destabilizing impacts of computers, and more and more Americans were forced into poorly paying service sector jobs.

I actually suspect that right now, if we wanted to, we could automate a large amount of societies needs if we were willing to take a hit on quality/variety. For example, what % of the food chain could be 100% automated if we really wanted to? Obviously most foods could not, but surely a few staple crops could be automated 100% to the extent of robo-semis and robots loading and unloading crops?

That will be the eventual end goal. The question is what do we do as a society then?

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#196

Post by ascorbic »

rafaelmn wrote: post #24
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 claimed that AI was inevitable in the 80s and invested, or claimed people would be inevitably moving to VR 10 years ago - you would be shit out of luck. Zuck is still burning billions on it with nothing to show for it and a bad outlook. Even Apple tried it and hilariously missed the demand estimate. The only potential bailout for this tech is AR, but thats still years away from consumer market and widespread a…

The people claiming that AI in the 80s or VR or robotaxis or self-driving cars in the 2010s were inevitable weren't doing it on the basis of the tech available at that point, but on the assumed future developments. Just a little more work and they'd be useful, we promise. You just need to believe hard enough.

With the smartphone in 2009, the web in the late 90s or LLMs now, there's no element of "trust me, bro" needed. You can try them yourself and see how useful they are. You didn't need to be a tech visionary to predict the future when you're buying stuff from Amazon in the 90s, or using YouTube or Uber on your phone in 2009, or using Claude Code today. I'm certainly no visionary, but both the web and the smartphone felt different from everything else at the time, and AI feels like that now.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#197

Post by killerstorm »

sircastor wrote: post #172

The hardest part about inevitablism here is that the people who are making the argument this is inevitable are the same people who are the people who are shoveling hundreds of millions of dollars into it. Into the development, the use, the advertisement. The foxes are building doors into the hen houses and saying there’s nothing to be done, foxes are going to get in so we might as well make it something that works fo…

"put your money where your mouth is" is generally a good thing.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#198

Post by hammyhavoc »

trashchomper wrote: post #108
fendy3002 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> all of the information on the internet

Total exaggeration—especially given Cloudflare providing free tools to block AI and now tools to charge bots for access to information.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#199

Post by tsimionescu »

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…

> Most people except for the gamers and plagiarists don't want it.

As someone who doesn't actually want or use AI, I think you are extremely wrong here. While people don't necessarily care about the forced integrations of AI into everything, people by and large want AI massively.

Just look at how much it is used to do your homework, or replaces Wikipedia & Google in day to day discussions. How much it is used to "polish" emails (spew better sounding BS). How much it is used to generate meme images instead of trawling the web for them. AI is very much a regular part of day to day life for huge swaths of the population. Not necessarily in economically productive ways, but still very much embedded and unlikely to be removed - especially since it's current capabilities today are already good enough for these purposes, they don't need smarter AI, just keep it cheap enough.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#200

Post by sharkjacobs »

baxuz wrote: post #151
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…

The thing is that the data from actual research doesn't support your anecdotal proof of quality: - https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o... - https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/29/ai_agents_fail_a_lot/ But more importantly, it makes you stupid: - https://www.404media.co/microsoft-study-finds-ai-makes-human... - https://archive.is/M3lCG And it's an unsustainable bubble and wishful thinking, muc…

- higher editorial standards and gatekeeping meant print media was generally of higher quality than internet publications

- print publications built reputations of spans of time that the internet still hasn't existed for, earning greater trust and authority, and helping to establish shared cultural touchstones and social cohesion

- copyright was clearer and more meaningful, piracy was more difficult

- selling physical copies and subscriptions was a more stable revenue source for creators and publishers than the tumult of selling ads in the 21st century

And all of this was nothing in the face of "receiving pages of text. Faster than one could read"

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