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LLM Inevitabilism

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Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#241

Post by benreesman »

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…

As someone who has historically been very much an LLM inevitabalism skeptic and has recently decided that we've crossed the breakeven point with indiscriminant use of Opus 4, eh, it's precisely because we're in late LLM === AGI hype world. They're actually cutting the shit on "this can do anything, and in a month, twice that!". This thing is crazy operator aligned, wildly SFT'd on curated codebases, and running a TTFT and cost that means it's basically Chinchilla maxed out, back to work boys, sell some NVIDIA stock.

This is precisely the opposite data point to the one you'd expect if the TESCREAL hype men were right: you do that when the writing is on the wall that this thing is uniquely suited to coding and the only way you'll ever do better than quantize and ad support it is to go after a deep pocketed vertical (our employers).

Nothing whatsoever to do with making a military drone or a car that can handle NYC or an Alexa that's useful instead of an SNL skit. That's other ML (very cool ML).

So the frontier lab folks have finally replaced the information commons they first destroyed, except you need a nuclear reactor and a bunch of Taiwan hawks that make Dick Cheney look like a weak-kneed feminist to run it at a loss forever.

The thing is, this kind of one ine itabalism isn't new: David Graeber spent a luminous career tearing strips off of hacks like Harari for the same exact moral and intellectual failure perpetrated by the same class warfare dynamics for the same lowbrow reasons.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#242

Post by lmm »

HPsquared wrote: post #8
NBJack wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, this is exactly the technique for arguing that the blog mentions. Remember the revolutionary, seemingly inevitable tech that was poised to rewrite how humans thought about transportation? The incredible amounts of hype, the secretive meetings disclosing the device, etc.? That turned out to be the self-balancing scooter known as a Segway?

1. The Segway had very low market penetration but a lot of PR. LLMs and diffusion models have had massive organic growth. 2. Segways were just ahead of their time: portable lithium-ion powered urban personal transportation is getting pretty big now.

> LLMs and diffusion models have had massive organic growth.

I haven't seen that at all. I've seen a whole lot of top-down AI usage mandates, and every time what sounds like a sensible positive take comes along, it turns out to have been written by someone who works for an AI company.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#243

Post by Msurrow »

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…

> first signs of pulling back investments

I agree with you, but I’m curious; do you have link to one or two concrete examples of companies pulling back investments, or rolling back an AI push?

(Yes it’s just to fuel my confirmation bias, but it’s still feels nice:-) )

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#244

Post by Disposal8433 »

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.

The first car and first laptop were infinitely better than no car and no laptop. LLMs is like having a drunk junior developer, that's not an improvement at all.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#245

Post by bravesoul2 »

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…

I find your approach interesting and will try it. Especially as I'm paying a fixed monthly.

But surely this is fragile against model changes in the future. But maybe it's still better than manual fixing.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#247

Post by keiferski »

cdrini wrote: post #236

How do you differentiate between an effective debater using inevitabilism as a technique to win a debate, and an effective thinker making a convincing argument that something is likely to be inevitable? How do you differentiate between an effective debater "controlling the framing of a conversation" and an effective thinker providing a new perspective on a shared experience? How do you differentiate between a good ar…

Easy: good arguments take the form of books, usually, not rapid-fire verbal exchanges. No serious intellectual is interested in winning debates as their primary objective.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#248

Post by TeMPOraL »

AndyKelley wrote: post #213
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…

You speak with a passive voice, as if the future is something that happens to you, rather than something that you participate in.

They are not wrong.

The market, meant in a general sense, is stronger than any individual or groups of people. LLMs are here, and already demonstrate enough productive value to make them in high demand for objective reasons (vs. just as a speculation vehicle). They're not going away, nor is larger GenAI. It would take a collapse of technological civilization to turn the tide back now.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#249

Post by tempfile »

handoflixue wrote: post #233
baxuz wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"But more importantly, it makes you stupid:" I don't think it was your intent, but that reads out as a seriously uncalled for attack - you might want to work on your phrasing. Hacker News rules are pretty clear on civility being an important virtue.

I doubt it. It's not directed at an individual, and it's presented as a passive fact. It's a bit like saying "drugs make you stupid", which no-one would complain about.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#250

Post by lmm »

keeda wrote: post #238
Animats wrote: post #46

There may be an "LLM Winter" as people discover that LLMs can't be trusted to do anything. Look for frantic efforts by companies to offload responsibility for LLM mistakes onto consumers. We've got to have something that has solid "I don't know" and "I don't know how to do this" outputs. We're starting to see reports of LLM usage having negative value for programmers, even though they think it's helping. Too much eff…

People can't be trusted to do anything either, which is why we have guardrails and checks and balances and audits. That is why in software, for instance, we have code reviews and tests and monitoring and other best practices. That is probably also why LLMs have made the most headway in software development; we already know how to deal with unreliable workers that are humans and we can simply transfer that knowledge o…

> People can't be trusted to do anything either, which is why we have guardrails and checks and balances and audits. That is why in software, for instance, we have code reviews and tests and monitoring and other best practices. That is probably also why LLMs have made the most headway in software development; we already know how to deal with unreliable workers that are humans and we can simply transfer that knowledge over.

The difference is that humans eventually learn. We accept that someone who joins a team will be net-negative for the first few days, weeks, or even months. If they keep making the same mistakes that were picked out in their first code review, as LLMs do, eventually we fire them.

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