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LLM Inevitabilism

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Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#321

Post by camillomiller »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #288
bambax wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with LLM is when they're used for creativity or for thinking. Just because LLMs are indeed useful in some (even many!) context, including coding, esp. to either get something started, or, like in your example, to transcode an existing code base to another platform, doesn't mean they will change everything . It doesn't mean “AI is the new electricity.” (actual quote from Andrew Ng in the post). More like A…

> It doesn't mean “AI is the new electricity.” (actual quote from Andrew Ng in the post). I personally agree with Andrew Ng here (and I've literally arrived at the exact same formulation before becoming aware of Ng's words). I take "new electricity" to mean, it'll touch everything people do, become part of every endeavor in some shape of form. Much like electricity. That doesn't mean taking over literally everything…

AI is not a fundamental physical element. AI is mostly closed and controlled by people who will inevitably use it to further their power and centralize wealth and control. We acted with this in mind to make electricity a publicly controlled service. There is absolutely no intention nor political strength around to do this with AI in the West.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#322

Post by 0xAFFFF »

Msurrow wrote: post #243
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:-) )

Most prominent example was this one: https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-pulls-back-more...

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#323

Post by moffkalast »

p0w3n3d wrote: post #25
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…

Back in 1950s nuclear tech was seen as inevitable. Many people had even bought plates made from uranium glass. They still glow somewhere in my parents' cabinet or maybe I broke them

Well there are like 500 nuclear powerplants online today supplying 10% of the world's power, so it wasn't too far off. Granted it's not the Mr. Fusion in every car as they imagined it back then. We probably also won't have ASI taking over the world like some kind of vengeful comic book villain as people imagine it today.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#324

Post by TeMPOraL »

stiray wrote: post #316
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…

Are you sure, that the code works correctly? ;) Now, imagine, what you would do, if you never learned to read the code. As you were always using only AI. Anyway, coding is much simpler and easier than reading someone else's code. And I rather code it myself than spend time to actually read and study what AI has outputted. As at the end, I need to know that code works. --- At one point, my former boss was explaining t…

Regarding your plane story, I can't help but notice that the fact this plane was in operation, and they were willing to fly on it, implies the problem wasn't that big of an issue.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#325

Post by teiferer »

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 long as you view LLM as just a tool to do some mostly-mechanical changes to some codebase, you are missing the big picture which the article is about.

What do LLMs mean for your mom? For society? For the future world view of your kids? Nobody cares about library refactoring.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#326

Post by endymion-light »

keiferski wrote: post #107

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 t…

Techno Calvinists vs Luddite Reformists is a very funny image.

Agree - although it's an interesting view, I think it's far more related to a lack of idealogy and writing where this has emerged from. I find it more akin to a distorted renaissance. There's such a large population of really intelligent tech people that have zero real care for philisophical or religious thought, but still want to create and make new things.

This leads them down the first path of grafting for more and more money. Soon, a good proportion of them realise the futility of chasing cash beyond a certain extent. The problem is this belief that they are beyond these issues that have been dealt with since Mesopotamia.

Which leads to these weird distorted idealogies, creating art from regurgitated art, creating apps that are made to become worse over time. There's a kind of rush to wealth, ignoring the joy of making things to further humanity.

I think LLMs and AI is a genie out of a bottle, it's inevitable, but it's more like linear perpsective in drawing or the printing press rather than electricity. Except because of the current culture we live in, it's as if leonardo spent his life attempting to sell different variations of linear perspective tutorial rather than creating, drawing and making.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#327

Post by cheevly »

imiric wrote: post #112
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…

> Look for frantic efforts by companies to offload responsibility for LLM mistakes onto consumers. Not just by companies. We see this from enthusiastic consumers as well, on this very forum. Or it might just be astroturfing, it's hard to tell. The mantra is that in order to extract value from LLMs, the user must have a certain level of knowledge and skill of how to use them. "Prompt engineering", now reframed as "con…

Unless you have automated fine-tuning pipelines that self-optimize optimize models for your tasks and domains, you are not even close to utilizing LLMs to their potential. But stating that you don’t need extensive, specialized skills is enough of a signal for most of us to know that offering you feedback would be fruitless. If you don’t have the capacity by now to recognize the barrier to entry, experts are not going to take the time to share their solutions with someone unwilling to understand.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#328

Post by stiray »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #324
stiray wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure, that the code works correctly? ;) Now, imagine, what you would do, if you never learned to read the code. As you were always using only AI. Anyway, coding is much simpler and easier than reading someone else's code. And I rather code it myself than spend time to actually read and study what AI has outputted. As at the end, I need to know that code works. --- At one point, my former boss was explaining t…

Regarding your plane story, I can't help but notice that the fact this plane was in operation, and they were willing to fly on it, implies the problem wasn't that big of an issue .

It actually was, but no one bothered with plane model until they were in the air, but fair point, should mentioned it.

(I would love to explain more, but deliberately type of error and company name were omitted, anyway it is fixed for a decade)

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#329

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#330

Post by Boristoledano »

Disclaimer - I am building an AI web retriever (Linkup.so) so I have a natural bias -

LLMs aren’t just a better Google, they’re a redefinition of search itself.

Traditional search is an app: you type, scroll through ads and 10 blue links, and dig for context. That model worked when the web was smaller, but now it’s overwhelming.

LLMs shift search to an infrastructure, a way to get contextualized, synthesized answers directly, tailored to your specific need. Yes, they can hallucinate, but so can the web. It’s not about replacing Google—it’s about replacing the experience of searching (actually they probably will less and less 'experience' of searching)

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