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LLM Inevitabilism

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Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#361

Post by blub »

com2kid wrote: post #173
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…

All of those studies have been torn apart in detail, often right here on HN. > So while it may be a fun toy for senior devs that know what to look for, it actually makes them slower and stupider, making them progressively less capable to do their job and apply critical thinking skills. I've been able to tackle problems that I literally would not have been able to undertake w/o LLMs. LLMs are great at wading through S…

The AI in OSS study was not “torn apart”.

The AI aficionados made scary faces at it, tried to scratch it with their cute little claws and then gave up and stopped talking about it. :)

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#363

Post by theSherwood »

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thoughtful people feel justified in brushing away millennia of philosophical and religious thought because they deem it outdated or no longer relevant.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…

I think this is a case of bad pattern matching, to be frank. Two cosmetically similar things don't necessarily have a shared cause. When you see billions in investment to make something happen (AI) because of obvious incentives, it's very reasonable to see that as something that's likely to happen; something you might be foolish to bet against. This is qualitatively different from the kind of predestination present in many religions where adherents have assurance of the predestined outcome often despite human efforts and incentives. A belief in a predestined outcome is very different from extrapolating current trends into the future.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#364

Post by rightbyte »

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…

> Or it might just be astroturfing, it's hard to tell.

Compare the hype for commercial SaaS models to say Deepseek. I think there is an insane amount of astroturfing.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#365

Post by pickledoyster »

Boristoledano wrote: post #330

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…

I believe there are some debatable assumptions baked into your comment, so I have to ask. Do you believe that the entirety of all possible knowledge ("answers") is already online? If not, how is new knowledge supposed to appear online: what are the incentives to put it up on the web if the last open gateways to it are killed by this LLM "experience"? And, if new information must be added continuously, how is it supposed to be vetted?

That last one is important, since you state: > That model worked when the web was smaller, but now it’s overwhelming.

Because it seems like the "experience" changes, but the underlying model of sucking up data off the web does not. If it was "overwhelming" in the past, how is it supposed to be easier now, with subsidized slop machines putting up new information full-tilt?

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#366

Post by petra »

mettamage wrote: post #343
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…

> everyone can code! I work directly with marketers and even if you give them something like n8n, they find it hard to be precise. Programming teaches you a "precise mindset" that one doesn't have when they aren't really thinking about tech professionally. I wonder if seasoned UX designers can code now. They do think professionally about software. I wonder if it's at a deep enough granularity such that they can simpl…

Can an LLM detect a lack of precision and point it to you ?

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#367

Post by jononor »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #338
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 seriously comparing the internet and LLMs? You know what's the difference between both? Internet costs a fraction of LLMs to serve literally everyone in the world. It is universally useful and has continuously become more and more useful since it started. LLMs are insanely expensive to the point of them having to be sold at a loss to have people using them, while the scope they are promised to cover has narro…

The Internet was also very expensive in its infancy. Dialup charged by the minute for mere kilobytes. The cost per MB dropped by a factor 1000x over the course of 30 years. It took billions in investments, and millions of people working on it to make it happen. Give LLLms a couple of decades, and the price for a given capability will have increased by 1-4 orders of magnitude.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#369

Post by pmontra »

ankit219 wrote: post #157
oblio wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

i would disagree we kind of figured it out early. Early visions for internet were about things like information superhighway (with a centralized approach). What came to pass was the opposite. Its a good thing. There are lessons here in that we are not always accurate at predicting what the future would look like. But we can always identify trends that may shape the future.

Well, if we look at the flow of most of internet traffic we don't have highways (I'm thinking about the USA East/West North/South highway matrix).

Instead we have roads that go straight from suburbs to a few big city centers. Sometimes a new center rise, but it's still very centralized. I'd say that the prediction was correct. What they failed to foresee is that we don't connect to libraries and newspapers, we connect to Netflix, FB, Instagram etc.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#370

Post by pickledoyster »

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…

>They spend 18 hours a day in conversation with chatbots.

Engagement metrics like that are what product managers love to see. Promotions incoming. /s

Sad to see it, but I believe these "companions" and "spiritual gurus" will generate the most revenue in B2C. If you have a user base that's on the slop drip 24/7, you can make them pay premium and target them with ads at the same time. The trend is already here: people listen to podcasts, follow influencers and streamers on every platform just for the surrogate friendship effects. Why not automate it away and make the spiritual guru bot sell you the next vpn subscription?

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