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LLM Inevitabilism

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Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#681

Post by jopsen »

megaloblasto wrote: post #569

I think what scares people who code for a living the most is the loss of their craft. Many of you have spent years or decades honing the craft of producing clear, fast, beautiful code. Now there is something that can spit out (often) beautiful code in seconds. An existential threat to your self worth and livelihood. A perfectly reasonable thing to react to. I do think, however, that this is an inevitable change. Indu…

> Many of you have spent years or decades honing the craft of producing clear, fast, beautiful code.

Very little of our code is clear, fast or even beautiful :)

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#682

Post by lupusreal »

JimmaDaRustla wrote: post #556

The author seems to imply that the "framing" of an argument is done so in bad faith in order to win an argument but only provides one-line quotes where there is no contextual argument. This tactic by the author is a straw-man argument - he's framing the position of tech leaders and our acceptance of it as the reason AI exists, instead of being honest, which is that they were simply right in their predictions: AI was…

Reading between the lines of the OP, the author seems to think that the future of LLMs will be determined by debate and that he can win that debate by choosing the framing of the debate.

The whole meat of his article is about this debate technique, ostensibly saying that's what the other guys are doing, but really he's only described what he himself is doing.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#683

Post by KerrAvon »

pama wrote: post #671
jdiff wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The IT industry is also full of salesmen and con men, both enjoy unrealistic exaggeration. Your statements would not be out of place 20 years ago when the iPhone dropped. Your statements would not be out of place 3 years ago before every NFT went to 0. LLMs could hit an unsolvably hard wall next year and settle into a niche of utility. AI could solve a lengthy list of outstanding architectural and technical problems…

> I can't find a single open source codebase, actively used in production, and primarily maintained and developed with AI This popular repo (35.6k stars) documents the fraction of code written by LLM for each release since about a year ago. The vast majority of releases since version 0.47 (now at 0.85) had the majority of their code written by LLM (average code written by aider per release since then is about 65%.) h…

I think we need to move the goalposts to "unrelated to/not in service of AI tooling" to escape easy mode. Replace some core unix command-line tool with something entirely vibecoded. Nightmare level: do a Linux graphics or networking driver (in either Rust or C).

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#684

Post by giancarlostoro »

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…

> 2. Almost three years in, companies investing in LLMs have not yet discovered a business model that justifies the massive expenditure of training and hosting them, the majority of consumer usage is at the free tier, the industry is seeing the first signs of pulling back investments, and model capabilities are plateauing at a level where most people agree that the output is trite and unpleasant to consume.

You hit the nail on why I say to much hatred from "AI Bros" as I call them, when I say it will not take off truly until it runs on your phone effortlessly, because nobody wants to foot a trillion dollar cloud bill.

Give me a fully offline LLM that fits in 2GB of VRAM and lets refine that so it can plug into external APIs and see how much farther we can take things without resorting to burning billions of dollars' worth of GPU compute. I don't care that my answer arrives instantly, if I'm doing the research myself, I want to take my time to get the correct answer anyway.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#685

Post by Jach »

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…

I don't really buy your point 2. Just the other day Meta announced hundreds of billions of dollars investment into more AI datacenters. Companies are bringing back nuclear power plants to support this stuff. Earlier this year OpenAI and Oracle announced their $500bn AI datacenter project, but admittedly in favor of your point have run into funding snags, though that's supposedly from tariff fears with foreign investors, not lack of confidence in AI. Meta can just finance everything from their own capital and Zuck's decree, like they did with VR (and it may very well turn out similarly).

Since you brought up supersonic jetliners you're probably aware of the startup Boom in Colorado trying to bring it back. We'll see if they succeed. But yes, it would be a strange path, but a possible one, that LLMs kind of go away for a while and try to come back later.

You're going to have to cite some surveys for the "most people agree that the output is trite and unpleasant" and "almost universally disliked attempts to cram it everywhere" claims. There are some very vocal people against LLM flavors of AI, but I don't think they even represent the biggest minority, let alone a majority or near universal opinions. (I personally was bugged by earlier attempts at cramming non-LLM AI into a lot of places, e.g. Salesforce Einstein appeared I think in 2016, and that was mostly just being put off by the cutesy Einstein characterization. I generally don't have the same feelings with LLMs in particular, in some cases they're small improvements to an already annoying process, e.g. non-human customer support that was previously done by a crude chatbot front-end to an expert system or knowledge base, the LLM version of that tends to be slightly less annoying.)

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#686

Post by tartoran »

raincole wrote: post #638
JimmaDaRustla wrote: post #556

The author seems to imply that the "framing" of an argument is done so in bad faith in order to win an argument but only provides one-line quotes where there is no contextual argument. This tactic by the author is a straw-man argument - he's framing the position of tech leaders and our acceptance of it as the reason AI exists, instead of being honest, which is that they were simply right in their predictions: AI was…

The usual argument is that the tech leaders are saying that only because they've invested in AI. ...Like, you don't say? If one truly believes AI is inevitable than of course they're going to put money in AI. I wonder how many people who claim we're in an AI bubble actually short AI stocks and $NVDA. Or they'd just stutter "uh you know the market can stay irrational longer than we can stay solvent..." when asked.

There's no doubt that LLMs are useful and will generate some productivity. The hype raises them to the silver bullet tech though. This inevitably creates a bubble that it will pop at some point. People who see signs of bubble don't short because they are lacking on details as to when exactly this will happen.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#687

Post by deadbabe »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #495

People like communicating in natural language. LLMs are the first step in the movement away from the "early days" of computing where you needed to learn the logic based language and interface of computers to interact with them. That is where the inevitabilism comes from. No one* wants to learn how to use a computer, they want it to be another entity that they can just talk to. *I'm rounding off the <5% who deeply lov…

Let’s reframe your world view:

No one wants to communicate with a computer. Computers are annoying, vile things. They just want things to work easily and magically.

Therefore, for these people, being able to communicate in a natural language isn’t going to be anymore appealing than a nice graphical user interface. Using a search engine to find stuff you want already requires no logic, the LLM does the same but it just gives you better results.

Thus the world of LLMs is going to look much like the world of today: just with lazier people who want to do even less thinking than they do now.

It is inevitable.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#688

Post by scioto »

(commenting late in the game, so the point may have been made already)

I personally believe that "AI" is mostly marketing for the current shiny LLM thing that will end up finding some sort of actual useful niche (or two) once the dust has settled. But for now, it's more of a solution being carpet-bombed for problems, most of them inappropriate IMHO (e.g, replacing HR).

For now there'll be collateral damage as carbon-based lifeforms are displaced, with an inevitable shortage of pesky humans to do cleanup once the limitations of "AI" are realized. Any the humans will probably be contract/gig at half their previous rates to do the cleanup.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#689

Post by [deleted] »

jaza wrote: post #564
aksosoakbab wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spoken language is a miserable language to communicate in for programming. It’s one of the major detractors of LLMs. Programming languages have a level of specification orders of magnitude greater than human communication ones.

Computer scientists in the ~1970s said that procedural languages are a miserable medium for programming, compared to assembly languages. And they said in the ~1960s that assembly languages are a miserable medium for programming, compared to machine languages. (Ditto for every other language paradigm under the sun since then, particularly object-oriented languages and interpreted languages). I agree that natural langu…

[deleted]

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#690

Post by miki123211 »

lordnacho wrote: post #524
alonsonic wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused with your second point. LLM companies are not making any money from current models? Openai generates 10b USD ARR and has 100M MAUs. Yes they are running at a loss right now but that's because they are racing to improve models. If they stopped today to focus on optimization of their current models to minimize operating cost and monetizing their massive user base you think they don't have a successful busi…

Are you saying they'd be profitable if they didn't pour all the winnings into research? From where I'm standing, the models are useful as is. If Claude stopped improving today, I would still find use for it. Well worth 4 figures a year IMO.

But if Claude stopped pouring their money into research and others didn't, Claude wouldn't be useful a year from now, as you could get a better model for the same price.

This is why AI companies must lose money short term. The moment improvements plateau or the economic environment changes, everyone will cut back on research.

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