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LLM Inevitabilism

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Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#701

Post by charles_f »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #571
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…

> AI was inevitable. This is post hoc ergo propter hoc. AI exists thus it must have been inevitable. You have no proof it was inevitable. (Also AI means something wildly different than it meant a few years ago - I remember when AI meant AGI, the salesmen have persuaded you the emperor has clothes because they solved a single compelling test).

> I remember when AI meant AGI

Interestingly I had the same definition, and at the same time there's always been multiple definitions. I have always called whatever animated NPC in games "AI", even when the thing is hard coded and not very intelligent at all. I guess that calling AI a category of tools that are artificial and somewhat intelligent is fair.

I also anticipate that what we call AGI will be fluid, and that marketing being marketing, we'll start calling actual products AGI before it would be genuine.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#702

Post by magicalist »

Centigonal wrote: post #678
dbalatero wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They might generate 10b ARR, but they lose a lot more than that. Their paid users are a fraction of the free riders. https://www.wheresyoured.at/openai-is-a-systemic-risk-to-the...

This echoes a lot of the rhetoric around "but how will facebook/twitter/etc make money?" back in the mid 2000s. LLMs might shake out differently from the social web, but I don't think that speculating about the flexibility of demand curves is a particularly useful exercise in an industry where the marginal cost of inference capacity is measured in microcents per token. Plus, the question at hand is "will LLMs be rele…

> LLMs might shake out differently from the social web, but I don't think that speculating about the flexibility of demand curves is a particularly useful exercise in an industry where the marginal cost of inference capacity is measured in microcents per token

That we might come to companies saying "it's not worth continuing research or training new models" seems to reinforce the OP's point, not contradict it.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#703

Post by e3bc54b2 »

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…

> LLMs are the first step in the movement away from (...) the logic based language

This dumb thing again.. The logic based language was and remains a major improvement [0] in being able to build abstractions because it allows the underlying implementations to be 'deterministic'. The natural language misses that mark by such a wide margin that it is impossible to explain in nicer language. And if one wants to make the argument that people achieve that anyway, perhaps you reading through one [1] will put that thought to rest :)

[0] www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667.html

[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/1/te...

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#704

Post by osti »

seydor wrote: post #54
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…

they said the same about VR glasses, about cryptocurrency ...

If you are seriously equating these two with AI, then you have horrible judgements and should learn to think critically, but unfortunately for you, I don't think critical thinking can be learned despite what people say.

Note that I'm not even going to bother arguing against your point and instead resort to personal attacks,because I believe it would be a waste of time to argue against people with poor judgment.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#705

Post by Jach »

alonsonic wrote: post #541
nyarlathotep_ wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do wonder where in the cycle this all is given that we've now seen yet another LLM/"Agentic" VSCode fork. I'm genuinely surprised that Code forks and LLM cli things are seemingly the only use case that's approached viability. Even a year ago, I figured there'd be something else that's emerged by now.

But there are a ton of LLM powered products in the market. I have a friend in finance that uses LLM powered products for financial analysis, he works in a big bank. Just now anthropic released a product to compete in this space. Another friend in real estate uses LLM powered lead qualifications products, he runs marketing campaigns and the AI handles the initial interaction via email or phone and then ranks the lead…

Yup. Lots of products in the education space. Even doctors are using LLMs, while talking with patients. All sorts of teams are using the adjacent products for image and (increasingly) video generation. Translation freelancers have been hit somewhat hard because LLMs do "good enough" quite a bit better than old google translate.

Coding is relevant to the HN bubble, and as tech is the biggest driver of the economy it's no surprise that tech-related AI usages will also be the biggest causes of investment, but it really is used in quite a lot of places out there already that aren't coding related at all.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#706

Post by brokencode »

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…

> “most people agree that the output is trite and unpleasant to consume”

That is a such a wild claim. People like the output of LLMs so much that ChatGPT is the fastest growing app ever. It and other AI apps like Perplexity are now beginning to challenge Google’s search dominance.

Sure, probably not a lot of people would go out and buy a novel or collection of poetry written by ChatGPT. But that doesn’t mean the output is unpleasant to consume. It pretty undeniably produces clear and readable summaries and explanations.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#707

Post by th0ma5 »

visarga wrote: post #31

> I’m certainly not convinced that they’re the future I want. But what I’m most certain of is that we have choices about what our future should look like, and how we choose to use machines to build it. While I must admit we have some choice here, it is limited. No matter what, there will be models of language, we know how they work, there is no turning back from it. We might wish many things but one thing we can't do…

We have no idea how they work. We know the training making a model and generating things from it, but the thing we want from it being an Oracle or something, we have no idea how that works at the level of the specific knowledge it generates. And when we dig into it doesn't reveal anything very interesting. The premise of put everything digital in a pile and see if makes something like a god is a neat idea, but the god is literally playing dice.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#708

Post by spyckie2 »

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…

I think the author is encouraging out of the box thinking. The framing of "inevitable" is a box (an assumption) that we can include in our analysis or judgment, rather than assume it to be true.

But to your point, his debate analogy does imply that tech enthusiasts are arguing in bad faith in order to win an argument, because the goal of winning a debate has no good faith aspect to it (good faith in debate terms is seeking the truth, bad faith is winning an argument).

But just because he is wrong doesn't mean he isn't useful.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#709

Post by lwelyk »

paulcole wrote: post #699
lwelyk wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What tasks is it better at doing than other technologies we have available to us? I'm not being sarcastic, I generally want to know in which areas you think it is better. I can't think of anything off the top of my head that isn't just doing the things that make it a generative AI. (It's better at generating an image that I describe to it, etc, but that's not something that another technology does.)

> What tasks is it better at doing than other technologies we have available to us? I'm not being sarcastic, I generally want to know in which areas you think it is better. I, a below average programmer, can write code myself but it takes time and effort that is generally incompatible with my actual job. With an LLM I am able to write code with a level of time and effort that fits very nicely inside my job. It can fi…

As a fellow below average programmer I have used them for that, but it feels like a fairly minor improvement over searching stack overflow, but that is definitely an area where it is a time saver, thanks for the example.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#710

Post by materiallie »

alonsonic wrote: post #541
nyarlathotep_ wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do wonder where in the cycle this all is given that we've now seen yet another LLM/"Agentic" VSCode fork. I'm genuinely surprised that Code forks and LLM cli things are seemingly the only use case that's approached viability. Even a year ago, I figured there'd be something else that's emerged by now.

But there are a ton of LLM powered products in the market. I have a friend in finance that uses LLM powered products for financial analysis, he works in a big bank. Just now anthropic released a product to compete in this space. Another friend in real estate uses LLM powered lead qualifications products, he runs marketing campaigns and the AI handles the initial interaction via email or phone and then ranks the lead…

It feels like there's a lot of shifting goalposts. A year ago, the hype was that knowledge work would cease to exist by 2027.

Now we are trying to hype up enhanced email autocomplete and data analysis as revolutionary?

I agree that those things are useful. But it's not really addressing the criticism. I would have zero criticisms of AI marketing if it was "hey, look at this new technology that can assist your employees and make them 20% more productive".

I think there's also a healthy dose of skepticism after the internet and social media age. Those were also society altering technologies that purported to democratize the political and economic system. I don't think those goals were accomplished, although without a doubt many workers and industries were made more productive. That effect is definitely real and I'm not denying that.

But in other areas, the last 3 decades of technological advancement have been a resounding failure. We haven't made a dent in educational outcomes or intergenerational poverty, for instance.

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