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I love LLMs, I hate hype

geohot.github.io

31–40 of 340 posts

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#31

> where’s all this new magical software that the productivity improvements should imply? It's running, privately, in my homelab. I think we are entering what I call the "have it your way" era. If an open source project doesn't do exactly what you want it to do, fork it, or create a new version. It's too easy. This makes me a bit concerned about the future of open source. Upstreaming used to be worth it, since maintai…

You still have to track upstream and merge conflicts. Or else you have to get LLMs to fix all the CVEs in your fork.

[flagged]

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#32
post #28

Yeah I don't think any of the labs have some secret sauce for intelligence either. It seems most of the advancements are still coming from hardware, making LLMs more efficient and throwing more compute and data at problems. And even those problems still require a lot of prompt engineering: https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/04d1d1e4-bc75-476a-97cf-49055cd98...

The secret sauce is training data. They’re not just taking advantage of more compute (which obviously is necessary but as mentions basically a commodity). They are paying billions to data labelers and making judgements about the nature of the training data they best need to make the product they want. This seems to get pushed aside as a minor point but it’s the primary differentiator of the big labs.

As a I said, compute and data. But LLMs can be distilled, so even their data is not much of a secret sauce.

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#33
post #4

Honestly, who likes any hype in anything ever? Especially if you genuinely like and understand the thing being hyped.

Agreed, but I do think this is a wholly different kind of hype. With crypto currencies it was the promise of modernizing value exchange, with some zealots promising the end of traditional currency.

With this, I’m hearing (from supposedly reputable publications, in addition to random people) that this is going to end knowledge work in general and take out a large percentage of the world’s labor force. I’m being told to pick up a trade, and that the career I have and the knowledge I’ve gained is now worthless.

The worst part seems to be that it’s pretty much impossible to quantify any kind of impact these tools will have until after the impact is actually felt. We’ve been in limbo while the tech sector is just rotting.

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#34
> What I don’t like is two things. One, this constant bullshit about some window closing, or the perpetual underclass, or falling hopelessly behind.

The blog has a tagline, "the singularity is nearer". I think belief in a "singularity" almost implies these things to some degree.

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#35

I recently realized, that ever since I've had AI to "talk" to, I haven't had a stuck or "downtime" moment; there's always something to at least brainstorm on. In the past when I couldn't figure out something, I'd take a break for a couple days, while going through Google → Stack Overflow → Reddit, and by the time you got to that point you rarely got useful answers, usually either trolls or silence. Now I can just ask…

Do you feel like the ideas you’re getting from brainstorming these days are the same level of quality as in the past? I’ve been doing some of the same, but I’ve also been feeling like the downtime where I’m genuinely stuck is where my most innovative solutions come to light. I’m not going as deep into problem spaces anymore.

I’ve also lost my ability to self-filter. In the past, I’d write down an idea and if I was stuck for too long, I’d discard it. Now I feel like I have an obligation to build everything.

Maybe it never mattered and the quantity of solutions is truly the most valuable thing.

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#37
post #34

> What I don’t like is two things. One, this constant bullshit about some window closing, or the perpetual underclass, or falling hopelessly behind. The blog has a tagline, "the singularity is nearer". I think belief in a "singularity" almost implies these things to some degree.

the author does not believe in the technological singularity.

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#38
post #4

Honestly, who likes any hype in anything ever? Especially if you genuinely like and understand the thing being hyped.

C-suites. Marketers. People with stock portfolios. Banks. Politicians. So all people that don’t understand the thing being hyped.

Basically all people with monetary investment in the thing being hyped

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#39
I love LLMs too, but I am concerned about their cost. They are all still very subsidised. Is there any guarantee that I'll be able to run a Opus 4.8-level model on my personal computer before the big AI labs decide to hike up the prices?

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#40

I recently realized, that ever since I've had AI to "talk" to, I haven't had a stuck or "downtime" moment; there's always something to at least brainstorm on. In the past when I couldn't figure out something, I'd take a break for a couple days, while going through Google → Stack Overflow → Reddit, and by the time you got to that point you rarely got useful answers, usually either trolls or silence. Now I can just ask…

Do you feel like the ideas you’re getting from brainstorming these days are the same level of quality as in the past? I’ve been doing some of the same, but I’ve also been feeling like the downtime where I’m genuinely stuck is where my most innovative solutions come to light. I’m not going as deep into problem spaces anymore. I’ve also lost my ability to self-filter. In the past, I’d write down an idea and if I was st…

> Do you feel like the ideas you’re getting from brainstorming these days are the same level of quality as in the past?

You have to be careful and "remain yourself":

Like I've been trying to think of a generic save/load system for my game framework, but the ideas given by Codex so far don't suit my desired design/interface, BUT it makes me certain of how I DON'T want to do it heh

If I got lazy and just blindly took the AI's first suggestion, I'd end up in deeper tech dept.

You have to take advantage of and "exploit" the way LLMs work, which seems ideal for shaping vague ideas, by using the AI's fuzziness to help you decide what you do and don't want.

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