Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I love LLMs, I hate hype

geohot.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 340 posts

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#61

Post by thegrim33 »

hamandcheese wrote: post #10

> 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…

"This new tool allows for writing all this code ..... but every person and company, in unison, in a grand conspiracy, all decided to only write private software with it that they aren't releasing to the public in any way"

Seems reasonable

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#62

Post by midasz »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #11
hamandcheese wrote: post #10

> 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.

I'm guilty of creating a fork that just goes off the rails, but still needs to keep up with upstream. I do it via a skill and seems to work good enough for now: https://github.com/midasvo/findroid-ce/tree/main/.claude/ski...

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#63

Post by ks2048 »

therepanic wrote: post #37
ks2048 wrote: 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.

That's what I gathered from the blog post - which made the title of the blog seem odd.

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#64

Post by fragmede »

blauditore wrote: post #43
hamandcheese wrote: post #10

> 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 will likely end up in maintenance hell soon. This will likely not be much easier with AI because coding is not the hard/annoying part, it's the fact that you need to dust off every little project every time a tiny fix is needed, and that's a lot of toil in the long run.

Maybe? I ran across an old pre-LLM project of mine recently, and past me was an asshole and didn't leave a readme for future me. Meanwhile post-LLM projects at least have a readme that the LLM generated for me or my agent to read and pick up context on. Being able to ask an agent what is this repo, what's going on here? Hey just make it do this, instead of toilsomely digging in and doing it tmmyself, seems to say that might not come to pass.

There is, of course, the question of if that's making me dumber. It might be, but there are other brain training things I'm doing outside of that to force my brain to do the thing.

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#65

Post by pu_pe »

> A certain cult likes to claim credit for things that are happening with or without them, and this is my main argument against the valuation of frontier labs. It’s not that AI won’t create that much value, it’s that they won’t capture it.

> AI is something that’s happening mostly due to Moore’s law and general progress in computing, not something that they are doing.

But if these companies control the vast majority of compute power, which seems like the plan they are already executing, won't they capture most of the value from the progress of AI?

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#66

Post by helloplanets »

Aurornis wrote: post #50
dom96 wrote: post #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?

> They are all still very subsidised. I think the opposite: I think the frontier labs have good margins on their inference unit costs. We can already see what it costs to run near frontier-size models. There are independent business pivoting to serving these models at reasonable prices and they're competing on OpenRouter for costs much lower than frontier labs. > Is there any guarantee that I'll be able to run a Opus…

The subscription based plans are heavily subsidized, but the direct API inference pricing (which larger companies need to pay) is profitable.

Using a full Claude Max 20x plan to 100% of weekly usage would easily cost you 2k through the API. While the Claude Max 20x plan is 200 a month.

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#67

Post by xyst »

I think big money/private equity/vulture capitalists tend to ruin everything. They set these unrealistic goals and force companies to do shady shit in order to meet these often unattainable goals or achieve unicorn status.

It’s why con artists, scammers always flood every hype cycle. Greed ruins everything.

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#68

Post by dude250711 »

Aurornis wrote: post #50
dom96 wrote: post #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?

> They are all still very subsidised. I think the opposite: I think the frontier labs have good margins on their inference unit costs. We can already see what it costs to run near frontier-size models. There are independent business pivoting to serving these models at reasonable prices and they're competing on OpenRouter for costs much lower than frontier labs. > Is there any guarantee that I'll be able to run a Opus…

I thought hardware prices would always just keep going down.

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#69

Post by deep_concern »

>One, this constant bullshit about some window closing, or the perpetual underclass, or falling hopelessly behind. This is negative valence hype, not only is it not true, it’s mostly designed to make you feel bad about yourself and move to shitty San Francisco where everything really does suck like how these people claim.

It's bullshit in the sense that they don't know for sure, but the author doesn't either. Why might or might not it be true?

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#70

Post by lukan »

jacobgold wrote: post #54
lukan wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's powerful, and it's amazing, but it's not magic" But since its creators and as of my knowledge everyone else totally did not see it coming, that you can now give a vague prompt full of spelling errors - and get returned a working program - I would say it is pretty close to magic (as in we don't really understand why it works so good). I also don't see how you cannot call it AI. Especially since simple chess engi…

Yes, LLM agents are "magic" in the sense that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"[1] But it's not actually magic. Technical people understand that it's just software running on computers. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws

Sure, nothing is magic. You can go look how a simple LLM works and build your understanding from there. But calling it "just software" is trivializing it in my opinion. I can write software, but I cannot write software that writes software.
Post reply on HN