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I love LLMs, I hate hype

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Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#101

Post by coldtea »

thegrim33 wrote: post #61
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

Doesn't have to be "every person and company, in unison, in a grand conspiracy" and other such strawmen.

We could try steelmaning this argument instead: it's enough that most big companies who would otherwise have incentives to contribute.

Before FOSS got in fashion, around the early 2000s, most commercial companies wouldn't touch it as contributors and were openly avert to it, and to open sourcing their stuff. This can be the case again.

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#102

Post by dominotw »

password54321 wrote: post #20

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...

even meta that sucks at doing anything is releasing frontier models. making an top ai is easier than making twitter clone( threads) if you have enough money.

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#103

Post by SwellJoe »

arscan wrote: post #87
SwellJoe wrote: post #81

This line: "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." That is a very astute and concise way to explain everything about how the frontier labs are behaving and how they're trying to push more people to pay token rates for the best models. At the current subscription prices ($100 or $200 a month for a generous, thoug…

Who is going to end up capturing all this value being generated is going to be very interesting. Back in 1980, who’d have thought MS would capture the majority of the value from PCs over the next 3 decades, and not IBM?

So far, it seems to be the reverse of that disruption. Hardware companies, Nvidia, Apple, AMD, Intel, ARM, memory companies, are all having record-setting quarters, and it's actual profits, not subsidized by investors and circular investments (though the hardware companies are investing in the AI companies to keep the hype train rolling).

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#104

Post by dakolli »

fragmede wrote: post #64
blauditore wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

The fact that you're even saying this it is probably an admission that you do think it's making you dumber. Most people I know, who are honest with themselves, have admitted to me that they feel like it's making them dumber or "zombifying" them. This is also well studied already, https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872

LLMs are poison for the brain, I'm almost certain of it, at least when used in the way most people are using them. If you drive everywhere because you don't want to walk (but you could), you're obviously going to be physically worse off than if you walked. This is the case with llms, if you have them do all the thinking, planning and action you're going to be cognitively worse off than if you didn't use them.

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#105

Post by SwellJoe »

bluegatty wrote: post #91
SwellJoe wrote: post #81

This line: "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." That is a very astute and concise way to explain everything about how the frontier labs are behaving and how they're trying to push more people to pay token rates for the best models. At the current subscription prices ($100 or $200 a month for a generous, thoug…

Frontier labs will figure out all sorts of ways to wiggle into the value chain beyond being commodities.

When do you reckon they'll start doing that?

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#106

Post by Aurornis »

theli0nheart wrote: post #75
Aurornis wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

They may have good margins, but a few things are still true: 1. Much of those profits have to be immediately reinvested into model training runs to avoid being lapped by competitions. 2. Unit costs are irrelevant when the labs don't price per unit, and instead charge, for instance, $200 / month for $10k worth of tokens. This isn't a steady state. Whatever the current situation is, I doubt it's sustainable.

> 2. Unit costs are irrelevant when the labs don't price per unit, and instead charge, for instance, $200 / month for $10k worth of tokens.

Cost to generate all of the tokens divided by revenue generated by selling those tokens is what matters.

The subscription plans confuse a lot of people because that's what they see. They're not seeing the gigantic API bills from all of the tokens going into enterprise use cases.

The subscription plans are a small part of their income. Most users aren't maxing out 100% of their plan usage every week. I wouldn't be surprised if their average plan user was using less than 50% of their monthly quota each month.

Plans like that can produce a net increase in profit if they get consumers interested in the brand and pitching it at work. Giving them some extra token headroom on their $20/month or $100/month home plan is money well spent if it gets all of a company's developers advocating for enterprise plans with budgets exceeding $1000 per person.

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#109

Post by edot »

Lt_Riza_Hawkeye wrote: post #96
SwellJoe wrote: post #81

This line: "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." That is a very astute and concise way to explain everything about how the frontier labs are behaving and how they're trying to push more people to pay token rates for the best models. At the current subscription prices ($100 or $200 a month for a generous, thoug…

While I do agree there will be disruption we haven't seen yet, my company is already spending >$40k/day for a "frontier model", so who knows. Then again, they're not using that for coding

What are they / you using it for in such quantities?

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#110

Post by lacedeconstruct »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #13

At least for me, the jump in productivity has resulted in building stripped down one-off software for my highly specific use-cases. You can use an LLM to create anything but you still need to know what it is that you're building, and you need to think through how everything should work or the LLM will just fill it with sausage. You can tell that the models are still quite jagged and limited by the mixed quality from…

This doesn't make sense, I enjoy making bread at home but it costs 10x and tastes like dog shit I dont want to spend my time perfecting the craft of making bread for my daily needs (maybe once in a while its a soothing activity), I want someone smarter than me to spend his entire life coming up and perfecting a solution and exerting more time and effort than I can afford and I am very happy to support him so I can stop worrying about it and focus on what I want to do
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