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

131–140 of 340 posts

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#131

Post by matwood »

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…

> It’s not that AI won’t create that much value, it’s that they won’t capture it.

Think airlines - both passenger and freight. They have never come close to capturing all the economic value they enable.

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#132

Post by vilos1611 »

dakolli wrote: post #104
fragmede wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 usi…

It's pretty easy to generalize this, but it doesn't match my perception. People who are using llms to do things they could have already done, but faster, probably have atrophying skill sets. People who are using these tools to accomplish significantly more difficult or complex work than they used to are absolutely finding new ways to push themselves. The problems are just much bigger.

The average Joe can easily vibe code apps that took a small startup just a few years ago. If developers are also using AI to build the same simple apps - then yeah. They're not pushing themselves hard enough, and probably not using their brains as much anymore.

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#133

Post by user43928 »

Aurornis wrote: post #111
helloplanets wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Using a full Claude Max 20x plan to 100% of weekly usage I doubt many of their customers are on the 20X plan. Of those, I doubt many of them are using 100% of their weekly usage regularly. Comparing the 100% maximum usage scenario of their most discounted plan against the API cost has been a trap in this conversation since it came out. I bet if we saw their financials it would be a tiny sliver in a pie chart somewh…

[dead]

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#134

Post by peab »

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.

yeah I had this happen to me. Except when I go to maintain it, now cursor/claude are good enough to essentially handle it on their own, so it turns out to be very low effort to maintain.

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#136

Post by RajT88 »

cautiouscat wrote: post #19
sigmar wrote: post #3

>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 possible to use LLMs without logging onto twitter to be exposed to the people spouting off…

Those people are not just on Twitter. They’re here on HN, they’re at work, they’re at your next social gathering. I’ve found them to be unavoidable to some degree.

I see a lot of them on Nextdoor and at my city council meetings.

Talking points like: "Data centers are just surveillance centers that are going to use AI to put us into a digital prison!"

Whatever all that means. I assume some of it is about Flock cameras.

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#137

Post by gyomu »

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…

In 5-10 years an Apple Watch will run a Fable level model locally. I don’t think we (hackers) should worry too much about token cost inflation. The current wave of providers, that’s another story.

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#138

Post by pyrophane »

matwood wrote: post #131
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…

> It’s not that AI won’t create that much value, it’s that they won’t capture it. Think airlines - both passenger and freight. They have never come close to capturing all the economic value they enable.

And airline stocks are typically a bad investment and Delta has been called a bank that operates an airline due the the amount of their revenue that comes from credit card fees.

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#139

Post by charcircuit »

reinitctxoffset wrote: post #90
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...

I'm pretty sure at this point that Anthropic is training mixture models (at least in the heavy pre-train) and deploying them dense with explicit loss on thinking trace coherence. Having a thinking trace that is legible, coherent, and immediately implies the explicit turn output and/or tool use seems difficult if not impossible to reliably get from mixture models. I predict MoE is a transitional technology, it's got t…

>I predict MoE is a transitional technology

While scaling laws hold (more weights = better), and time / financial costs are not trivial the incentives are in place to have MoE. MoE means you can have more weights without increasing the critical path of evaluating it.

I am curious what you believe the problems with it that would cause people to prefer using less weights. I'm not following what you mean by MoE can't have legible thinkings trace or tool use when existing models with MoE can.

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#140

Post by simoncion »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #85
ghthor wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Qtips are made for cleaning your ears. It says not to do that so they are NOT sued every time some idiot fucks up their ear with one.

But the part of the ear that needs cleaning can be reached without a cotton bud. This is like shoving a sponge down your windpipe to remove mucus.

> This is like shoving a sponge down your windpipe to remove mucus.

In my personal experience, not using a cotton-tipped swab for the task is like cleaning a plate loaded with gunk and burned-on patches with one's bare hands rather than choosing to use a sponge and/or brush. You can do it, [0] but it's much more work, much more time consuming, or you get an inferior result.

[0] In my case, I'd need to make one set of passes with paper wrapped around my smallest finger, and then another set with paper shaped into a tool that can lever the excess wax out from outer orifice of my ear canal.

Post reply on HN