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What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

vishnumenon.com

181–190 of 219 posts

Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#181

Take over simple system administration tasks such as (of course giving it full shell access): - install this nVidia driver and make it work with pytorch - get this ethernet connection to $IP working - schedule a daily cron job to make an incremental backup of this harddrive, don't store duplicate files

You've got nerves of steel. It can, and will, hallucinate sudo rm -fr / as a step necessary for configuration at some point (it's even easy to justify by, say, missing the mention of this having to be in a chroot or a container). Russian roulette with your data and setup on the line. Not sure I'm willing to try...

Step 1: use a filesystem that supports snapshots ;)

Anyway, if LLMs can write computer programs (see Copilot), then surely they can do simple administrative tasks ...

Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#182
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I'll tell you my vision which is kinda long term - like 20-30 year from now on. I think the future is that everyone will have their own personalized AI assistant on their phone. Internet as it is will be mostly useless because only robots will be able to wade through the generated shit ocean and the next generation will see it as the current see the TV - unimportant old boring low-entropy data which is not entertaini…

Do you think that this will all function as one giant homogenizing force at the societal level? The AIs will all be trained on the same data, and so will have the same opinions, beliefs, persuasions, etc. It seems like everyone having AIs which are mostly the same will maximize exploitation, and minimize exploration, of ideas.

Is that any different than media before the internet consumed it all? Media consisted of a couple of news stations, a couple of TV stations and that was mostly it.

I'm also not sure that the recent broadening of media has been a net benefit to society. Look at the degree of polarization in recent years. At a certain point heterogeneity is no longer a societal good.

Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#183
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Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 20-30 years I most certainly do not want to use a phone anymore. I grew up without the things, and boy was that fun.

Do you ever wonder if that's because of the growing up part and not the phone part? Growing up for most people tends to be pretty fun and exciting compared to adult life. And with or without phones, the 80s and 90s were a very different time when it came to kids being able to go out and play outside on their own. Move to a country where it's common for kids to play outside and you'll see that times aren't much differ…

Growing up in the time where Palm and Windows CE were a thing, I knew having a capable pocket sized computer was an inevitability, and couldn't wait for it. And it's great: I would fucking hate not having modern mobile banking, communications tools, maps, calendars and the ability to look anything up immediately.

The internet was more fun pre-smartphone, but that's because of the demographic change brought on by a new Eternal September, not the existence of mobile computers. We went from the internet being the domain of interesting, creative people who made things for fun to "basically everybody."

Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#184

The modern internet and modern app experience has become so shitty. For example opening up Robinhood, transferring money from a bank account, and buying a stock is hidden behind a multitude of product driven dark patterns that turns what should be a low cognitive load task into a high cognitive load task. This is true for everything now days. I predict llm based agents will be used as a 3rd party layer on top of the…

If we're talking about the future here, it makes much more sense that you'd be buying stocks directly using currency stored on your phones hardware wallet through a DEX like Uniswap. In fact, you might just tell your phone that you want to buy X amount of stock, and it would do it all for you onchain.

Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not really following what you're trying to say. What is that personality type, and what are the things its good at? What is the LLM advantage? Not saying your post is devoid of any substance, just trying to educate myself on my blindspots

There are three types of intelligence: intuitive, cognitive and narrative. Tech has, for years, seen people with cognitive/narrative intelligence as the people who are actually smart. LLMs help the intuitive people reach the level of the cognitive/narrative people. Cognitive/narrative people can't really understand this in the same way the intuitive people are bad at syntax or database structure. The steamrolling wil…

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Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not really following what you're trying to say. What is that personality type, and what are the things its good at? What is the LLM advantage? Not saying your post is devoid of any substance, just trying to educate myself on my blindspots

There are three types of intelligence: intuitive, cognitive and narrative. Tech has, for years, seen people with cognitive/narrative intelligence as the people who are actually smart. LLMs help the intuitive people reach the level of the cognitive/narrative people. Cognitive/narrative people can't really understand this in the same way the intuitive people are bad at syntax or database structure. The steamrolling wil…

Could you give a concrete example of where ChatGPT is likely to provide a competitive advantage to intuitive people with weak cognitive/narrative capabilities?

Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#188

> I don’t believe that natural language is an adequate medium for conveying instructions with the precision required for many applications. Not clear to me if the author actually uses LLMs to do meaningful work, or is speculating about how they might be used. I've written about 2500 lines of F# for the first time in the past 1.5 weeks using ChatGPT-4 to guide me. It has been an constant back and forth, iterative proc…

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Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Programmers[1] have a complexity bias that interferes with the idea that LLMs can write useful code. I had a problem last week where I wanted to extract sheet names and selection ranges from the Numbers app for a few dozen spreadsheets. ChatGPT, came up with the idea of using Apple script and with a but of coaxing wrote a script to do it. I don't know ApplesScript and I really don't want to learn it. I want to solve…

I am confused - the "code" you described is likely a google search away. Well I mean google has become useless but when it worked it was able to find such stuff in one search. So really all I am getting is that gpt is a better google.

I'm not quite understanding. It sounds like I was supposed to use google search before it stopped working?

A great counterexample would be a google query which includes the answer in the results.

Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#190
The predictions the article makes are a bit unimaginative and shallow. The timeline is also somewhat extremely long. It's more like late 2023 than 2027.

So, Language Model UX in 2024 according to me:

- Pervasive: Virtual assistants are omnipresent, and integrate everything together. Like Alexa that is actually intelligent and can for example make you a custom app for interfacing with your banking following your preferences on-the-fly for you only. Web apps become meaningless as you are getting the UI you need customized, tailor-made, live when you need it. Agents go with you in smartphones or project to any device nearby. No need for authentication, bots know you.

- Agentic: They will negotiate with each others all the time and present a unified interface to you no matter which system you are interacting with. The air is full of silent chatter. Things move when you aren't watching. Progress is decoupled from human input, attention and care.

- Web searches and such are for bots. Answering phones is for bots. Making calls is for bots. Any person still grasping at these kinds of interfaces will notice all emails they get are from bots, and all emails they send are instantly answered by bots. Just let go, let the machines handle that, which brings me to:

- Intermediation: No matter what you do, a bot will help you with it. Swiping Tinder? Don't bother, a bot does it better for you. Just lay back and relax. Ads become targeted to bots and truthful, because the bots won't forgive misrepresentation, ever.

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