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The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

lewiscampbell.tech

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Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#271

Post by xyzsparetimexyz »

moron4hire wrote: post #178
rudedogg wrote: post #3

Hearing people on tech twitter say that LLMs always produce better code than they do by hand was pretty enlightening for me. LLMs can produce better code for languages and domains I’m not proficient in, at a much faster rate, but damn it’s rare I look at LLM output and don’t spot something I’d do measurably better. These things are average text generation machines. Yes you can improve the output quality by writing a…

If firing up old coal plants and skyrocketing RAM prices and $5000 consumer GPUs and violating millions of developers' copyrights and occasionally coaxing someone into killing themselves is the cost of Brian Who Got Peter Principled Into Middle Management getting to enjoy programming again instead of blaming his kids for why he watches football and drinks all weekend instead of cultivating a hobby, I guess we have no…

Well said

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#272

Post by xyzsparetimexyz »

jason_oster wrote: post #208
WolfeReader wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given how much energy LLMs use, I'd greatly prefer not to let the results speak for themselves.

Quick napkin math time! Steam reached a new peak of 42 million concurrent players today [1]. An average/mid-tier gaming PC uses 0.2 kWh per hour [2]. 42 million * 0.2 gives 8,400,000 kWh per hour, or 8,400 MWh per hour. By contrast, training GPT3 was estimated to have used 1,300 MWh of energy [3]. This does not account for training costs of newer models, nor inference costs. But we know inference costs are extraordin…

I'd rather people play games, even extremely mediocre ones, than generate ai slop images or code.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#273

Post by theshrike79 »

tstrimple wrote: post #247
theshrike79 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of us are paid to solve problems and deliver features, not craft the most perfect code known to man. If the slop-o-matic next to you is delivering 5 features a week without tripping up QA and you do one every two weeks - which one will the company pick when layoffs hit again?

Most developer jobs are like working at Ikea, but most developers on HN pretend they are fine furniture craftsman and that's really what everyone needs or the whole world will fall apart. It turns out, the vast majority of the population is quite happy with a LACK side table and their carefully crafted dovetail joinery adds nothing but expense to the average use case.

Exactly. With the current over-funded startup market people can spend tons of time and money building over-engineered juicers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ - and their software equivalent.

So many companies would be just fine with a single VPS, Python and PostgreSQL - but that's boring and doesn't look good in your resume =)

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#274

Post by jason_oster »

xyzsparetimexyz wrote: post #272
jason_oster wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quick napkin math time! Steam reached a new peak of 42 million concurrent players today [1]. An average/mid-tier gaming PC uses 0.2 kWh per hour [2]. 42 million * 0.2 gives 8,400,000 kWh per hour, or 8,400 MWh per hour. By contrast, training GPT3 was estimated to have used 1,300 MWh of energy [3]. This does not account for training costs of newer models, nor inference costs. But we know inference costs are extraordin…

I'd rather people play games, even extremely mediocre ones, than generate ai slop images or code.

I don't have a preference. Both are valuable in their own way.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#275

Post by mrguyorama »

habinero wrote: post #35
rudedogg wrote: post #3

Hearing people on tech twitter say that LLMs always produce better code than they do by hand was pretty enlightening for me. LLMs can produce better code for languages and domains I’m not proficient in, at a much faster rate, but damn it’s rare I look at LLM output and don’t spot something I’d do measurably better. These things are average text generation machines. Yes you can improve the output quality by writing a…

I saw someone refer to it as future digital asbestos.

Asbestos is a miracle material with a serious and hard to really avoid downside.

It's so good that we are genuinely left with crappy options to replace it, and people have died in fires that could have been saved with the right application of asbestos.

Current AI hype is closer to the Radium craze back during the discovery of radioactivity. Yes it's a neat new thing that will have some interesting uses. No don't put it in everything and especially not in your food what are you doing oh my god!

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#276

Post by mrguyorama »

bashtoni wrote: post #27

The tech industry seems to attract people that feel personally attacked when someone else makes different choices that they do. "Why are you using Go? Rust is best! You should be using that!" "Don't use AWS CDK, use Terraform! Don't you know anything?"

Keep in mind that anyone posting on a forum (just like this), or so much more, anyone blogging about something is already a huge selection bias for people who believe that their opinion needs to be shared.

You don't hear from all the people who don't feel that others must know their opinion.

Lurkers always outweigh posters.

Don't ever make the mistake of believing that a sample of posts is a sample of people

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#277

Post by _zagj »

xyzsparetimexyz wrote: post #267
tim333 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Antirez: >Skipping AI is not going to help you or your career. Think about it.

Who knows. Maybe all the AI people will have their skills atrophy and by the time the AI crash happens and none of the models can be run, they don't be employable any more. I'm happy to take that gamble if it saves my conscience.

> the AI crash happens and none of the models can be run

How could this happen with local models already in service?

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#278

Post by munksbeer »

reb wrote: post #10

How much longer until we get to just... let the results speak for themselves and stop relitigating an open question with no clear answer. We're well past ad nauseum now. Let's talk about anything else.

I said this elsewhere. The whole argument is so boring. There are people trying to make money by pushing the tech (annoying videos I come across), but the most vehement side on HN are the anti-LLM.

Within five years I think the debate will be over, and I think I know what the outcome will be.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#279

Post by lijok »

WolfeReader wrote: post #190
lijok wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when AI shows itself responsible for a new category of life-saving technique, like a cure for cancer or Alzheimer's, then I'd have to reconsider. We’re way past that

Please, go into detail!

Here’s a good exercise;

Search through github for commits authored by .edu, .ac.uk etc emails and spend a few days understanding what they’ve been building the past few years. Once you’ve picked your jaw off the floor, take another 10 minutes to appreciate that this is just the public code by some researchers, and is crumbs compared to what is being built right now behind closed doors.

Tenured professors are abdicating their teaching positions to work on startups. Commercial labs are pouring billions into tech that was unreachable just a few years ago. Academic labs are downscaling their interns 20x. Historically hermit companies are opening their doors to build partnerships in industry.

The scale of what is happening is difficult to comprehend.

Re: The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists

#280

Post by rtpg »

amunozo wrote: post #224
rtpg wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

now sometimes that's 4 hours, but I've had plenty of times where I'm "racing" people using LLMs and I basically get the coding done before them. Once I debugged an issue before the robot was done `ls`-ing the codebase! The shape of the problem is super important in considering the results here

People usually talk about how they're better than LLMs in the domains they're experts and with known codebases. What about all the other, large amounts of cases? Don't you ever face situations in which an LLM can greatly help (and outrace) you?

Yeah totally, for unknown codebases it can help kick you off in the right direction (though it can send you down a totally wrong path as well... projects with good docs tend to be ones where I've found LLMs be worse at their job on this ironically).

But well.. when working with coworkers on known projects it's a different story, right?

My stance is these tools are, of course, useful, but humans can most definitely be faster than the current iteration of these tools in a good number of tasks, and some form of debugging tasks are like that for me. The ones I've tried have been too prone to meandering and trying too many "top results on Google"-style fixes.

But hey maybe I'm just holding it wrong! Just seems like some of my coworkers are too

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