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I love LLMs, I hate hype

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Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#281

Post by rightbyte »

lacedeconstruct wrote: post #110
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 st…

> I enjoy making bread at home but it costs 10x and tastes like dog shit

I am sorry but you are holding it wrong. Among all the things you can do yourself cgeaper and better, bread is probably the further most low hanging fruit.

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#282

Post by SwellJoe »

intothemild wrote: post #172
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…

> 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. Are they really the best models? Like take anthropic. Without mythos, it's the what? Third best? Sure openAI just leapfrogged them but .. seriously to get there it's a giant model that costs insane per token. Nobody needs that, it's l…

"Are they really the best models?"

Yes. I mean, most people agree they are. I've used all of the serious contenders (well not Grok 4.5, because Musk, and not Meta Spark because Zuck, but everything else I've used on at least a couple of projects to get a feel for them). My experience roughly matches the vibes. But, Fable is remarkable when it doesn't refuse to do the work (which it does, quite a lot, since my areas of interest are security and training specialist models).

Anyway, the vibes strongly indicate Fable is the best model, but not by an amount that is noticeable to most people. You could pick any of the top 10 models on this chart and do most of the tasks most people are doing with models:

https://artificialanalysis.ai/#intelligence

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#284

Post by nylonstrung »

Jtarii wrote: post #153
nylonstrung wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but it was only like 2 years ago that artists were arguing this on the basis that AI-gen images would consistently mangle hands Now we're at a point where that never happens, and where lipsync is almost a completely solved problem If the issue here is simply that the quality is bad, one has to contend with the fact that it is undoubtedly exponentially improving and there's no reason we should expect that improve…

An LLM cannot make art because it isn't human. It can make "art like artifacts". Art involves one human communicating some emotional experience to another human, LLMs cannot experience human emotion, so they cannot make art. The process of making art is not a subset of hill climbing optimisation algorithms.

The natural world is full of things that area beautiful and breathtaking without having come from "human emotion".

The plumage of a peacock is beautiful and awe-inspiring beyond most human made art, and it is genuinely the result of evolutionary hill climbing on a fitness landscape

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#285

Post by QuantumGood »

datadrivenangel wrote: post #128
QuantumGood wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to clarify your implication: Fable subscription usage was just (re)extended to July 19

And now their comment is good next week! The rug pull getting extended doesn't mean it won't come.

Their comment was good as is because of the extension (not a nitpick, a clarification)

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#286

Post by mlrtime »

gyomu wrote: post #137
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.

I gave you a upvote simply because I see your prediction just as likely as anyone else's here, meaning nobody has any idea what this space will look like in 10 years.

I hope everyone reads these LLM threads like your post, complete shots in the dark because nobody here will get close to predicting what the environment will look like, even the "insiders".

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#287

Post by impure-aqua »

bluegatty wrote: post #158
SwellJoe wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But, that's not what you said they'd do. I can switch to a different model with almost zero cost. That's the definition of a commodity.

No, you switched to another SOTA model. You didn't switch to 'Random Corner Store Token Seller' down the street, did you? There 2-3 top players, that is not commodity. Commodity is when there are enough that none of them have market power or can set prices. 'Commodity' means you buy your tokens from the Grocery Store on their loan plan. Like consumer credit is a commodity. FYI predict this is roughly the way it will…

Commoditizarion is a process, not a binary state.

If I run an oil refinery, my fractional distillation system needs to be reworked depending on the exact mixture of crude I'm taking as input. So there are still switching costs even in the textbook example of a commodity.

Crucially though the exact upstream I use has minimal impact on the downstream. Closer equivalents, say, another barrel of WTI grade crude from a nearby regional supplier, require extremely minimal reworking. Oil from a different region, that might require more retooling, so I might be willing to sustain a longer shock in market conditions before making that switch. The important thing is the output broadly remains the same, but even this is broad, e.g. a different mix of inputs yields different ratios of output.

LLMs are quite similar no? Maybe switching to another SOTA model has minimal reworking, as you can delegate at the same level of abstraction to the model, whereas switching to a slightly-behind-frontier model you need to do more hand holding. Switching costs being nonzero does not preclude them from being broadly an interchangeable input in the production process. Any non-frontier use (99% of SWE) will be delivered on pretty much the exact same timeline irrespective of which model was used, so my requisition process looks more like buying barrels of oil than e.g. shopping for a new phone.

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#288

Post by darkwater »

somenameforme wrote: post #280
darkwater wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now you can download free open source software, that works better than DALL-E and runs fine on a plain old video card, and for orders of magnitude lower cost. Ok, I completely missed that one. Can you point me in the right direction?

Sure, for a balance between usability and power I'd recommend fooocus. [1] AmuseAI [2] is an alternative that is extremely plug-and-play which can be especially handy with AMD hardware, but is a bit less powerful and also censored by default. ComfyUI [3] is an advanced tool for rich customization and what not. However it's anything but comfy if you're not already quite knowledgeable in this domain - I would not recom…

Thank you!

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#289

Post by Razengan »

Razengan wrote: post #98
deeplowdock wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am calling your bullshit out and asking to provide even a singular example where you got 'trolled' seeking software development help.

^ Here's one but seriously? You can have a look now yourself. I haven't used Reddit for anything serious for years, but the times I or other people actually got useful answers or ideas is few compared to: - A handful of mods deciding for thousands of readers that your question doesn't fit the "subreddit" (this happened a lot on /r/askscience) - Low effort answers by karma farmers, basically copy-pasting docs etc - "W…

quotes were supposed to be around "fit" :')

Re: I love LLMs, I hate hype

#290

Post by one33seven »

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…

A few days back there was a post saying the only ones making money with AI are the ones selling the hardware
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