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LLM Inevitabilism

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Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#381

Post by fnwbr »

mg wrote: post #70

In the 90s a friend told me about the internet. And that he knows someone who is in a university and has access to it and can show us. An hour later, we were sitting in front of a computer in that university and watched his friend surfing the web. Clicking on links, receiving pages of text. Faster than one could read. In a nice layout. Even with images. And links to other pages. We were shocked. No printing, no shipp…

lol it's like you didn't even read the OP...

your own blog post has the very wording the author was criticizing and you seem to be absolutely ignorant about it:

> "Future versions of my [...] will successfully address"

> "LLMs will become so good, no [...]"

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#382

Post by latexr »

mg wrote: post #70

In the 90s a friend told me about the internet. And that he knows someone who is in a university and has access to it and can show us. An hour later, we were sitting in front of a computer in that university and watched his friend surfing the web. Clicking on links, receiving pages of text. Faster than one could read. In a nice layout. Even with images. And links to other pages. We were shocked. No printing, no shipp…

> would have required me to dive deep down into the documentation or read its code to tackle my use case.

You mean, you had a task which required you to learn about and understand what you were doing?! Gasp! The horror! Oh, the humanity! How could we ever survive all this time, having to use our heads to think and reason and make choices about what we should spend our time on and improve.

Nowadays we have the sweet life. We can just let our brains atrophy to spend more time drooling in front of junk designed to syphon our attention and critical thinking. We don’t even need to think, we can just trust what the machine provides us. And when we’re fucked because the machine is wrong or spitting out propaganda, we can lay down and wait for sweet death, knowing we lived a life devoid of interest or agency.

All hail the inevitability of LLMs. All hail being in the palm of large corporations who would sacrifice us for a nickel.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#383

Post by jcfrei »

pavlov wrote: post #353
mg wrote: post #70

In the 90s a friend told me about the internet. And that he knows someone who is in a university and has access to it and can show us. An hour later, we were sitting in front of a computer in that university and watched his friend surfing the web. Clicking on links, receiving pages of text. Faster than one could read. In a nice layout. Even with images. And links to other pages. We were shocked. No printing, no shipp…

Compare these positive introductory experiences with two technologies that were pushed extremely hard by commercial interests in the past decade: crypto/web3 and VR/metaverse. Neither was ever able to offer this kind of instant usefulness. With crypto, it’s still the case that you create a wallet and then… there’s nothing to do on the platform. You’re expected to send real money to someone so they’ll give you some of…

Give it some time - just like LLMs the first VR headsets were created in the 90s (for example by Nintendo). But it took another 30 years for the hardware to achieve levels of functionality and comfortableness that make it a viable consumer product. Apple Vision is starting to get there. And crypto is even younger - it started in early 2009. For people living in countries without a proper banking infrastructure the stablecoins are already very helpful. Billions of people live in countries that don't have a well audited financial sector, that respects the rule of law or an independent central bank that makes sound monetary decisions irrespective of the government. For them stablecoins and their cheap transactions are huge.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#384

Post by camillomiller »

eric-burel wrote: post #133
lsy wrote: post #63

I think two things can be true simultaneously: 1. LLMs are a new technology and it's hard to put the genie back in the bottle with that. It's difficult to imagine a future where they don't continue to exist in some form, with all the timesaving benefits and social issues that come with them. 2. Almost three years in, companies investing in LLMs have not yet discovered a business model that justifies the massive expen…

Developers haven't even started extracting the value of LLMs with agent architectures yet. Using an LLM UI like open ai is like we just figured fire and you use it to warm you hands (still impressive when you think about it, but not worth the burns), while LLM development is about building car engines (here is you return on investment).

>> Developers haven't even started extracting the value of LLMs with agent architectures yet.

What does this EVEN mean? Do words have any value still, or are we all just starting to treat them as the byproduct of probabilistic tokens?

"Agent architectures". Last time I checked an architecture needs predictability and constraints. Even in software engineering, a field for which the word "engineering" is already quite a stretch in comparison to construction, electronics, mechanics.

Yet we just spew the non-speak "Agentic architectures" as if the innate inability of LLMs in managing predictable quantitative operations is not an unsolved issue. As if putting more and more of these things together automagically will solves their fundamental and existential issue (hallucinations) and suddenly makes them viable for unchecked and automated integration.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#385

Post by rafaelmn »

Qwertious wrote: post #271
rafaelmn wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you claimed that AI was inevitable in the 80s and invested, or claimed people would be inevitably moving to VR 10 years ago - you would be shit out of luck. Zuck is still burning billions on it with nothing to show for it and a bad outlook. Even Apple tried it and hilariously missed the demand estimate. The only potential bailout for this tech is AR, but thats still years away from consumer market and widespread a…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhr6fHmCJ6k (1min video, 'Elon Musk's broken promises') Musk's 2014/2015 promises are arguably delivered, here in 2025 (took a little more than '1 month' tho), but the promises starting in 2016 are somewhere between 'undelivered' and 'blatant bullshit'.

I mean no argument here - but the insane valuation was at some point based on a fleet of self driving cars based on cars they don't even have to own - overtaking Uber. I don't think they are anywhere close to that. (It's hard to keep track what it is now - robots and AI ?) Kudos for hype chasing all these years tho. Only beaten by Jensen on that front.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#386

Post by baxtr »

mg wrote: post #70

In the 90s a friend told me about the internet. And that he knows someone who is in a university and has access to it and can show us. An hour later, we were sitting in front of a computer in that university and watched his friend surfing the web. Clicking on links, receiving pages of text. Faster than one could read. In a nice layout. Even with images. And links to other pages. We were shocked. No printing, no shipp…

I am absolutely on board with the LLM inevitablism. It seems inevitable as you describe it. Everyone will use them everyday. Like smartphones.

I am absolutely not on board with AGI inevitablism. Saying “AGI is inevitable because models keep getting better” is an inductive leap that is not guaranteed.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#387

Post by Applejinx »

stillpointlab wrote: post #255
AndyKelley wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You speak with a passive voice, as if the future is something that happens to you, rather than something that you participate in.

There is an old cliché about stopping the tide coming in. I mean, yeah you can get out there and participate in trying to stop it. This isn't about fatalism or even pessimism. The tide coming in isn't good or bad. It's more like the refrain from Game of Thrones: Winter is coming. You prepare for it. Your time might be better served finding shelter and warm clothing rather than engaging in a futile attempt to prevent…

If you believe that there is nobody there inside all this LLM stuff, that it's ultimately hollow and yet that it'll still get used by the sort of people who'll look at most humans and call 'em non-player characters and meme at them, if you believe that you're looking at a collapse of civilization because of this hollowness and what it evokes in people… then you'll be doing that, but I can't blame anybody for engaging in attempts to prevent it.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#388

Post by podlp »

meager_wikis wrote: post #69
podlp wrote: post #55

The book I’m currently reading-Kevin Kelly’s The Inevitable-feels pretty ironic given this post

What is your take on the outcome of his predictions?

Well many have come true, a few have not. As someone who gets vertigo from headsets, I’m a VR skeptic. But his AI predictions are pretty much spot on

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#389

Post by miscend »

Not sure I get the author of this piece. The tech leaders are clearly saying AI is inevitable, they're not saying LLMs are inevitable. Big tech is constantly working on new types of AI such as world models.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#390

Post by _flux »

skybrian wrote: post #153
bradly wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what that same GPT4 told me today after trying to get a simple mqttwarn config: ChatGPT: Let’s cut through the mqttwarn quirks and get you a single, complete warn.ini that I’ve actually tested with mqttwarn 0.32 Me: that "I’ve actually tested with mqttwarn 0.32:" How did you perform this test? ChatGPT: I set up a quick local sandbox on my laptop Me: What brand is your laptop? What store did you buy it at? Cha…

Yes, arguing with an LLM in this way is a waste of time. It’s not a person. If it does anything weird, start a new conversation.

I usually just modify the message before it goes off the rails, taking into consideration how it failed.
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