Agreed it's just messianistic thinking a la abrahamic religions. See, Gnosticism, Marxism, positivism,....
Yeah, dialectical materialism is a great example. Socialism is inevitable, and all that.
LLM Inevitabilism
401–410 of 1001 posts
Re: LLM Inevitabilism
#402In 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…
Hours of time saved, and you learned nothing in the process. You are slowly becoming a cog in the LLM process instead of an autonomous programmer. You are losing autonomy and depending more and more on external companies. And one day will come that, with all that power, they'll set whatever price or conditions they want. And you will accept. That's the future. And it's not inevitable.
Re: LLM Inevitabilism
#403I 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…
Exactly. This is basically the argument of “AI as Normal Technology”.
Re: LLM Inevitabilism
#404In 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…
> And realize the thing on your head adds absolutely nothing to the interaction.
There are some nice effects - simulating sword fighting, shooting, etc.
It's just benefits still outweigh the cost. Getting to "good enough" for most people is just not possible in short and midterm.
Re: LLM Inevitabilism
#405Earlier 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…
There is a skill to it. You can get lucky as a beginner but if you want consistent success you gotta learn the ropes (strengths, weaknesses, failure modes etc). A quick way of getting seriously improved results though: if you are literally using GPT-4 as you mention—that is an ancient model! Parent comment says GPT-4.1 (yes openai is unimaginably horrible at naming but that ".1" isn't a minor version increment). And…
Literally astrology at this point. We don't understand the black box bs generating machine, but actually if you prod it this and that way according to some vague vibe, then it yields results that even if wrong are enough to fool you.
And christ, every single time there's the same retort: "ah but of course your results are shit, you must not be using gpt-4.69-o7-turbo-pro which came out this morning". Come on...
Re: LLM Inevitabilism
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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 the funny money that lets you play the game. This became a problem later due to governments cracking down on cryptos and some terrible technical choices made transactions expensive just as adoption was ramping. (Pat yourselves on the bac…
> buying for cash from an institution requires slow and intrusive KYC.
Hello my friend, grab a seat so we can contemplate the wickedness of man. KYC is not some authoritarian or entrenched industry response to fintech upstarts, it's a necessary thing that protects billions of people from crime and corruption.
Re: LLM Inevitabilism
#407In 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…
And here's a list of stuff I've seen or that the non-computer-experts tell me they're doing with it, since the last month or two when suddenly even people who were against it are accepting it, along with people who'd never heard of it suddenly using it:
- getting the do-re-mi notes for "twinkle twinkle little star" for the piano, just written out with no rhythm or audio anything
- writing a groom's wedding speech ("the first draft", he said, but I doubt it'll be edited much)
- splitting a list of ten names into two groups, to get two teams for indoor soccer (I know, I know... The tone was one of amazement and being impressed, I shit you not. One fellow used to bring a little bag with the same amount of yellow and red lego bricks and we'd pick one from the bag)
- in a workplace, a superior added a bell that gets triggered when a door opens. The superior left, and one employee went straight to ask chatgpt how to turn off the bell, and went straight to fiddling with the alarm after the very quickest skim of the response (and got nowhere, then gave up)
- and a smattering of sort of "self-help" or "psychology lite" stuff which you'll have to take my word on because it's personal stuff, but as you'd expect: "how to deal with a coworker who doesn't respect me in xyz manner", "how to get a 6-pack", "how to be taller", "how to get in to day-trading"
- and a good dose of "news"-related stuff like matters of actual law, or contentious geopolitical topics with very distinct on-the-ground possiblities and mountains of propaganda and spin everywhere, about say the Ukraine war or Gaza. E.g., one friend asked for specific numbers of deaths "on both sides" in Gaza and then told me (I shit you not!) he'd "ran the numbers" on the conflict during his research
Anyway. All that to say not that these people are silly or bad or wrong or anything, but to say - the internet was new! This isn't. When you were brought to see that computer in the university, you were seeing something genuinely amazingly new.
New forms of communcation would open up, new forms of expression, and a whole new competitive space for the kids of the wealthy to see who could contort these new technologies to their will and come out on top dominating the space.
With LLMs, we're only getting the last one there. There's nothing new, in the same profound sense as what the internet brought us. The internet offered a level playing field, to those brave enough to slog through the difficulties of getting set up.
Put differently - LLMs are similar to the internet, if and only if we accept that humans generally are idiots who can't understand their tools and the best we can hope for is that they get faster slop-generating machines. The internet didn't start like that, but it's where it ended up.
And that's LLM's starting point, it's their cultural and logical heart. I think a large number of technologists have internalised these assumptions about humans and technology, and are simply not aware of it, it's the air they breathe.
Put differently again - if the tech industry has gotten so blind that LLMs are what it considers the next internet-sized-idea, and the only possible future, well, it's an industry that's in a myopic and inhumane rut. We'll go from a world where people click and scroll on their devices for entertainment, fundamentally detached from each other and fundamentally disempowered, to a world where people click and scroll on their devices for entertainment, detached and disempowered. How noble a vision, how revolutionary.
So to sum up, in one sense you're correct - it looks like it's going to "take over", and that that's "inevitable". In another sense, LLMs are absolutely wildly different, as this time we're starting off treating the average user like a complete idiot, in fact assuming that we can never do better, and that considering the possibility is childish nonsense.
Re: LLM Inevitabilism
#408I don't think it's inevitable, for very few things are really inevitable. However, I find LLM-s good and useful. First the chat bots, now the coding agents. Looks to me medical consultation, 2nd opinion and the like - are not far behind. Enough people already use them for that. I give my lab tests results to ChatGPT. Tbh can't fault the author for motivated reasoning. Looks to me it goes like: this is not a future I want -> therefore it should not happen -> therefore it will not happen. Because by the same motivated reasoning: for me it is the future I want. To be able to interact with a computer via language, speech and more. For the computer to be smart, instead of dumb, as it is now. If I can have the computer enhance my smarts, my information processing power, my memory - the way writing allows me to off-load from my head onto paper, a calculator allows me to manipulate numbers, and computer toils for days instead myself - then I will probably want for the AI to complement, enhance me too.
Re: LLM Inevitabilism
#409In 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…
Hours of time saved, and you learned nothing in the process. You are slowly becoming a cog in the LLM process instead of an autonomous programmer. You are losing autonomy and depending more and more on external companies. And one day will come that, with all that power, they'll set whatever price or conditions they want. And you will accept. That's the future. And it's not inevitable.
> and you learned nothing in the process.
why do you presume the person wanted to learn something, rather than to get the work done asap? May be they're not interested in learning, or may be they have something more important to do, and saving this time is a life saver?
> You are losing autonomy and depending more and more on external companies
do you also autonomously produce your own clean water, electricity, gas and food? Or do you rely on external companies to provision all of those things?
Re: LLM Inevitabilism
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
LLMs need significant optimization or we get significant improvement on computing power while keeping the energy cost the same. It's similar with smartphone, when at the start it's not feasible because of computing power, and now we have one that can rival 2000s notebooks. LLMs is too trivial to be expensive EDIT: I presented the statement wrongly. What I mean is the use case for LLM are trivial things, it shouldn't…
Imagine telling a person from five years ago that the programs that would basically solve NLP, perform better than experts at many tasks and are hard not to anthropomorphize accidentally are actually "trivial". Good luck with that.
"hard not to anthropomorphize accidentally' is a you problem.
I'm unhappy every time I look in my inbox, as it's a constant reminder there are people (increasingly, scripts and LLMs!) prepared to straight-up lie to me if it means they can take my money or get me to click on a link that's a trap.
Are you anthropomorphizing that, too? You're not gonna last a day.