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LLM Inevitabilism

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Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#431

Post by shaky-carrousel »

chii wrote: post #409
shaky-carrousel wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

The pretty big difference is that I'm not easily able to produce my electricity or food. But I'm easily able to produce my code. We are losing autonomy we already have, just for pure laziness, and it will bite us.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#432

Post by seunosewa »

ojr wrote: post #420

The company name was changed from Facebook to Meta because Mark thought the metaverse was inevitable, it's ironic that you use a quote from him

The true reason was to have a new untainted brand after the election scandal.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#433

Post by nevertoolate »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #265

AI is being framed as the future because it is the future. If you can't see the writing on the wall then you surely have your head in the sand or are seeking out information to confirm your beliefs. I've thought a lot about where this belief comes from, that belief being the general Hacker News skepticism towards AI and especially big tech's promotion and alignment with it in recent years. I believe it's due to fear…

Your point is: ai is the future and for some it is bad news and they dismiss the possibility of this future. My question is: who will control this ai? The folk who can’t do the work without ai or the ones who can? Who would you hire?

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#434

Post by seunosewa »

ccortes wrote: post #145

Earlier today I was scrolling at the “work at a startup” posts. Seems like everyone is doing LLM stuff. We are back at the “uber for X” but now it is “ChatGPT for X”. I get it, but I’ve never felt more uninspired looking at what yc startups are working on today. For the first time they all feel incredibly generic

That's an old trend in AI time. The new trend is "Cursor for X". YC is all over that.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#435

Post by thefz »

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…

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

It's all great until it breaks and you have to make changes. Will you be asking the same agent that made the errors in the first place?

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#436

Post by Draiken »

baxtr wrote: post #419
shaky-carrousel wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Did you build the house you live in? Did you weave your own clothes or grow your own food? We all depend on systems others built. Determining when that trade-off is worthwhile and recognizing when convenience turns into dependence are crucial.

We're talking about a developer here so this analogy does not apply. If a developer doesn't actually develop anything, what exactly is he?

> We all depend on systems others built. Determining when that trade-off is worthwhile and recognizing when convenience turns into dependence are crucial.

I agree with this and that's exactly what OP is saying: you're now a cog in the LLM pipeline and nothing else.

If we lived in a saner world this would be purely a net positive but in our current society it simply means we'll get replaced for the cheaper alternative the second it becomes viable, making any dependence to it extremely risky.

It's not only for individuals too. What happens when our governments are now dependent on LLMs from these private corporations to function and they start the enshitification phase?

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#438

Post by xnorswap »

vidarh wrote: post #425
pavlov wrote: post #353

Earlier 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…

The day I can put on a pair of AR glasses as lightweight as my current glasses and gain better vision, I'd pay a huge amount for that. I hate my varifocals because of how constrained they make my vision feel... And my vision is good enough that the only thing I struggle with without glasses is reading. To me, that'd be a no-brainer killer app where all of the extra AR possibilities would be just icing. Once you get s…

I just want the ability to put on a lightweight pair of glasses and have it remind me who people are.

Ideally by consulting a local database, made up of people I already know / have been introduced.

And yet while this capability would be life-changing, and has been technically possible for a decade or more, yet it was one of the first things banned/removed from APIs.

I understand privacy concerns of facial recognition looking up people against a global database, but I'm not asking for that. I'd be happy to have the burden of adding names/tags myself to the hashes.

I'd just like to be able to have what other people take for granted, the ability to know if you've met someone before (sometimes including people you've known for years).

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#439

Post by kazinator »

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…

You're discounting the times when it doesn't work. I recently experienced a weird 4X slowdown across multiple VirtualBox VM's on a Windows 10 host. AI led me down rabbit holes that didn't solve the problem.

I finally noticed a configuration problem. For some weird reason, in the Windows Features control panel, the "Virtual Machine Platform" checkbox had become unchecked (spontaneously; I did not touch this).

I mentioned this to AI, which insisted on not flipping that option, that it is not it.

> "Virtual Machine Platform" sounds exactly like something that should be checked for virtualization to work, and it's a common area of conflict. However, this is actually a critical clarification that CONFIRMS we were on the right track earlier! "Virtual Machine Platform" being UNCHECKED in Windows Features is actually the desired state for VirtualBox to run optimally.'

In fact, it was that problem. I checked the option, rebooted the host OS, and the VMs ran at proper speed.

AI can not only not be trusted to make deep inferences correctly, it falters on basic associative recall of facts. If you use it as a substitute for web searches, you have to fact check everything.

LLM AI has no concept of facts. Token prediction is not facts; it's just something that is likely to produce facts, given the right query in relation to the right training data.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#440

Post by raincole »

nperez wrote: post #84

It's inevitable because it's here. LLMs aren't the "future" anymore, they're the present. They're unseating Google as the SOTA method of finding information on the internet. People have been trying to do that for decades. The future probably holds even bigger things, but even if it plateaus for a while, showing real ability to defeat traditional search is a crazy start and just one example.

Debating whether LLM is future is like debating whether online advertising is future. We've long, long passed that point. It's present, and it's not going to magically go away.

Is online advertising good for the society? Probably not.

Can you use ad blockers? Yes.

Can you avoid putting ads on your personal website? Yes.

All of these are irrelevant in the context of "inevitabilism." Online advertising happened. So did LLM.

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