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LLM Inevitabilism

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Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#451

Post by ACCount36 »

benreesman wrote: post #241
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…

As someone who has historically been very much an LLM inevitabalism skeptic and has recently decided that we've crossed the breakeven point with indiscriminant use of Opus 4, eh, it's precisely because we're in late LLM === AGI hype world. They're actually cutting the shit on "this can do anything, and in a month, twice that!". This thing is crazy operator aligned, wildly SFT'd on curated codebases, and running a TTF…

This comment is absolute bullshit.

It starts off being wrong ("Opus 4 has maxed out LLM coding performance"), then keeps being wrong ("LLM inference is sold at a loss"), and tries to mask just how wrong it at any point in time is by pivoting from one flavor of bullshit to another on a dime, running laps a manic headless chicken.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#452

Post by bonoboTP »

martindbp wrote: post #427
theSherwood wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a case of bad pattern matching, to be frank. Two cosmetically similar things don't necessarily have a shared cause. When you see billions in investment to make something happen (AI) because of obvious incentives, it's very reasonable to see that as something that's likely to happen; something you might be foolish to bet against. This is qualitatively different from the kind of predestination present i…

Yes, nobody is claiming it's inevitable based on nothing, it's based on first principles thinking: economics, incentives, game theory, human psychology. Trying to recast this in terms of "predestination" gives me strong wordcel vibes.

It's a bit like pattern matching the Cold War fears of a nuclear exchange and nuclear winter to the flood myths or apocalyptic narratives across the ages, and hence dismissing it as "ah, seen this kind of talk before", totally ignoring that Hiroshima and Nagasaki actually happened, later tests actually happened, etc.

It's indeed a symptom of working in an environment where everything is just discourse about discourse, and prestige is given to some surprising novel packaging or merger of narratives, and all that is produced is words that argue with other words, and it's all about criticizing how one author undermines some other author too much or not enough and so on.

From that point of view, sure, nothing new under the sun.

It's all too well to complain about the boy crying wolf, but when you see the pack of wolves entering the village, it's no longer just about words.

Now, anyone is of course free to dispute the empirical arguments, but I see many very self-satisfied prestigious thinkers who think they don't have to stoop so low as to actually look at models and how people use them in reality, it can all just be dismissed based on ick factors and name calling like "slop".

Few are saying that these things are eschatological inevitabilities. They are saying that there are incentive gradients that point in a certain direction and it cannot be moved out from that groove without massive and fragile coordination, due to game theoretical reasonings, given a certain material state of the world right now out there, outside the page of the "text".

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#453

Post by nradov »

PeterStuer wrote: post #334
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.

The reality for most people is that at a macro level the future is something that happens to them. They try to participate e.g. through voting, but see no change even on issues a significant majority of 'voters' agree on, regardless of who 'wins' the elections.

What are issues that a significant majority of voters agree on? Polls indicate that everyone wants lower taxes, cleaner environment, higher quality schools, lower crime, etc. But when you dig into the specifics of how to make progress on those issues, suddenly the consensus evaporates.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#454

Post by possiblydrunk »

Inevitability implies determinism and assumes complete knowledge. Forecasts of inevitable things are high probability guesses based on the knowledge at hand. Their accuracy is low and becomes lower as the level of detail increases. The plethora of wrong guesses get less attention or are forgotten and right ones are celebrated and immortalized after the fact.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#455

Post by uludag »

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…

While I accept this point completely, in a way it's not really different from someone saying that programming with IDEs is the future because look how much time it saved.

The inevitabilism isn't that we'll have some sleek dev tools that speed programmers hours a day (which high level languages, IDEs, etc. in fact do). It's about a change in the operation of our socio economic systems: who are the brokers of knowledge, how knowledge work is defined, a new relationship between employer and employee, new modes of surveillance, etc.

The peddlers of inevitabilism are not doing it to convince stubborn developers a newer, better way of writing software. They are trying to convince us to play on a new game board, one which better suits their hand and they'd be set up to win big. More likely than not you'd be at a disadvantage on this new board. Want to argue against it? Don't like the new rules? Well too bad, because this is inevitable, just the way things are (or so the argument goes).

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#456

Post by pron »

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…

> This is the future. It is inevitable.

"This" does a lot of unjustifiable work here. "This" refers to your successful experience which, I assume, involved a program no larger than a few tens of thousands lines of code, if that, and it saved you only a few hours of work. The future you're referring to, however, is an extrapolation of "this", where a program writes arbitrary programs for us. Is that future inevitable? Possibly, but it's not quite "this", as we can't yet do that, we don't know when we'll be able to, and we don't know that LLMs are what gets us there.

But If we're extrapolating from relatively minor things we can do today to big things we could do in the future, I would say that you're thinking too small. If program X could write program Y for us, for some arbitrary Y, why would we want Y in the first place? If we're dreaming about what may be possible, why would we need any program at all other than X? Saying that that is the inevitable future sounds to me like someone, at the advent of machines, saying that a future where machines automatically clean the streets after our horses is the inevitable future, or perhaps one where we're carried everywhere on conveyor belts. Focusing on LLMs is like such a person saying that in the future, everything will inevitably be powered by steam engines. In the end, horses were replaced wholesale, but not by conveyor belts, and while automation carried on, it wasn't the steam engine that powered most of it.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#457

Post by satyrnein »

stiray wrote: post #316
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…

Are you sure, that the code works correctly? ;) Now, imagine, what you would do, if you never learned to read the code. As you were always using only AI. Anyway, coding is much simpler and easier than reading someone else's code. And I rather code it myself than spend time to actually read and study what AI has outputted. As at the end, I need to know that code works. --- At one point, my former boss was explaining t…

This is how non-engineers have always lived! The code is a black box, but Product Managers develop a sense of whether the developer really understood what they meant, the QA team verifies the outputs, etc.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#459

Post by petetnt »

mg wrote: post #231
petetnt wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s always a distinct lack of the names in the posts like this. What was the library that was being changed to what? You say it had ”no good documentation”, but it clearly has some sort of documentation considering the LLM did such a good job on the rewrite. Do you understand the ”large library” now?

You are right. I always wish for more specifics too when we talk about code here. The library was https://mediabunny.dev/ Before I used my own proprietary code for media encoding/decoding. I also tested a WASM port of ffmpeg for a while. Mediabunny's documentation might be fine for some developers, but personally I prefer a reference where I have a list of all functions and their specifications. Yes, I understand the…

Personally looking at the documentation I would say that "no good documentation" is highly misleading, because the documentation that it provides is incredibly detailed from quick starts to detailed explanations, offers a lot of examples and has very high quality typings with inline documentation. Not to mention the code itself is documented thoroughly. Sure it doesn't have an API reference, but you get that from the typings, that what I usually do - just check the imports first and go from there.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#460

Post by IAmGraydon »

Things which are both powerful and possible become inevitable. We know that LLMs are powerful, but we aren't sure how powerful yet, and there's a large range this might eventually land in. We know they're possible in their current form, of course, but we don't know if actual GAI is possible.

At this time, humanity seems to be estimating that both power and possibility will be off the charts. Why? Because getting this wrong can be so negatively impactful that it makes sense to move forward as if GAI will inevitably exist. Imagine supposing that this will all turn out to be fluff and GAI will never work, so you stop investing in it. Now imagine what happens if you're wrong and your enemy gets it to work first.

This isn't some arguing device for AI-inevitabilists. It's knowledge of human nature, and it's been repeating itself for millennia. If the author believes that's going to suddenly change, they really should back that up with what, exactly, has changed in human nature.

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