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LLM Inevitabilism

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Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#461

Post by benreesman »

ACCount36 wrote: post #451
benreesman wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Chinchilla maxed out refers to the so-called "Chinchilla Scaling Law" from the famous DeepMind paper about how in this particular regime, scale seemed to just flow like the spice. That happens sometimes, until it doesn't.

I didn't say the coding performance was maxed out, I said the ability to pour NVIDIA in and have performance come out the other side is at it's tail end. We will need architectural innovations to make the next big discontinuous leap (e.g. `1106-preview`).

They're doing things they don't normally do right: letting loose on the safety alignment bullshit and operator-aligning it, fine-tuning it on things like nixpkgs (cough defense cough), and generally not pretending it's an "everything machine" anymore.

This is state of the art Google/StackOverflow/FAANG-megagrep in 2025, and it's powerful (though the difference between this and peak Google/SO might be less than many readers realize: pre-SEO Google also spit out working code for most any query).

But it's not going to get twice as good next month or the month after that. They'd still be selling the dream on the universal magic anything machine if it were. And NVIDIA wouldn't be heavily discounted at every provider that rents it.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#462

Post by ryoshu »

dale_glass wrote: post #394
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…

> With the “metaverse”, you clear out a space around you, strap a heavy thing on your head, and shut yourself into an artificial environment. After the first oohs and aahs, you enter a VR chat room… And realize the thing on your head adds absolutely nothing to the interaction. It doesn't if you use it as just a chat room. For some people it does add a lot, though. The "metaverse" as in Active Worlds, Second Life, VR…

AI has the same vague hand-wavey problems of the metaverse. LLMs are not AI. Roblox is not the metaverse. Both are approaching parts of the promise of each of their potential, but only a small part of what they could be or are promised to be.

Hype cycles will hype. Builders will build.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#463

Post by welferkj »

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.

Nobody serious is claiming theological predesination is based on "nothing", either. Talk about poor pattern matching.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#464

Post by saati »

phito wrote: post #352
kazinator wrote: post #74

LLM is an almost complete waste of time. Advocates of LLM are not accurately measuring their time and productivity, and comparing that to LLM-free alternative approaches.

Indeed, I keep seeing comments stating that LLMs have completely changed their way of programming or even changed their lives. All I can think is, they must have been pretty bad at programming for the impact to be that dramatic.

And never back it up with hard data on productivity and defect rate before and after.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#465

Post by epolanski »

oytis wrote: post #398
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…

Bitcoin seems to be working as a kind of digital gold if you look at price development. It's not that much about technology though.

Except that you can't clone gold or fork gold.

Gold isn't lost because you forgot the password to open it.

Or arbitrarily decide tomorrow that the old gold is not valid and a specific chain of gold is the real one.

Also, you can smelt gold, create electronics, jewellery, cosmetics, drugs with gold, you can't with Bitcoin.

Seriously comparing Bitcoin to gold is beyond silly.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#466

Post by ansc »

alexdowad wrote: post #373

My belief is that whatever technology can be invented by humans (under the constraints of the laws of physics, etc) will eventually be invented. I don't have a strong argument for this; it's just what makes sense to me. If true, then an immediate corollary is that if it is possible for humans to create LLMs (or other AI systems) which can program, or do some other tasks, better than humans can, that will happen. Inev…

>I don't have a strong argument for this

I think you do. Have we ever been successful at slowing down technological efficiency?

>If that comes to pass, then what people will do with that technology, and what will change as a result, will be up to the people who are alive at the time.

If it is inevitable that technology will be developed, it is also inevitable that it will be used, and in turn, further technology developed. Technology is an arms race. You can't opt out once you've started. If you do not employ the same technical progress for whatever-- propaganda, profits-- you will lose.

I know you're not posing it as a problem or solution, but I believe pinning it completely on "it's how we use it" is not a valid tactic either.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#467

Post by ilaksh »

zorked wrote: post #399
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…

> 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…

There are Ethereum, Algorand, many alternatives with low fees.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#468

Post by alanbernstein »

pron wrote: post #456
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?…

Just try to imagine what you would have thought about this technology if you saw it with no warning, 10 years ago. Would "a few tens of thousands of lines of code" still seem small?

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#469

Post by agos »

baxtr wrote: post #386
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.

I doubt that LLM will keep getting better, too. Or at least, not in an economically sustainable way

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#470

Post by roxolotl »

pron wrote: post #456
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?…

Absolutely couldn’t agree more. Incredibly useful tools are, in fact, incredibly useful. These discussions get clouded though when we intentionally ignore what’s being said by those doing the investing. The inevitability here isn’t that they’ll save 30% of dev time and we’ll get better software with less employees. It’s that come 2030, hell there’s that 2027 paper even, LLMs will be more effective than people at most tasks. Maybe at some point that’ll happen but looking at other normal technology[0] it takes decades.

0: https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology

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