Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

LLM Inevitabilism

tomrenner.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

471–480 of 1001 posts

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#471

Post by ilaksh »

Some is marketing, but it's not _just_ marketing. Many people have a worldview now where AI progress is inevitable. So we really believe it

I would be interested to hear other ideas or plans that don't involve AI progress. My premise though is that the current state of affairs although improved from X decades/centuries ago is horrible in terms of things like extreme inequality and existential threats. If in your worldview the status quo is A-OKAY then you don't feel you need AI or robotics or anything to improve things.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#473

Post by antonvs »

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 use a "One prompt one file. No code edits."

You might like to try one of the CLI agents like Claude Code or Gemini CLI. The latter is essentially free for casual use.

They support an approach like yours, but let you take it a bit further while still being very transparent and explicit about what they can do.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#474

Post by bigfishrunning »

f1shy wrote: post #137
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…

Totally agree, had same experience couple of times, and until now no experience like that of the OP. BUT: in the 90s I remember saying: supposedly in internet is all and everything, but I never find what I need, is more ads than actual information. So the I think the point of OP holds. It may (today) not be useful for you, but maybe in some years, and if not, will still ve useful for many people, and is here to stay.

> is more ads than actual information.

This is true now more then ever. Half of the comments in this thread are ads.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#475

Post by Buttons840 »

Animats wrote: post #46

There may be an "LLM Winter" as people discover that LLMs can't be trusted to do anything. Look for frantic efforts by companies to offload responsibility for LLM mistakes onto consumers. We've got to have something that has solid "I don't know" and "I don't know how to do this" outputs. We're starting to see reports of LLM usage having negative value for programmers, even though they think it's helping. Too much eff…

We need to put the LLMs inside systems that ensure they can only do correct things.

Put an LLM on documentation or man pages. Tell the LLM to output a range of lines, and the system actually looks up those lines and quotes them. The overall effect is that the LLM can do some free-form output, but is expected to provide a citation to support its claims; and the citation can't be hallucinated, since the LLM doesn't generate the citation, a plain old computer program does.

And we haven't seen LLMs integrated with type systems yet. There are very powerful type systems, like dependent types, that can prove things like "this function returns a list of sorted number", and the type system ensures that is ALWAYS true [0], at compile time. You have to write a lot of proof code to help the compiler do these checks at compile time, but if a LLM can write those proofs, we can trust they are correct, because only correct proofs will compile.

[0]: Or rather, almost always true. There's always the possibility of running out of memory or the power goes out.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#476

Post by durumu »

0xAFFFF wrote: post #322
Msurrow wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> first signs of pulling back investments I agree with you, but I’m curious; do you have link to one or two concrete examples of companies pulling back investments, or rolling back an AI push? (Yes it’s just to fuel my confirmation bias, but it’s still feels nice:-) )

Most prominent example was this one: https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-pulls-back-more...

I think that's more reflective of the deteriorating relationship between OpenAI and Microsoft than an true lack of demand for datacenters. If a major model provider (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI) were to see a dip in available funding or stop focusing on training more powerful models, that would convince me we may be in a bubble about to pop, but there are no signs of that as far as I can see.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#477

Post by antonvs »

ryanjshaw wrote: post #392
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…

Every single HN post on AI or crypto I see this argument and it’s exhausting. When Eliza was first built it was seen a toy. It took many more decades for LLMs to appear. My favourite example is prime numbers: a bunch of ancient nerds messing around with numbers that today, thousands of years later, allow us to securely buy anything and everything without leaving our homes or opening our mouths. You can’t dismiss a te…

> When Eliza was first built it was seen a toy.

It was a toy, and that approach - hardcoded attempts at holding a natural language conversation - never went anywhere, for reasons that have been obvious since Eliza was first created. Essentially, the approach doesn't scale to anything actually useful.

Winograd'd SHRDLU was a great example of the limitations - providing a promising-seeming natural language interface to a simple abstract world - but it notoriously ended up being pretty much above the peak of manageable complexity for the hardcoded approach to natural language.

LLMs didn't grow out of work on programs like Eliza or SHRDLU. If people had been prescient enough to never bother with hardcoded NLP, it wouldn't have affected development of LLMs at all.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#479

Post by amunozo »

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 still don't find LLMs to be that useful outside of coding and searching on the Internet.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#480

Post by ludicrousdispla »

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…

>> There are many technologies that have seemed inevitable and seen retreats under the lack of commensurate business return

120+ Cable TV channels must have seemed like a good idea at the time, but like LLMs the vast majority of the content was not something people were interested in.

Post reply on HN