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

491–500 of 1001 posts

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#491

Post by strangescript »

The great thing but terrifying thing about innovation is we rarely select how it plays out. People create great ideas and concepts, but they rarely play out exactly how the initial researchers/inventors expected. Did Apple know we would spend all day doom scrolling when it created the iPhone? Did it want that? Would they have viewed that as desirable? Doubtful. But what was the alternative? Not make a smart phone and then wait until someone else does create one who has even less concern for people's well being. Or better yet, how could they have even predicted the outcome in 2007?

Humanity has never been able to put the innovation genie back in the bottle. At best we have delayed it, but even those situations require there be a finite resource that can be easily regulated and controlled. AI is not one of those things.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#492

Post by killerstorm »

lmm wrote: post #253
killerstorm wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"put your money where your mouth is" is generally a good thing.

"Talking your book" is seen as a bad thing, especially when not properly disclosed.

Dude, it's a public company. They are required to explain their reasoning, by law.

Their "book" is their company, it's public.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#493

Post by techpineapple »

gbalduzzi wrote: post #114
rafaelmn wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you claimed that AI was inevitable in the 80s and invested, or claimed people would be inevitably moving to VR 10 years ago - you would be shit out of luck. Zuck is still burning billions on it with nothing to show for it and a bad outlook. Even Apple tried it and hilariously missed the demand estimate. The only potential bailout for this tech is AR, but thats still years away from consumer market and widespread a…

None of the "failed" innovations you cited were even near the adoption rate of current LLMs. As much as I don't like it, this is the actual difference. LLMs are already good enough to be a very useful and widely spread technology. They can become even better, but even if they don't there are plenty of use cases for them. VR/AR, AI in the 80s and Tesla at the beginning were technology that someone believe could become…

I don’t see this as that big a difference, of course AI/LLMs are here to stay, but the hundreds in billions of bets on LLMs don’t assume linear growth.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#494

Post by Herring »

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…

Cars were/are inevitable. But they did massive damage to human fitness, which we still haven't recovered from. I intentionally don't own one, and at least some places in the world are starting to wake up and restrict them and build walkable cities.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPUlgSRn6e0&ab_channel=NotJu...

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#495

Post by Workaccount2 »

People like communicating in natural language.

LLMs are the first step in the movement away from the "early days" of computing where you needed to learn the logic based language and interface of computers to interact with them.

That is where the inevitabilism comes from. No one* wants to learn how to use a computer, they want it to be another entity that they can just talk to.

*I'm rounding off the <5% who deeply love computers.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#496

Post by jowea »

guelo wrote: post #298
keiferski wrote: post #107

One of the negative consequences of the “modern secular age” is that many very intelligent, thoughtful people feel justified in brushing away millennia of philosophical and religious thought because they deem it outdated or no longer relevant. (The book A Secular Age is a great read on this, btw, I think I’ve recommended it here on HN at least half a dozen times.) And so a result of this is that they fail to notice t…

Sorry I don't buy your argument. (First I disagree with A Secular Age 's thesis that secularism is a new force. Christian and Muslim churches were jailing and killing nonbelievers from the beginning. People weren't dumber than we are today, all the absurdity and self-serving hypocrisy that turns a lot of people off to authoritarian religion were as evident to them as they are to us.) The idea is not that AI is on a p…

I add to this that we have plenty of examples of societies that don't keep up with technological advancement, or "history" more broadly get left behind. Competition in a globalized world makes some things inevitable. I'm not agreeing in full with the most AI will change everything arguments, but those last couple of paragraphs of TFA sounds to me like standing athwart history, yelling "Stop!".

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#497

Post by badRNG »

alanbernstein wrote: post #468
pron wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

The OG ChatGPT released less than three years ago. Prior to that, 20 lines of code would seem wild. Does anyone remember leetcode?

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#498

Post by strangescript »

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…

I think the difference between all previous technologies is scope. If you make a super sonic jet that gets people from place A to place B faster for more money, but the target consumer is like "yeah, I don't care that much about that at that price point", then your tech sort is of dead. You are also fully innovated on that product, like maybe you can make it more fuel efficient, sure, but your scope is narrow.

AI is the opposite. There are numerous things it can do and numerous ways to improve it (currently). There is lower upfront investment than say a supersonic jet and many more ways it can pivot if something doesn't work out.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#499

Post by cmiles74 »

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 whole comparison is weird. The internet opened doors of communication between people who were very distant from each other. It enabled new methods of commerce and it made it easier for people to research and purchase product. Anyone interested in a particular subject could find other people interested in that same area and learn from them, increasing their knowledge. Ad-hoc organizations were much easier.

These are all things that the majority of people wanted. I understand that software developers find many benefits from using LLMs and I encourage us to put that to the side for the moment. When we look at the rest of the places where LLMs are being put to use, how excited are the majority of people?

I'd argue that people, in the larger sense, are nowhere near as excited about LLMs as they were about the internet.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#500

Post by AstralStorm »

Inevitabilism is defeated by showing someone we're still not having a moonbase, and we don't have and likely never will have faster than light travel.

There are no inevitable things. There are predictable ones at best.

It's a silly position to start from and easily defeated if you know what you're dealing with.

Post reply on HN