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LLM Inevitabilism

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Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#501

Post by loudmax »

roxolotl wrote: post #470
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?…

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…

Looking at the rollout of the internet, it did take decades. There was a lot of nonsensical hype in the dotcom era, most famously pets.com taking out an ad during the Superbowl. Most of those companies burned through their VC and went out of business. Yet here we are today. It's totally normal to get your pet food from chewy.com and modern life without the internet is unimaginable.

Today we see a clear path toward machines that can take on most of the intellectual labor that humans do. Scott Alexander's 2027 time frame seems optimistic (or pessimistic, depending on how you feel about the outcome). But by say 2037? The only way that vision of the future doesn't come true is economic collapse that puts us back to 20th century technology. Focusing on whether the technology is LLMs or diffusion models or whatever is splitting hairs.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#502

Post by jstummbillig »

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?…

> where a program writes arbitrary programs for us

That seems like a strange requirement and I am not sure where you are getting it from. Programs are not arbitrary, and software design is something you will need to do at some level; you need to at least be able to describe the problem you are having and getting that right has been the hardest part of software development for a long time.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#503

Post by jsnell »

fendy3002 wrote: post #68
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…

LLMs need significant optimization or we get significant improvement on computing power while keeping the energy cost the same. It's similar with smartphone, when at the start it's not feasible because of computing power, and now we have one that can rival 2000s notebooks. LLMs is too trivial to be expensive EDIT: I presented the statement wrongly. What I mean is the use case for LLM are trivial things, it shouldn't…

But the thing is, LLMs are already incredibly cheap to operate compared to the alternatives. Both for trivial things and for complex things.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#504

Post by mark_l_watson »

As much as I love open source software and open weight LLMs, let’s get real: a combination of special interests ‘owning’ both political parties, the rise of the “Tech Bros” who don’t care a rat’s ass about anyone but themselves, and a permanent War Department fueling extreme profit for inside players - future looks a little grim.

I fight back by using the technology I want, lead a spiritual/religious life and am loving with the people I interact with.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#505

Post by alonsonic »

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'm confused with your second point. LLM companies are not making any money from current models? Openai generates 10b USD ARR and has 100M MAUs. Yes they are running at a loss right now but that's because they are racing to improve models. If they stopped today to focus on optimization of their current models to minimize operating cost and monetizing their massive user base you think they don't have a successful business model? People use this tools daily, this is inevitable.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#506

Post by wyager »

cmiles74 wrote: post #499
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…

Many people were extremely skeptical of the internet in the early 90s. You can find old clips of news shows basically mocking the idea.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#507

Post by airstrike »

alonsonic wrote: post #505
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'm confused with your second point. LLM companies are not making any money from current models? Openai generates 10b USD ARR and has 100M MAUs. Yes they are running at a loss right now but that's because they are racing to improve models. If they stopped today to focus on optimization of their current models to minimize operating cost and monetizing their massive user base you think they don't have a successful busi…

No, because if they stop to focus on optimizing and minimizing operating costs, the next competitor over will leapfrog them with a better model in 6-12 months, making all those margin improvements an NPV negative endeavor.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#508

Post by DebtDeflation »

pjc50 wrote: post #487
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…

I think AI is inevitable in the way that bitcoin is now inevitable: it's not going to go away, it consumes a huge amount of energy, has various negative externalities, but a massive fanbase. It doesn't really matter whether crypto is "useful", it has billions of dollars worth of fans. Similarly the LLM fans are not going to go away. However, there will probably be curated little oases for human-made works. We're also…

It does matter whether something is useful and I really wish people would stop making comparisons to crypto because it's an absolutely terrible comparison.

AI is certainly in a bubble right now, as with dotcoms in 1999. But AI is also delivering a lot of value right now and advancing at an incredible pace. It will become ubiquitous and at a faster pace than the Internet ultimately did.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin has been around for 17 years and there still are no non-criminal use cases apart from buying it and hoping it will be worth more in the future.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#509

Post by pron »

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?

I'm not saying it's not impressive or that it doesn't show great promise, but there are clearly challenges, and we don't yet know when or how they'll be solved.

From some big LLM fans I've heard that one major problem is that of trust: Unlike tools/machines, LLMs cannot be trusted to reliably succeed or fail in an obvious way; unlike people, LLMs cannot be trusted to communicate back useful feedback, such as important insights or pitfalls. So while in some respects LLMs are superior to both humans and existing automation, in others they're inferior to both.

Maybe we'll be able to fix these problems within the current LLM technology, and maybe we'll be able to do that soon, but neither of these is obviously inevitable.

My pet issue with one form of inevitability, as I mentioned above, is that if we get to a point where software can reliably write other software for us, then we're also at a point where we don't need any of other software to be actually written, at least not in some human-readable form. There will just be one (kind of) program that does what we ask it to; why would we ask it to write programs?

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#510

Post by usrbinbash »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #495

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 lov…

> No one* wants to learn how to use a computer, they want it to be another entity that they can just talk to.

No, we don't.

Part of the reason why I enjoy programming, is because it is a mental exercise allowing me to give precise, unambiguous instructions that either work exactly as advertised or they do not.

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