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LLM Inevitabilism

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Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#521

Post by NoGravitas »

Herring wrote: post #494
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...

They also destroyed our cities, and are one of the major contributors to the destruction of the climate to which we are adapted.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#522

Post by colinmorelli »

mc32 wrote: post #512
alonsonic wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Making money and operating at a loss contradict each other. Maybe someday they’ll make money —but not just yet. As many have said they’re hoping capturing market will position them nicely once things settle. Obviously we’re not there yet.

It is absolutely possible for the unit economics of a product to be profitable and for the parent company to be losing money. In fact, it's extremely common when the company is bullish on their own future and thus they invest heavily in marketing and R&D to continue their growth. This is what I understood GP to mean.

Whether it's true for any of the mainstream LLM companies or not is anyone's guess, since their financials are either private or don't separate out LLM inference as a line item.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#524

Post by lordnacho »

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…

Are you saying they'd be profitable if they didn't pour all the winnings into research?

From where I'm standing, the models are useful as is. If Claude stopped improving today, I would still find use for it. Well worth 4 figures a year IMO.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#525

Post by pron »

jstummbillig wrote: post #502
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?…

> 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.

In this case, by "arbitrary" I meant anything we would ask of it. But I don't understand why a machine that is able to reliably write code would be unable to reliably design software. Currenly, LLMs do neither, but if we're imagining what they could do some day, I don't know why we'd think it could do one but not the other. And a machine that can reliably write code can also probably reliably run a company as well as if not better than a human CEO.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#526

Post by nyarlathotep_ »

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 do wonder where in the cycle this all is given that we've now seen yet another LLM/"Agentic" VSCode fork.

I'm genuinely surprised that Code forks and LLM cli things are seemingly the only use case that's approached viability. Even a year ago, I figured there'd be something else that's emerged by now.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#527

Post by fendy3002 »

jsnell wrote: post #503
fendy3002 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well recently cursor got a heat for rising price and having opaque usage, while anthropic's claude reported to be worse due to optimization. IMO the current LLMs are not sustainable, and prices are expected to increase sooner or later.

Personally, until models comparable with sonnet 3.5 can be run locally on mid range setup, people need to wary that the price of LLM can skyrocket

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#528

Post by noosphr »

aksosoakbab wrote: post #519
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…

Spoken language is a miserable language to communicate in for programming. It’s one of the major detractors of LLMs. Programming languages have a level of specification orders of magnitude greater than human communication ones.

It absolutely is, but 99% of programs the average person wants to write for thier job are some variation of, sort these files, filter between value A and B, search inside for string xyz, change string to abc.

LLMs are good enough for that. Just like how spreadsheets are good enough for 99% of numerical office work.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#529

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

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…

> If they stopped today to focus on optimization of their current models to minimize operating cost and monetizing their user base you think they don't have a successful business model?

Actually, I'd be very curious to know this. Because we already have a few relatively capable models that I can run on my MBP with 128 GB of RAM (and a few less capable models I can run much faster on my 5090).

In order to break even they would have to minimize the operating costs (by throttling, maiming models etc.) and/or increase prices. This would be the reality check.

But the cynic in me feels they prefer to avoid this reality check and use the tried and tested Uber model of permanent money influx with the "profitability is just around the corner" justification but at an even bigger scale.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#530

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

lordnacho wrote: post #524
alonsonic wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Are you saying they'd be profitable if they didn't pour all the winnings into research? From where I'm standing, the models are useful as is. If Claude stopped improving today, I would still find use for it. Well worth 4 figures a year IMO.

For me, if Anthropic stopped now, and given access to all alternative models, they still would be worth exactly $240 which is the amount I'm paying now. I guess Anthropic and OpenAI can see the real demand by clearly seeing what are their free:basic:expensive plan ratios.
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