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LLM Inevitabilism

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Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#551

Post by andai »

evantbyrne wrote: post #543
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thoughtful people feel justified in brushing away millennia of philosophical and religious thought because they deem it outdated or no longer relevant.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…

I'm pretty bearish on the idea that AGI is going to take off anytime soon, but I read a significant amount of theology growing up and I would not describe the popular essays from e.g., LessWrong as religious in nature. I also would not describe them as appearing poorly read. The whole "look they just have a new god!" is a common trope in religious apologetics that is usually just meant to distract from the author's o…

Maybe not a god, but we're intentionally designing artificial minds greater than ours, and we intend to give them control of the entire planet. While also expecting them to somehow remain subservient to us (or is that part just lip service)?

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#553

Post by baxuz »

handoflixue wrote: post #233
baxuz wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is that the data from actual research doesn't support your anecdotal proof of quality: - https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o... - https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/29/ai_agents_fail_a_lot/ But more importantly, it makes you stupid: - https://www.404media.co/microsoft-study-finds-ai-makes-human... - https://archive.is/M3lCG And it's an unsustainable bubble and wishful thinking, muc…

"But more importantly, it makes you stupid:" I don't think it was your intent, but that reads out as a seriously uncalled for attack - you might want to work on your phrasing. Hacker News rules are pretty clear on civility being an important virtue.

I didn't target the author, and I used the terminology used in the article heading

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#554

Post by digianarchist »

Buttons840 wrote: post #475
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 gen…

Are models capable of generating citations? Every time I've asked for citations on ChatGPT they either don't exist or are incorrect.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#555

Post by andai »

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…

Many people love games, and some of those even love making games, but few truly love to code.

I'm designing a simple game engine now and thinking, I shall have to integrate AI programming right into it, because the average user won't know how to code, and they'll try to use AI to code, and then the AI will frantically google for docs, and/or hallucinate, so I might as well set it up properly on my end.

In other words, I might as well design it so it's intuitive for the AI to use. And -- though I kind of hate to say this -- based on how the probabilistic LLMs work, the most reliable way to do that is to let the LLM design it itself. (With the temperature set to zero.)

i.e. design it so the system already matches how the LLM thinks such a system works. This minimizes the amount of prompting required to "correct" its behavior.

The passionate human programmer remains a primary target, and it's absolutely crucial that it remains pleasant for humans to code. It's just that most of them won't be in that category, they'll be using it "through" this new thing.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#556

Post by JimmaDaRustla »

The author seems to imply that the "framing" of an argument is done so in bad faith in order to win an argument but only provides one-line quotes where there is no contextual argument.

This tactic by the author is a straw-man argument - he's framing the position of tech leaders and our acceptance of it as the reason AI exists, instead of being honest, which is that they were simply right in their predictions: AI was inevitable.

The IT industry is full of pride and arrogance. We deny the power of AI and LLMs. I think that's fair, I welcome the pushback. But the real word the IT crowd needs to learn is "denialism" - if you still don't see how LLMs is changing our entire industry, you haven't been paying attention.

Edit: Lots of denialists using false dichotomy arguments that my opinion is invalid because I'm not producing examples and proof. I guess I'll just leave this: https://tools.simonwillison.net/

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#557

Post by xpe »

ygritte wrote: post #258
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…

> the actor has changed from God to technology Agreed. You could say that technology has become a god to those people.

What technology? Agriculture? The steam engine? The automobile? Modern medicine? Cryptography? The Internet? LLMs? Nanotechnology?

Who are these people? Jonas Salk, widely credited as the inventor of the polio vaccine? Sam Altman, fundraiser extraordinaire? Peter Thiel, exalter of The World-Saving Founders? Ray Kurzweil? Technocrats? Other techno-optimists? Perhaps transhumanists? There are many variations, and they differ by quite a lot.

What kind of god? Carl Sagan has a nice interview where he asks a question-asker to define what they mean by “god”. A blind watchmaker? Someone who can hear your prayers? A wrathful smoter of the wicked and (sometimes) the loyal (sorry, Job!)? A very confusing 3-tuple, one element of which birthed another, who died somehow but was resurrected? The essence of nature? The laws of physics? An abstract notion of love? Yeah. These three letters are too vague to be useful unless unpacked or situated in a mutually understood context. It often fosters a flimsy consensus or a shallow disagreement.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#558

Post by throwawayoldie »

ehutch79 wrote: post #544
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…

Revenue is _NOT_ Profit

And ARR is not revenue. It's "annualized recurring revenue": take one month's worth of revenue, multiply it by 12--and you get to pick which month makes the figures look most impressive.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#559

Post by NoGravitas »

Buttons840 wrote: post #475
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 gen…

I think that if LLMs have any future, it is this. The LLM will only be a user interface to a system that on the back end is deterministic and of consistent quality, i.e., a plain old computer program.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#560

Post by smrtinsert »

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…

They didn't really need the cloud either and yet...
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