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LLM Inevitabilism

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Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#561

Post by strangescript »

digianarchist wrote: post #533
strangescript wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's not a great analogy. The only parallel with Concorde is energy consumption. I think a better analogy would have been VR.

I mean, thats the point, they aren't the same. Concorde was one dimensional, AI is not.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#562

Post by xpe »

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people feel justified in brushing away millennia of philosophical and religious thought because they deem it outdated or no longer relevant.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

> many very intelligent, thoughtful people feel justified in brushing away millennia of philosophical and religious thought because they deem it outdated

Why lump philosophy and religion together? I distinguish between philosophical thought and religious thought, to the extent the former is conditionally framed.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#564

Post by jaza »

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.

Computer scientists in the ~1970s said that procedural languages are a miserable medium for programming, compared to assembly languages.

And they said in the ~1960s that assembly languages are a miserable medium for programming, compared to machine languages.

(Ditto for every other language paradigm under the sun since then, particularly object-oriented languages and interpreted languages).

I agree that natural languages are a miserable medium for programming, compared to procedural / object-oriented / functional / declarative languages. But maybe I only agree because I'm a computer scientist from the ~2010s!

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#565

Post by globular-toast »

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…

LLMs are nowhere near the first step. This is Python, an almost 35 year old language:

    for apple in sorted(bag):
        snake.eat(apple)
The whole point of high-level programming languages is we can write code that is close enough to natural language while still being 100% precise and unambiguous.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#566

Post by xpe »

jowea wrote: post #535
usrbinbash wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Exactly, we are in the *, the 5% (and I think that's an overestimate) who actually like it. Seems tech is at least partly moving on.

> seems like tech is at least partly moving on

This framing risks getting it backwards and disempowering people, doesn’t it? Technology does not make its own choices (at least not yet).

Or does it? To problematize my own claims… If you are a materialist, “choice” is an illusion that only exists once you draw a system boundary. In other words, “choice” is only an abstraction that makes sense if one defines an “agent”. We have long-running agents, so…

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#567

Post by ReptileMan »

Jensson wrote: post #283
eric-burel wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Developers haven't even started extracting the value of LLMs with agent architectures yet. Using an LLM UI like open ai is like we just figured fire and you use it to warm you hands (still impressive when you think about it, but not worth the burns), while LLM development is about building car engines (here is you return on investment).

> Developers haven't even started extracting the value of LLMs with agent architectures yet There are thousands of startups doing exactly that right now, why do you think this will work when all evidence points towards it not working? Or why else would it not already have revolutionized everything a year or two ago when everyone started doing this?

>Or why else would it not already have revolutionized everything a year or two ago when everyone started doing this?

The internet needed 20 years to take over the world. All of the companies of the first dot com bust are in the past. The tech is solid.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#568

Post by jdiff »

JimmaDaRustla wrote: post #556

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…

The IT industry is also full of salesmen and con men, both enjoy unrealistic exaggeration. Your statements would not be out of place 20 years ago when the iPhone dropped. Your statements would not be out of place 3 years ago before every NFT went to 0. LLMs could hit an unsolvably hard wall next year and settle into a niche of utility. AI could solve a lengthy list of outstanding architectural and technical problems and go full AGI next year.

If we're talking about changing the industry, we should see some clear evidence of that. But despite extensive searching myself and after asking many proponents (feel free to jump in here), I can't find a single open source codebase, actively used in production, and primarily maintained and developed with AI. If this is so foundationally groundbreaking, that should be a clear signal. Personally, I would expect to see an explosion of this even if the hype is taken extremely conservatively. But I can't even track down a few solid examples. So far my searching only reveals one-off pull requests that had to be laboriously massaged into acceptability.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#569

Post by megaloblasto »

I think what scares people who code for a living the most is the loss of their craft. Many of you have spent years or decades honing the craft of producing clear, fast, beautiful code. Now there is something that can spit out (often) beautiful code in seconds. An existential threat to your self worth and livelihood. A perfectly reasonable thing to react to.

I do think, however, that this is an inevitable change. Industries and crafts being massively altered by technology is a tale as old as time. In a world that constantly changes, adaptation is key.

I also think that almost all of you who have this craft should have no problem pivoting to higher level software architecture design. Work with an llm and produce things it would have taken a small team to do in 2019.

I find it to be a very exciting time.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#570

Post by xpe »

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…

> 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.

Even if one accepts the framing (I don’t), LLMs are far from the first step.

The article is about questioning “inevitabilism”! To do that, we need to find anchoring and assuming the status-quo. Think broader: there are possible future scenarios where people embrace unambiguous methods for designing computer programs, even business processes, social protocols, governments.

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