It's more that big money going towards a clear and desirable endgame is a fairly sure thing. I choose to avoid lots of tech and I won't download the app but it's very hard to see how fighting a promising open tech like LLMs is the "pro-humanity" stance here.
LLM Inevitabilism
581–590 of 1001 posts
Re: LLM Inevitabilism
#582The 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…
> AI was inevitable. This is post hoc ergo propter hoc. AI exists thus it must have been inevitable. You have no proof it was inevitable. (Also AI means something wildly different than it meant a few years ago - I remember when AI meant AGI, the salesmen have persuaded you the emperor has clothes because they solved a single compelling test).
Good aside - this is really the hoverboard rebranding of the 2020s.
Re: LLM Inevitabilism
#583I hate AI. I'm so sick of it. I read a story about 14 year olds that are adopting AI boyfriends. They spend 18 hours a day in conversation with chatbots. Their parents are worried because they are withdrawing from school and losing their friends. I hate second guessing emails that I've read, wondering if my colleagues are even talking to me or if they are using AI. I hate the idea that AI will replace my job. Even if…
Just remember that machines already do most of the work. Nobody ploughs fields anymore.
What a fascinatingly out-of-touch comment.
Re: LLM Inevitabilism
#584You can't put an idea as compelling as AI back in the bottle. Once the knowledge of how to build a model, and what the reward is, permeated society, it became an inevitability. Protest all you want and frame it as a choice if you'd like, but the 8 billion people on this planet will simply go around you, much like the sick little boy that the zombies bypassed in World War Z. We've seen this with hand tools, the wheel, horses, steam engines and combustion engines, electricity, TCP/IP and now AI. It is not the manifestation of human preferences. It is instead the irreversible discovery by a species of what is possible in this lonely universe.
Re: LLM Inevitabilism
#585Earlier 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. What does this EVEN mean? Do words have any value still, or are we all just starting to treat them as the byproduct of probabilistic tokens? "Agent architectures". Last time I checked an architecture needs predictability and constraints. Even in software engineering, a field for which the word "engineering" is already quite…
This means I believe we currently underuse LLM capabilities and their empirical nature makes it difficult to assess their limitations without trying.
I've been studying LLMs from various angles during a few months before coming to this conclusion, as an experienced software engineer and consultant. I must admit it is however biased towards my experience as an SME and in my local ecosystem.
Re: LLM Inevitabilism
#586People 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'm not sure I see the logic in what you're describing. By the time you run into this "users using AI on my engine" problem, the models will be different from the ones you used to make the design. Design how you like, I would just be surprised if that choice actually ended up mattering 5 years from now.
Re: LLM Inevitabilism
#587Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> I can't find a single open source codebase, actively used in production, and primarily maintained and developed with AI. That's because using AI to write code is a poor application of LLM AIs. LLMs are better suited to summary, advice, and reflection than forced into a Rube Goldberg Machine. Use your favorite LLM as a Socratic advisor, but not as a coder, and certainly not as an unreliable worker.
> Use your favorite LLM as a Socratic advisor
Can you give an example of what you mean by this?
Re: LLM Inevitabilism
#588This is a fantastic framing method. Anyone who sees the future differently to you can be brushed aside as “an inevitablist,” and the only conversations worth engaging are those that already accept your premise. --- This argument so easily commits sudoku that I couldn't help myself. It's philosophical relativism, and self-immolates for the same reason -- it's inconsistent. It eats itself.
I agree 100% with you. The author starts the essay with the very technique that he uses later on the essay: frame the conversation in his terms (that LLMs are _not_ inevitable), and then once that's done, anyone who disagrees can be dismissed.
The irony is that he's doing it, just in the opposite direction of those he disagrees with.
Some things _are_ economically inevitable, and it's wishful thinking to ignore them. For example, it is inevitable that solar will be the primary form of electricity generation in the coming decades (and I am thankful that this is the case). For those that were watching closely, this was clear several years ago, and it is even more clear today.
People whose fortunes are built on the fossil fuel industry might wish it were otherwise, and they might dismiss "solar inevitabilists" with the same technique as the author. But those people would be wrong.
If someone says that something is inevitable, they could be wrong. But they could also be right.
Re: LLM Inevitabilism
#589The 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…
One part of the code generation tools is that they devalue code at the same time as produce low quality code (without a lot of human intervention.)
So a project that mostly is maintained by people who care about their problem/code (OSS) would be weird to be "primarily maintained by AI" in a group setting in this stage of the game.
Re: LLM Inevitabilism
#590Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> I can't find a single open source codebase, actively used in production, and primarily maintained and developed with AI. That's because using AI to write code is a poor application of LLM AIs. LLMs are better suited to summary, advice, and reflection than forced into a Rube Goldberg Machine. Use your favorite LLM as a Socratic advisor, but not as a coder, and certainly not as an unreliable worker.
The entire hype for LLMs is that they can *do* anything. Even if only writing code, that could justify their hype. If LLMs mean Grammarly is now a lot better (and offered by big tech) then it’ll be very disappointing (economically speaking)