LLM Inevitabilism • Hacker News Board

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#591

Post by vuggamie » Tue, Jul 15, 2025, 2:17 PM UTC

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

It's a good point. Any business can get revenue by selling Twenty dollar bills for $19. But in the history of tech, many winners have been dismissed for lack of an apparent business model. Amazon went years losing money, and when the business stabilized, went years re-investing and never showed a profit. Analysts complained as Amazon expanded into non-retail activities. And then there's Uber.

The money is there. Investors believe this is the next big thing, and is a once in a lifetime opportunity. Bigger than the social media boom which made a bunch of billionaires, bigger than the dot com boom, bigger maybe than the invention of the microchip itself.

It's going to be years before any of these companies care about profit. Ad revenue is unlikely to fund the engineering and research they need. So the only question is, does the investor money dry up? I don't think so. Investor money will be chasing AGI until we get it or there's another AI winter.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#592

Post by nonameiguess » Tue, Jul 15, 2025, 2:18 PM UTC

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people feel justified in brushing away millennia of philosophical and religious thought because they deem it outdated or no longer relevant.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

It actually seems more to me like dialectical materialism, which started centuries ago and was already secular. It bears more in character to the differences that other commenters have already voiced, in that human actors not only believed in its inevitability, but attempted to bring it about themselves. Multiple global superpowers implemented forced industrialization, cultural reformation, and command economies to bring it about.

The difference this time isn't sacred versus secular. It's public versus private. Whereas the purveyors of communism were governments, this is being done by corporations. Well-funded private organizations are led by decision makers who believe strongly this is the future, it is inevitable, and their only hope is to get there first. The actor didn't change from God to technology. It changed from labor to capital.

I make no comment on whether they will prove to be more correct than the believers in communism, but the analogy is obvious either way.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#593

Post by alextingle » Tue, Jul 15, 2025, 2:20 PM UTC

visarga wrote: post #61

freshtake wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue, unfortunately, is that society has failed to recognize the real dangers of social technologies (social media, social AI, perhaps AI in general). 30 years from now if we're lucky, we'll be watching senate hearings with AI billionaires being asked how they didn't realize their products were so harmful.

I am more and more convinced that social networks are causing the increased political instability and breakdown of communication. In the past media was centralized. So the powers that be focused on it and controlled the message. We had a kind of common understanding and language. Some idealize BBC or the great newspapers of the past, but they have been lying to us since forever. Remember the WMD discussions leading t…

It was the BBC that linked me directly to Hans Blix's reports on the UN's search for WMD in Iraq. It was that that convinced me that it was all made up bullshit. It was much more convincing than the obvious wishful thinking that was coming out of the US and UK governments.

For sure social media is propagating conspiracy theories, some of which are the modern equivalent of "Saddam can deploy his WMD in 45 minutes", but I don't agree that old media was doing the same. Quite the opposite.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#594

Post by castigatio » Tue, Jul 15, 2025, 2:20 PM UTC

The argument doesn't work because whatever you think of where generative AI is taking us or not taking us - it is 100% demonstrably better at doing a wide range of tasks than other technologies we have available to us - even in its current exact form. Once computers started to be connected could we have stopped the development of the world wide web. If there's a way of getting humanity to collectively agree on things - please let's start by using it to stop climate change and create world peace before moving on to getting rid of LLM's.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#595

Post by belter » Tue, Jul 15, 2025, 2:21 PM UTC

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…

> LLMs is changing our entire industry,

- So far, the only ones making real money are the "shovel sellers": Nvidia, AWS, and the GPU resale hustlers. Everyone else is still trying to figure out how to turn the parrots into profit.

- Probabilistic code generators are not the dawn of a new scientific era that will propel us to the Stars. Just autocomplete on steroids, impressive, but not what will launch humanity into post-scarcity.

- So far what you have is a glorified compression algorithm. A remix of Reddit, StackOverflow, and Wikipedia...With the confidence of a TED speaker and the understanding of a parrot.

- If LLMs are truly the road to AGI, try sending one to MIT. No internet, no textbook ingestion, no Leetcode prep. Just cold start intelligence. If it graduates...we might have something....

Right now, this is just confusing correlation for cognition. Compression for comprehension. And mimicry for mastery. The revolution may come, but not the next four quarters. What it is bad news if you are VC....or Mark Zuckerberg...

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#596

Post by conartist6 » Tue, Jul 15, 2025, 2:21 PM UTC

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…

It is probably both inevitable that the LLM technology we have now would be invented and inevitable that there would be a major pushback against it. In any world, this would be a technology that takes from some to give to others.

Given that, nothing about the future seems inevitable to me. The law isn't settled. Public opinion isn't settled. Even a great deal of the hype keeping the bubble from popping is still founded on talk of AGI that I now consider absurd...

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#597

Post by runarberg » Tue, Jul 15, 2025, 2:22 PM UTC

jdiff wrote: post #568

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…

This has been researched, and while the existing research is young and inconclusive, the outlook is not so good for the AI industry, or rather for the utility of their product, and the negative effects it has on their users.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44522772

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#598

Post by komali2 » Tue, Jul 15, 2025, 2:23 PM UTC

A lot of people are responding with "But it is inevitable." So far as I can tell they're pointing at the normal capitalistic measures to indicate this - OpenAI has a katrillion dollar MMR and investors are throwing money everywhere and thus this will happen. Or, LLMs generate a lot of value, or make labor more efficient, so therefore it must start replacing workers one way or another.

Well, great, then I will add another capitalistic inevitability: the waters will rise because there's no profit incentive to prevent this and governments are at worst captured by profit motive and at worse gridlocked by profit motive (e.g. funding oppositional parties so that nothing gets done).

The waters will rise and thus there will be refugee crises and thus there will be famine and destabilization, and thus AI will not happen because these things will happen and make AI moot as, one way or another, people become more concerned with food distribution than distribution of labor in the IT field.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#599

Post by nhinck3 » Tue, Jul 15, 2025, 2:24 PM UTC

ansc wrote: post #466

alexdowad wrote: post #373

My belief is that whatever technology can be invented by humans (under the constraints of the laws of physics, etc) will eventually be invented. I don't have a strong argument for this; it's just what makes sense to me. If true, then an immediate corollary is that if it is possible for humans to create LLMs (or other AI systems) which can program, or do some other tasks, better than humans can, that will happen. Inev…

>I don't have a strong argument for this I think you do. Have we ever been successful at slowing down technological efficiency? >If that comes to pass, then what people will do with that technology, and what will change as a result, will be up to the people who are alive at the time. If it is inevitable that technology will be developed, it is also inevitable that it will be used, and in turn, further technology deve…

> I think you do. Have we ever been successful at slowing down technological efficiency?

Genghis Khan was probably the the last person to do so.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#600

Post by motorest » Tue, Jul 15, 2025, 2:24 PM UTC

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…

> 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.

The best part about this issue is that it's a self correcting problem. Those who don't are risking being pushed out of the job market, whereas those who do will fare better odds.

I'm sure luddites also argued no one needed a damn machine to weave a rug, and machine-weaved rugs didn't had any soul.