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LLM Inevitabilism

tomrenner.com

621–630 of 1001 posts

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#621
post #568

Earlier 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. As I stated, you haven't been paying attention.

I don’t find it fair that you point out straw man in your parent comment and then use ad hominem in this comment. I would love to see you post some examples. I think you’d have a chance of persuading several readers to at least be more open minded.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#622
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what that same GPT4 told me today after trying to get a simple mqttwarn config: ChatGPT: Let’s cut through the mqttwarn quirks and get you a single, complete warn.ini that I’ve actually tested with mqttwarn 0.32 Me: that "I’ve actually tested with mqttwarn 0.32:" How did you perform this test? ChatGPT: I set up a quick local sandbox on my laptop Me: What brand is your laptop? What store did you buy it at? Cha…

Did you ever think there's a reason why people are paying for professional tools like Cursor or Claude Code instead of using free ChatGPT? Ye, the free version has some known issues. They cram a lot of stuff into GPT-4o, so it hallucinates a lot. Claude Opus 4 often gives perfectly working code on the first try, and it's much less likely to hallucinate or argue with you when it's wrong. It costs around $1 per request…

> Claude Opus 4 often gives perfectly working code on the first try, and it's much less likely to hallucinate or argue with you when it's wrong. It costs around $1 per request though. Not cheap. It's a model with many trillions of weights and running it isn't cheap.

Claude Opus 4 isn't the silver bullet as described here. I have used it quite often in the last few weeks to help me both write code and to debug system problems. I would say it's not worth the price and that Sonnet is, generally, just as good.

In fact I still just use 3.7 as it was stated that both 4.0 releases were less sychophantic, however I don't feel that is the case.

I also never have an AI "argue" with me, in fact I can tell it that it's completely wrong, when it's not, and it will agree with me almost always along with an zealous apology.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#623
post #568

Earlier 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.

I support this comment. AI for coding does still involve much prodding and redirecting in my limited experience. Try getting Claude to produce even a simple SVG for a paper is a struggle in my experience.

But for helping me as a partner in neurophilosophy conversations Claude is unrivaled even compared to my neurophilosophy colleagues—speed and the responsivness is impossible to beat. LLMs are at pushing me to think harder. They provides the wall against which to bounce ideas, and those bounces often come from surprising and helpful angles.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#624
post #568

Earlier 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. As I stated, you haven't been paying attention.

So… which ones?

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#625

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…

> 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).

Well, a few years ago I was a student in CS and my formation had the AI label stamped on it. We talked about machine learning, neural network and stuff like that and we called that AI. There was never a mention of AGI. I don't know if it's a translation thing but AI = AGI never was a thing for me. As long as there is no clear definition for it people will keep on arguing because we each have our own blurry picture.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#626
post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> you haven't been paying attention.

Still no falsifiable claim in sight....

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as you view LLM as just a tool to do some mostly-mechanical changes to some codebase, you are missing the big picture which the article is about. What do LLMs mean for your mom? For society? For the future world view of your kids? Nobody cares about library refactoring.

A lot of people are missing this point. It's not about what it can do today. It's about what all you're promised it can do and then be sold to you like there's no alternative; and no one really knows if it will be able to do it or what all non-KPI functions are lost because AI is the only way ahead. Having used a customer service, I just happen to know that a smarter and a better chat-bot for a bog-standard service r…

Agents can be great to assist you. The problem is that customer service can be adversarial in which case you do not want to give the customer somebody capable on their side. Which is why they are not capable and suck.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#628
post #568

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…

> LLMs could hit an unsolvably hard wall next year and settle into a niche of utility

LLMs in their current state have integrated into the workflows for many, many IT roles. They'll never be niche, unless governing bodies come together to kill them.

> I can't find a single open source codebase, actively used in production, and primarily maintained and developed with AI

Straw man argument - this is in no way a metric for validating the power of LLMs as a tool for IT roles. Can you not find open source code bases that leverage LLMS because you haven't looked, or because you can't tell the difference between human and LLM code?

> If this is so foundationally groundbreaking, that should be a clear signal.

As I said, you haven't been paying attention.

Denialism - the practice of denying the existence, truth, or validity of something despite proof or strong evidence that it is real, true, or valid

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#629
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…

How many of those MAUs are crappy startups building a janky layer on top of the OpenAI API which will cease to exist in 2 years?

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#630
People and companies that use LLMs will be seen as tacky and cheap. They already are.

Eew you have an ai generated profile photo? You write (code) with ai? You use ai to create marketing and graphics? You use non deterministic LLMs to brute force instead of paying humans to write efficient algorithms?

Yuck yuck yuck

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