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LLM Inevitabilism

tomrenner.com

631–640 of 1001 posts

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#631
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.

> But despite extensive searching myself and after asking many proponents

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#632

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…

Slight correction, we have many tools that are demonstrably better and more consistent than LLMs for their intended task; LLMs are just the most generally applicable tool (and the fumes are heady).

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#633

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, a…

That's actually not what the luddites argued at all; they were very explicitly trying to protect their own economic interests.

An AI could have told you that in 2 seconds.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#634
Most of us that are somewhat into the tech behind AI know that it's all based on simple matrix math... and anyone can do that... So "inevitibalism" is how we sound because we see that if OpenAI doesn't do it, someone else will. Even if all the countries in the world agree to ban AI, its not based on something with actual scarcity (like purified uranium, or gold) so someone somewhere will keep moving this tech forward...

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#635
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.

Agreed. That argument they made was a straw-man which doesn't really pertain to where LLMs are being leveraged today.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#637
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…

> 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…

> 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?

The money and the burden of proof are on the side of the pushers. If LLM code is as good as you say it is, we won't be able to tell that it's merged. So, you need to show us lots of examples of real world LLM code that we know is generated, a priori, to compare

So far most of us have seen ONE example, and it was that OAuth experiment from Cloudflare. Do you have more examples? Who pays your bills?

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#638

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 usual argument is that the tech leaders are saying that only because they've invested in AI.

...Like, you don't say? If one truly believes AI is inevitable than of course they're going to put money in AI.

I wonder how many people who claim we're in an AI bubble actually short AI stocks and $NVDA. Or they'd just stutter "uh you know the market can stay irrational longer than we can stay solvent..." when asked.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#640

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…

Are you saying they'd be profitable if they didn't pour all the winnings into research? From where I'm standing, the models are useful as is. If Claude stopped improving today, I would still find use for it. Well worth 4 figures a year IMO.

That's calculating value against not having LLMs and current competitors. If they stopped improving but their competitors didn't, then the question would be the incremental cost of Claude (financial, adjusted for switching costs, etc) against the incremental advantage against the next best competitor that did continue improving. Lock in is going to be hard to accomplish around a product that has success defined by its generalizability and adaptability.

Basically, they can stop investing in research either when 1) the tech matures and everyone is out of ideas or 2) they have monopoly power from either market power or oracle style enterprise lock in or something. Otherwise they'll fall behind and you won't have any reason to pay for it anymore. Fun thing about "perfect" competition is that everyone competes their profits to zero

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