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LLM Inevitabilism

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Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#661

Post by hnfong »

layer8 wrote: post #547
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…

People also like reliable and deterministic behavior, like when they press a specific button it does the same thing 99.9% of the time, and not slightly different things 90% of the time and something rather off the mark 10% of the time (give and take some percentage points). It's not clear that LLMs will get us to the former.

You can set the temperature of LLMs to 0 and that will make them deterministic.

Not necessarily reliable though, and you could get different results if you typed an extra whitespace or punctuation.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#662

Post by graerg »

lwelyk wrote: post #641
castigatio wrote: post #594

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…

What tasks is it better at doing than other technologies we have available to us? I'm not being sarcastic, I generally want to know in which areas you think it is better. I can't think of anything off the top of my head that isn't just doing the things that make it a generative AI. (It's better at generating an image that I describe to it, etc, but that's not something that another technology does.)

One very simple use case is making repetitive edits to a YAML (or similar) file. Sure, I can record a vim macro and/or try and conjure up some way to get it done with as few keystrokes as possible and hope I don’t fat finger anything along the way. Or I can just pipe it to llm and say [make this edit], and it just works.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#663

Post by 827a »

mg wrote: post #70

In the 90s a friend told me about the internet. And that he knows someone who is in a university and has access to it and can show us. An hour later, we were sitting in front of a computer in that university and watched his friend surfing the web. Clicking on links, receiving pages of text. Faster than one could read. In a nice layout. Even with images. And links to other pages. We were shocked. No printing, no shipp…

For sure; similarly, when someone showed me Prettier many years ago, I immediately understood its value. This will save significant time every year I previously spent manually formatting my code and having arguments with other engineers about tabs versus spaces.

AI bros will probably feel I'm being sarcastic and facetious; but I'm genuinely not. LLMs are an awesome tool to have in the toolbelt. I use them every day. The question is simply on the scope of their capability.

Is this the future of how all code is written? Or is it just the future of how mostly-mechanical refactors happen? Can these systems take extremely abstract prompts and deliver adequate results? Or do they need to be communicated with in a way that so-closely-resembles computer code that one might as well just write the code themselves?

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#664

Post by pera »

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…

> Ordinary language is totally unsuited for expressing what physics really asserts, since the words of everyday life are not sufficiently abstract. Only mathematics and mathematical logic can say as little as the physicist means to say.

- Bertrand Russell, The Scientific Outlook (1931)

There is a reason we don't use natural language for mathematics anymore: It's overly verbose and extremely imprecise.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#665

Post by SirHumphrey »

erlend_sh wrote: post #403
lsy wrote: 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…

Exactly. This is basically the argument of “AI as Normal Technology”. https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43697717

This seems like one the only sane arguments in this whole sea of articles.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#666

Post by erikerikson »

layer8 wrote: post #547
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…

People also like reliable and deterministic behavior, like when they press a specific button it does the same thing 99.9% of the time, and not slightly different things 90% of the time and something rather off the mark 10% of the time (give and take some percentage points). It's not clear that LLMs will get us to the former.

That is a parameter that can be changed, often called temperature. Setting the variance to 0 can be done and you will get repeatability. Whether you would be happy with that is another matter.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#667

Post by api »

lsy wrote: 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…

My take since day one:

(1) Model capabilities will plateau as training data is exhausted. Some additional gains will be possible by better training, better architectures, more compute, longer context windows or "infinite" context architectures, etc., but there are limits here.

(2) Training on synthetic data beyond a very limited amount will result in overfitting because there is no new information. To some extent you could train models on each other, but that's just an indirect way to consolidate models. Beyond consolidation you'll plateau.

(3) There will be no "takeoff" scenario -- this is sci-fi (in the pejorative sense) because you can't exceed available information. There is no magic way that a brain in a vat can innovate beyond available training data. This includes for humans -- a brain in a vat would quickly go mad and then spiral into a coma-like state. The idea of AI running away is the information-theoretic equivalent of a perpetual motion machine and is impossible. Yudkowski and the rest of the people afraid of this are crackpots, and so are the hype-mongers betting on it.

So I agree that LLMs are real and useful, but the hype and bubble are starting to plateau. The bubble is predicated on the idea that you can just keep going forever.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#668

Post by mattgreenrocks »

cheevly wrote: post #336
mlsu wrote: post #6

I 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…

You hate AI and want to go outside and stare at a tree? How are posts like this on HACKERnews? What is the point of all these types of posts on a site that is literally about hacking technology?

Imagine that...real people with different values, some of whom even prefer unmediated reality, and on a site called Hacker News?

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#669

Post by peder »

strangescript wrote: post #498
lsy wrote: 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 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…

Most of the comments here feel like cope about AI TBH. There's never been an innovation like this ever, and it makes sense to get on board rather than be left behind.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#670

Post by usrbinbash »

bsenftner wrote: post #576
jdiff wrote: 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.

> That's because using AI to write code is a poor application of LLM AIs

Then why is that exact usecase being talked about ad nauseam by many many many "influencers", including "big names" in the industry? Why is that exact usecase then advertised by leading companies in the industry?

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