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LLM Inevitabilism

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Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#671

Post by pama »

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…

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

This popular repo (35.6k stars) documents the fraction of code written by LLM for each release since about a year ago. The vast majority of releases since version 0.47 (now at 0.85) had the majority of their code written by LLM (average code written by aider per release since then is about 65%.)

https://github.com/Aider-AI/aider

https://github.com/Aider-AI/aider/releases

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#672

Post by fleebee »

megaloblasto wrote: post #569

I think what scares people who code for a living the most is the loss of their craft. Many of you have spent years or decades honing the craft of producing clear, fast, beautiful code. Now there is something that can spit out (often) beautiful code in seconds. An existential threat to your self worth and livelihood. A perfectly reasonable thing to react to. I do think, however, that this is an inevitable change. Indu…

My job security is pretty low on my list of concerns about LLMs. I wish this technology existed only for vibe coding.

I worry about the impact of LLMs to the society at large. These models hit the mainstream only a couple years ago and they already have disastrous effects. Not only people send LLM generated emails to each other, that's actually a selling point for many products. I regularly hear about people using LLMs as doctors and therapists. For many, a chatbot could be their only friend or even a partner. Genuine human-to-human interaction is being replaced by chatbots from a handful of megacorporations. It's hard to avoid it. The internet is being flooded by LLM generated garbage that looks like a human could've written it. It's easier than ever to generate misinformation and propaganda, and as a cherry on top the LLMs even help distribute it.

I don't particularly want to live in a society where any of that's considered normal. And that's not even considering the negative impact on the environment. It's hard to be excited about a technology with these downsides that I think severely outweigh any benefits.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#673

Post by mattgreenrocks »

nilirl wrote: post #116

HN over the last year: personal anecdotes, analogy, and extrapolation as evidence for "obviously it's inevitable, why can't you see?"

Don't forget the recent article:

Article: "here are logical reasons we should not anthropomorphize LLMs"

HN: "but I LIKE talking about them like that, so I will!"

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#674

Post by leshow »

nonameiguess wrote: post #592
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 b…

I kinda feel this way too. Reading some of the blog posts by AI "luminaries" I'm struck by how Stalinist they sound. They hold out some utopia that exists in their minds, and they are ready to feed people into the meat grinder to try and make it a reality. Stalin said that this generation would suffer so that the next lived in utopia, and that's kind of the same pitch they are making.

I think if we actually cared about making a better world, you'd take steps where each successive step is a positive one. Free healthcare, clean energy investments, etc..

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#675

Post by m0llusk »

jowea wrote: post #496
guelo wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry I don't buy your argument. (First I disagree with A Secular Age 's thesis that secularism is a new force. Christian and Muslim churches were jailing and killing nonbelievers from the beginning. People weren't dumber than we are today, all the absurdity and self-serving hypocrisy that turns a lot of people off to authoritarian religion were as evident to them as they are to us.) The idea is not that AI is on a p…

I add to this that we have plenty of examples of societies that don't keep up with technological advancement, or "history" more broadly get left behind. Competition in a globalized world makes some things inevitable. I'm not agreeing in full with the most AI will change everything arguments, but those last couple of paragraphs of TFA sounds to me like standing athwart history, yelling "Stop!".

Communism used to be thought of in this way. It enabled societies to cast off old limitations and make remarkable progress. Until it didn't and Communists found themselves and their modernized society stuck well behind the rest of the world. Perhaps LLMs are a similar trap that will generate many lines of code and imagined images but leave us all stupid and with impaired executive function.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#676

Post by dragonwriter »

leshow wrote: post #674
nonameiguess wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

I kinda feel this way too. Reading some of the blog posts by AI "luminaries" I'm struck by how Stalinist they sound. They hold out some utopia that exists in their minds, and they are ready to feed people into the meat grinder to try and make it a reality. Stalin said that this generation would suffer so that the next lived in utopia, and that's kind of the same pitch they are making. I think if we actually cared abo…

> I think if we actually cared about making a better world, you'd take steps where each successive step is a positive one.

Yeah, but lots of people don't care about that, they care about acheiving their visions of power, and they need an excuse to justify other people suffering for them. They aren’t seeking long term improvements at the cost of short term suffering, they are using a mirage of utopia over the hill to sell people a deal which is only suffering, now and for however long they can be kept in line.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#677

Post by cootsnuck »

hinkley wrote: post #642
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…

If there was a way to explain contracts in natural language, don’t you think lawyers would have figured it out by now? How much GDP do we waste on one party thinking the contract says they paid for one thing but they got something else?

> If there was a way to explain contracts in natural language, don’t you think lawyers would have figured it out by now?

Uh...I mean...you do know they charge by the hour, right?

Half joking, but seriously, the concept of "job security" still exists even for a $400 billion industry. Especially when that industry commands substantial power across essentially all consequential areas of society.

LLMs literally do explain contracts in natural language. They also allow you to create contracts with just natural language. (With all the same caveats as using LLMs for programming or anything else.)

I would say law is quietly one of the industries that LLMs have had a larger than expected impact on. Not in terms of job loss (but idk, would be curious to see any numbers on this). But more just like evident efficacy (similar to how programming became a clear viable use case for LLMs).

All of that being said, big law, the type of law that dominates the industry, does not continue to exist because of "contract disputes". It exists to create and reinforce legal machinations that advance the interests of their clients and entrench their power. And the practice of doing that is inherently deeply human. As in, the names of the firm and lawyers involved are part of the efficacy of the output. It's deeply relational in many ways.

(I'd bet anything though that smart lawyers up and down the industry are already figuring out ways to make use of LLMs to allow them to do more work.)

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#678

Post by Centigonal »

dbalatero wrote: post #538
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…

They might generate 10b ARR, but they lose a lot more than that. Their paid users are a fraction of the free riders. https://www.wheresyoured.at/openai-is-a-systemic-risk-to-the...

This echoes a lot of the rhetoric around "but how will facebook/twitter/etc make money?" back in the mid 2000s. LLMs might shake out differently from the social web, but I don't think that speculating about the flexibility of demand curves is a particularly useful exercise in an industry where the marginal cost of inference capacity is measured in microcents per token. Plus, the question at hand is "will LLMs be relevant?" and not "will LLMs be massively profitable to model providers?"

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#679

Post by jayd16 »

dcow wrote: post #549
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…

The difference is that the future is now with LLMs. There is a microwave (some multiple) in almost every kitchen in the world. The Concord served a few hundred people a day. LLMs are already ingrained into hundreds of millions if not billions of people’s lives, directly and indirectly. My dad directly uses LLMs multiple times a week if not daily in an industry that still makes you rotate your password every 3 months.…

The huge leap that is getting pushback is the sentiment that LLMs will consume every use case and replace human labor. I don't think many are arguing LLMs will die off entirely.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#680

Post by gawa »

seunosewa wrote: post #432
ojr wrote: post #420

The company name was changed from Facebook to Meta because Mark thought the metaverse was inevitable, it's ironic that you use a quote from him

The true reason was to have a new untainted brand after the election scandal.

Because the strategy of changing brand after a scandal works so well, it's good to add some precision here, for those who may not know: Facebook changed its name to Meta after a huge public backlash, the Cambridge Analytica scandal [0]

What was once a scandal in 2018 became common place. In 2018, targeting citizens with tailored messages to influence them was considered wrong. We had a different conception of "How we should make up our minds to choose our leaders" (it's still the case in some parts of Western Europe, where there are more regulations regarding elections, such as a ceiling for how much candidates can spend in marketing campaigns). Nowadays, we have Elon Musk directly involved in politics, who incidentally happen to possess all the data he bought with Twitter, and now tons of sensitive data he rushed to harness from government agencies during his short time in DOGE. Since he didn't shy away from directly paying people to vote for his candidates, it's hard to believe he would have the ethical restraint to not use this data and his social network to organize extremely precise and effective targeted manipulation campaigns to further his personal agenda.

Unfortunately, the unchecked (unregulated) use of personal data for massive manipulation is considered "inevitable" (i has been for decades). So much that we now comment about the word "inevitability" itself, and whether LLMs are "inevitably good at coding", completely brushing aside the most important, the main social issues LLMs can cause, such as: their biases (reinforcing fake news, or stereotypes), who train the model, what ads they will show in the near future, how they will be used for influencing people, how they will be used in drones, which humans in the loop, what guardrails, for whose interest, how will it be used in troll farm, how is it compatible with democracy, how (or if) the economics gains of this technology will be redistributed, ...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...

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