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LLM Inevitabilism

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Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#691

Post by megaloblasto »

fleebee wrote: post #672
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 LL…

That's a very dark point of view. Many countries have severely underdeveloped (or overbooked) healthcare systems. A tool that might help people get answers when they otherwise couldn't is a great thing.

I know of nowhere where it is normal to replace your human-to-human contact with a chatbot. In my society people would call that pathological.

People have always resisted change in favor of maintaining some idealized version of the past that probably never existed.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#693

Post by paulcole »

scioto wrote: post #688

(commenting late in the game, so the point may have been made already) I personally believe that "AI" is mostly marketing for the current shiny LLM thing that will end up finding some sort of actual useful niche (or two) once the dust has settled. But for now, it's more of a solution being carpet-bombed for problems, most of them inappropriate IMHO (e.g, replacing HR). For now there'll be collateral damage as carbon-…

> most of them inappropriate IMHO (e.g, replacing HR)

What is HR and why is replacing HR with LLM inappropriate? Is there some level of assistance that a person doing HR can gain from using an LLM?

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#694

Post by jihadjihad »

hnfong wrote: post #661
layer8 wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

It will make them more deterministic, but it will not make them fully deterministic. This is a crucial distinction.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#695

Post by charles_f »

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…

> 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.

Isn't that a societal trait though? See English Christians attitude towards vikings, requiring baptism (or the prima signatio, kinda baptism-light) before they could deal with them, because they were savage. Or colons forcing natives to adopt Christianity, because what they had before was "primitive". There was wisdom and thought in both, but in both case the Christian side "brushed it away". Or capitalism and communism in the cold war. It feels like everyone with a belief system tries to force it onto others.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#696

Post by sensanaty »

motorest wrote: post #600
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, a…

Every time pro-AI people bring up the Luddites I have to laugh, because they've clearly not had their magic little boxes actually tell them anything about the Luddites.

They argued the exact opposite, they wanted proper training on how to use the "damn machines" as people were literally dying because of being untrained in their usage. They were also then beset upon by hired thugs and mercenaries that proceeded to beat and even kill the Luddites for daring to speak out against horrible worker conditions in the factories.

It's pretty funny, the anti-luddites being exactly like the anti-luddites of yore.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#697

Post by sealeck »

hnfong wrote: post #661
layer8 wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even then, this isn't actually what you want. When people say deterministic, at one level they mean "this thing should be a function" (so input x always returns the same output y). Some people also use determinism to mean they want a certain level of "smoothness" so that the function behaves predictably (and they can understand it). That is "make me a sandwich" should not return radically different results to "make me a cucumber sandwich".

As you note, your scheme significantly solves the first problem (which is a pretty weak condition) but fails to solve the second problem.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#698

Post by Gormo »

peder wrote: post #669
strangescript wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> There's never been an innovation like this ever

There have been plenty of innovations like this. In fact, much of the hype around LLMs is a rehash of the hype around "expert systems" back in the '80s. LLMs are marginally more effective than those systems, but only marginally.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#699

Post by paulcole »

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.)

> 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, a below average programmer, can write code myself but it takes time and effort that is generally incompatible with my actual job. With an LLM I am able to write code with a level of time and effort that fits very nicely inside my job.

It can figure things out in a fraction of the time that it would take me. The limiting factor is no longer the depth of my technical knowledge but rather the knowledge of my business.

Sure, I could hire someone to do the coding for me but with an LLM available, why would I? And in that situation I would have to teach that person about the business because that would become their limiting factor if they could code as fast as the LLM.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#700

Post by [deleted] »

Centigonal wrote: post #678
dbalatero wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rele…

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