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LLM Inevitabilism

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Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#711

Post by captainzidgel »

killerstorm wrote: post #197
sircastor wrote: post #172

The hardest part about inevitablism here is that the people who are making the argument this is inevitable are the same people who are the people who are shoveling hundreds of millions of dollars into it. Into the development, the use, the advertisement. The foxes are building doors into the hen houses and saying there’s nothing to be done, foxes are going to get in so we might as well make it something that works fo…

"put your money where your mouth is" is generally a good thing.

i believe its patently bad when it comes to AI. 1) it could create an economic bubble if the only people interested in LLMs are LLM providers (unlikely scenario though) the real issue is 2) deepfakes and the end of "authentic video". Let me explain. Now, bearing in mind that most of us can still recognize a Veo 3 clip instantly, generative AI videos are getting better and better, and soon old people will be seeing clips on facebook of presidential candidates telling them not to vote, or that they're satan worshippers, or something, i don't know. But here's the key - video AI takes a lot of resources. A text GPT can reasonably be run on a researcher's computer with a good GPU. Could the videos that look 90% real be done without billions of dollars of investment from Google and OpenAI? No. When there are AI political ads on the TV and Google or Meta or some other AI company is decrying these or lobbying against them and saying "Veo is meant for good! We didn't intend for it to be used this way! Read the TOS!", remember they're the ones who enabled it. TL;DR Google put billions into Video AI to create a product worth buying, that product is a threat to democracy and rational thought and probably wouldn't exist without their investment. QED, not inevitable.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#712

Post by DanMcInerney »

These articles kill me. The reason LLMs (or next-gen AI architecture) is inevitably going to take over the world in one way or another is simple: recursive self-improvement.

3 years ago they could barely write a coherent poem and today they're performing at at least graduate student level across most tasks. As of today, AI is writing a significant chunk of the code around itself. Once AI crosses that threshold of consistently being above senior-level engineer level at coding it will reach a tipping point where it can improve itself faster than the best human expert. That's core technological recursive self-improvement but we have another avenue of recursive self-improvement as well: Agentic recursive self-improvement.

First there was LLMs, then there was LLMs with tool usage, then we abstracted the tool usage to MCP servers. Next, we will create agents that autodiscover remote MCP servers, then we will create agents which can autodiscover tools as well as write their own.

Final stage of agents are generalized agents similar to Claude Code which can find remote MCP servers, perform a task, then analyze their first run of completing a task to figure out how to improve the process. Then write its own tools to use to complete the task faster than they did before. Agentic recursive self-improvement. As an agent engineer, I suspect this pattern will become viable in about 2 years.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#713

Post by th0ma5 »

unraveller wrote: post #581

It's more that big money going towards a clear and desirable endgame is a fairly sure thing. I choose to avoid lots of tech and I won't download the app but it's very hard to see how fighting a promising open tech like LLMs is the "pro-humanity" stance here.

There's to me a sole unimpeachable use case... Two SMEs of adjacent fields can work with an LLM SME to find overlaps in research. This is a manual slog of evaluating hints at patterns and holistically trying to discover something and the LLM is only a part of it. All of the other use cases I've heard of have some kind of religious undertone or assumption and leads to people wanting to make blanket summarizing statements to avoid digging into inconvenient realities.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#714

Post by jdiff »

hobs wrote: post #589
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…

One part of the code generation tools is that they devalue code at the same time as produce low quality code (without a lot of human intervention.) So a project that mostly is maintained by people who care about their problem/code (OSS) would be weird to be "primarily maintained by AI" in a group setting in this stage of the game.

Exactly the problem. It doesn't need to be good enough to work unsupervised in order to gain real adoption. It just needs to be a performance or productivity boost while supervised. It just needs to be able to take an AI-friendly FOSS dev (there are many), and speed them along their way. If we don't have even that, then where is the value (to this use case) that everyone claims it has? How is this going to shake the foundations of the IT industry?

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#715

Post by mikewarot »

It seemed inevitable that the Internet would allow understanding of other cultures and make future war impossible, as the people united and stood in opposition to oppression and stupidity the world over.

Reality worked out differently. I suspect the same is about to happen with our LLM overlords.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#716

Post by sejje »

brokencode wrote: post #706
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…

> “most people agree that the output is trite and unpleasant to consume” That is a such a wild claim. People like the output of LLMs so much that ChatGPT is the fastest growing app ever. It and other AI apps like Perplexity are now beginning to challenge Google’s search dominance. Sure, probably not a lot of people would go out and buy a novel or collection of poetry written by ChatGPT. But that doesn’t mean the outp…

Maybe he's referencing how people don't like when other humans post LLM responses in the comments.

"Here's what chatGPT said about..."

I don't like that, either.

I love the LLM for answering my own questions, though.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#717

Post by [deleted] »

osti wrote: post #704
seydor wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they said the same about VR glasses, about cryptocurrency ...

If you are seriously equating these two with AI, then you have horrible judgements and should learn to think critically, but unfortunately for you, I don't think critical thinking can be learned despite what people say. Note that I'm not even going to bother arguing against your point and instead resort to personal attacks,because I believe it would be a waste of time to argue against people with poor judgment.

[deleted]

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#718

Post by hattmall »

brokencode wrote: post #706
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…

> “most people agree that the output is trite and unpleasant to consume” That is a such a wild claim. People like the output of LLMs so much that ChatGPT is the fastest growing app ever. It and other AI apps like Perplexity are now beginning to challenge Google’s search dominance. Sure, probably not a lot of people would go out and buy a novel or collection of poetry written by ChatGPT. But that doesn’t mean the outp…

I'm not really countering that ChatGPT is popular, it certainly is, but it's also sort of like "fastest growing tire brand" that came along with the adoption of vehicles. The amount of smartphone users is also growing at the fastest rate ever so whatever the new most popular app is has a good chance of being the fastest growing app ever.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#719

Post by overfeed »

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…

> This echoes a lot of the rhetoric around "but how will facebook/twitter/etc make money?"

The answer was, and will be ads (talk about inevitability!)

Can you imagine how miserable interacting with ad-funded models will be? Not just because of the ads they spew, but also the penny-pinching on training and inference budgets, with an eye focused solely on profitability. That is what the the future holds: consolidations, little competition, and models that do the bare-minimum, trained and operated by profit-maximizing misers, and not the unlimited intelligence AGI dream they sell.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#720

Post by authorfly »

evantbyrne wrote: post #543
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…

I'm pretty bearish on the idea that AGI is going to take off anytime soon, but I read a significant amount of theology growing up and I would not describe the popular essays from e.g., LessWrong as religious in nature. I also would not describe them as appearing poorly read. The whole "look they just have a new god!" is a common trope in religious apologetics that is usually just meant to distract from the author's o…

Would you say LessWrong posts are dogmatic?
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