731–740 of 1001 posts
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 con…
I strongly disagree with this characterization. I have yet to find an application that can reliably execute this prompt:
"Find 90 minutes on my calendar in the next four weeks and book a table at my favorite Thai restaurant for two, outside if available."
Forget "graduate-level work," that's stuff I actually want to engage with. What many people really need help with is just basic administrative assistance, and LLMs are way too unpredictable for those use cases.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> “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 do wonder what percent of ChatGPT usage is just students cheating on their homework, though.
https://nealstephenson.substack.com/p/emerson-ai-and-the-for...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Feels somewhat like a self fulfilling prophecy though. Big tech companies jam “AI” in every product crevice they can find… “see how widely it’s used? It’s inevitable!” I agree that AI is inevitable. But there’s such a level of groupthink about it at the moment that everything is manifested as an agentic text box. I’m looking forward to discovering what comes after everyone moves on from that.
Big Tech can jam X everywhere and not get actual adoption though, it's not magic. They can nudge people but can't force them to use it. And yes a lot of AI jammed everywhere is getting the Clippy reaction.
We saw the same thing with blockchain. We started seeing the most ridiculous attempts to integrate blockchain, by companies where it didn't even make any sense. But it was all because doing so excited investors and boosted stock prices and valuations, not because consumers wanted it.
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…
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…
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.
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…
Now that is a wild claim. ChatGPT might be challenging Google's dominance, but Perplexity is nothing.
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 con…
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…
The people using ChatGPT like its output enough when they're the ones reading it.
The people reading ChatGPT output that other people asked for generally don't like it. Especially if it's not disclosed up front.