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LLM Inevitabilism

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Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#741

Post by ants_everywhere »

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…

> That is a such a wild claim.

Some people who hate LLMs are absolutely convinced everyone else hates them. I've talked with a few of them.

I think it's a form of filter bubble.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#742

Post by pera »

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…

> People like the output of LLMs so much that ChatGPT is the fastest growing app ever

While people seem to love the output of their own queries they seem to hate the output of other people's queries, so maybe what people actually love is to interact with chatbots.

If people loved LLM outputs in general then Google, OpenAI and Anthropic would be in the business of producing and selling content.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#743

Post by jprokay13 »

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…

Why look to the past when you can rediscover it from “first principles?” /s

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#745

Post by notatallshaw »

DanMcInerney wrote: post #712

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…

> recursive self-improvement.

What LLM is recursively self-improving?

I thought, to date, all LLM improvements come from the hundreds of billions of dollars of investment and the millions of software engineer hours spent on better training and optimizations.

And, my understanding is, there are "mixed" findings on whether LLMs assisting those software engineers help or hurt their performance.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#746

Post by CivBase »

bikemike026 wrote: post #744

Arguing about AI is like arguing about bulldozers. It's just a tool.

Yeah but nobody argues that bulldozers are soon going to make human labor obsolete and force us to re-think our economic systems from the ground up.

There isn't trillions of dollars being invested into bulldozers expecting big returns. We aren't spinning up nuclear power plants to meet demands for bulldozer production. Bulldozers aren't challenging our legal framework for intellectual property.

Companies aren't trying to shove bulldozers down my throat when I try to do mundane tasks like write emails.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#747

Post by scubbo »

oblio wrote: post #94
scubbo wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hours of time saved Come back in a week and update us on how long you've spent debugging all the ways that the code was broken that you didn't notice in those 15 minutes. Usually I don't nitpick spelling, but "mimnutes" and "stylisitic" are somewhat ironic here - small correct-looking errors get glossed over by human quality-checkers, but can lead to genuine issues when parsed as code. A key difference between your…

> they'll still do harm when "working-as-intended" [..] to consolidation of wealth and capital. Fairly sure you didn't mean this :-D LLMs will probably lead to 10x the concentration of wealth.

Eh, phrasing ambiguity from the run-on sentence (analogous to how "I fought with" could mean "on the same side as" or "against").

Yes, I meant that LLMs will do harm to - will exacerbate - _the problem of" wealth consolidation.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#748

Post by roadside_picnic »

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…

The article's main point is that "inevitabilism" is a rhetorical tactic used to frame the conversation in such a way you can easily dismiss any criticism as denying reality. So drawing comparisons to reformation ideology wouldn't be particularly meaningful.

There's a also a bit of irony that you're presenting the secular view of predestination. As someone who once had a multi-volume set of "Institutes of the Christian Religion" next to him on his bookshelf, the protestant conception of predestination had very little to do with "offloading of freedom and responsibility" both in theory and in practice.

Predestination is founded on the concept that God's grace is given not earned (unlike the previous Catholic system which had multiple ways that merit, including cash donations, could be converted into salvation), since no human could earn salvation without the grace of God. But the lesson from this is not "so don't worry about it!", quite the opposite. Calvin's main extension to this was that (paraphrasing) "It's not through good works that we are saved, but through our good works we have evidence of our salvation". You wanted to see the evidence of your salvation, so you did try to do good works, but without the belief that your efforts would ever be enough. This ultimately created a culture of hard work with out the expectation of reward.

This is part of the focus of Max Weber's "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" which argued that this ability to "work without immediate reward" is precisely what enabled Capitalism to take such a strong foot hold in the early United States.

So even if the article were arguing for "inevitabilism" the framework is still quite distinct from that established in Protestantism.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#749

Post by JimmaDaRustla »

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…

Are they building doors? Or are they realizing that the door already exists and they want to be the first to walk through it?

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#750

Post by philomath_mn »

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

This is likely a selection bias: you only notice the obviously bad outputs. I have created plenty of outputs myself that are good/passable -- you are likely surrounded by these types of outputs without noticing.

Not a panacea, but can be useful.

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