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LLM Inevitabilism

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Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#771

Post by lupusreal »

charles_f wrote: post #723
lupusreal wrote: post #682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading between the lines of the OP, the author seems to think that the future of LLMs will be determined by debate and that he can win that debate by choosing the framing of the debate. The whole meat of his article is about this debate technique, ostensibly saying that's what the other guys are doing, but really he's only described what he himself is doing.

I didn't read that. I understood it as the fact that tech companies are currently framing the narrative as "inevitable", and that you should ask yourself the other questions, such as do I want it

The question of whether any individual wants it ultimately won't matter. Now that the technology exists and has found traction, it continuing to exist and have traction until eventually being superseded by something even more useful is inevitable.

The author seems to think that the existence of the technology can be decided by debate to sway people one way or the other, but that's not how it works. Real life doesn't work like a debate club. The people who are saying that the technology is inevitable aren't trying to do a debate persuasion thing to make it inevitable, that's just the way the author wants to see it because that framing makes it negotiable. But there's no negotiating with the course of technological development.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#772

Post by dmoy »

cootsnuck wrote: post #677
hinkley wrote: post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 explai…

> 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 can't generalize, but the last time I tried to use an LLM for looking at a legal document (month or two ago), it got a section completely wrong. And then when that was pointed out, it dug in its heels and insisted it was right, even though it was very wrong.

Interestingly there was a typo, which was obvious to any human, and would have been accepted as intended in a court, but the LLM insisted on using a strict interpretation accepting the typo as truth.

It was weird, because it felt like on the one hand the LLM was trained to handle legal documents with a more strict interpretation of what's written, but then couldn't cope with the reality of how a simple typo would be handled in courts or real legal proceedings.

So.... I dunno. LLMs can explain contracts, but they may explain then in a very wrong way, which could lead to bad outcomes if you rely on it.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#773

Post by cdrini »

throwawayoldie wrote: post #655
cdrini wrote: post #236

How do you differentiate between an effective debater using inevitabilism as a technique to win a debate, and an effective thinker making a convincing argument that something is likely to be inevitable? How do you differentiate between an effective debater "controlling the framing of a conversation" and an effective thinker providing a new perspective on a shared experience? How do you differentiate between a good ar…

One good way is if they back up their assertions and explain their reasoning, which generally people arguing for LLM inevitability don't--they make assertions like "LLMs are only going to get better". Contrast this with someone arguing the other side of the question like Ed Zitron or David Gerard. You may or may not agree with their arguments, but they explain, in great detail, with numbers and citations, how they ar…

+1, I think the mark of a good argument is to back up assertions and explain reasoning. Although I disagree, I'm seeing well-reasoned arguments in this thread both for and against the claim "AI is inevitable".

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#774

Post by cruffle_duffle »

pera wrote: post #742
brokencode wrote: post #706

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…

> 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.

> While people seem to love the output of their own queries they seem to hate the output of other people's queries

Listening or trying to read other peoples chats with these things is like listening to somebody describe a dream. It’s just not that interesting most of the time. It’s remarkable for the person experiencing it but it is deeply personal.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#775

Post by tikhonj »

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…

At some point, Groupon was the fastest growing company ever.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#776

Post by davesque »

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…

The thing is, people also dislike natural language for its ambiguity. That's why we invented things like legalese and computers; to get more reliable results. There will always be a need for that.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#777

Post by frozenseven »

genghisjahn wrote: post #733
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #722

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...I do wonder what percent of ChatGPT usage is just students cheating on their homework, though.

Neal Stephenson has a recent post that covers some of this. Also links to teachers talking about many students just putting all their work into chatgpt and turning it in. https://nealstephenson.substack.com/p/emerson-ai-and-the-for...

He links to Reddit, a site where most people are aggressively against AI. So, not necessarily a representative slice of reality.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#778

Post by saratogacx »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #684
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…

> 2. Almost three years in, companies investing in LLMs have not yet discovered a business model that justifies the massive expenditure of training and hosting them, the majority of consumer usage is at the free tier, the industry is seeing the first signs of pulling back investments, and model capabilities are plateauing at a level where most people agree that the output is trite and unpleasant to consume. You hit t…

We actually aren't too far off from that reality. There are several models you can run fully offline on your phone (phi-3, Gemma-3n-E2b-it, Qwen2.5-1.5b-instruct all run quite well on my Samsung S24 ultra). There are a few offline apps that also have tool calling (mostly for web search but I suspect this is extendable).

If you want to play around a bit and are on android there is PocketPal,ChatterUI, MyDeviceAI, SmolChat are good multi-model apps and Google's Edge gallery won't keep your chats but is a fun tech demo.

All are on github and can be installed using Obtainium if you don't want to

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#779

Post by feoren »

rafaelero wrote: post #770

Right now, I’m noticing how my colleagues who aren’t very comfortable using LLMs for most of their work are getting sidelined. It's a bit sad seeing them struggle by not keeping pace with everyone else who is using it for ~90% of our tasks. They seem to really care about writing code themselves, but, if they don't pivot, things are probably not going to end well for them. So is LLM inevitable? Pretty much if you want…

Can I take a guess and say that you and your colleagues are all pretty inexperienced? I'll wager less than 4 years experience max, working in a regimented structure, mostly closing tickets for well-understood features? Because I do not know anyone with >10 years experience working in a well-understood language but a relatively unexplored domain that uses LLMs to create any code. I only see LLMs being widely used by inexperienced programmers (or just new to the language) -- which sucks, because we need inexperienced programmers writing code by hand in order to get more experienced programmers.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#780

Post by motorest »

sensanaty wrote: post #696
motorest wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 bea…

> 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.

That's very interesting to hear, and also very unfortunate due to the loneliness your personal belief reflects. For example, your personal belief contrasts with what's clearly stated and supported in Wikipedia's article on Luddites. Is that because the whole world around you is wrong and you are the only lonely chap who is burdened by the truth?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

The interesting detail you are either unaware or chose to omit is that "training" only registered as a concern as industrialization completely eliminated the competitiveness and consequently need to what at the time represented high-skilled albeit manual labor. Luddite's arguments regarding training was not that industrial mills didn't had training, buy that "produced textiles faster and cheaper because they could be operated by less-skilled, low-wage labourers." This is a direct citation, not something that "magic little boxes" spit out. That's what motivated uprisings against these "magic little boxes": the threat that automaton posed to their livelihood for their once irreplaceable skillet being suddenly rendered useless overnight.

So, people like you who are uninformed and ignorant of history should spend some time trying to gather insights onto the problem to have a chance if understanding what's right in front of your nose. As Mark Twain said , history doesn't repeat itself but it often rhymes. Luddites represent those who failed to understand the impact that automation had on humanity, refused to understand what changes were placed upon them, and misplaced their energy and ultimate frustration and anger onto futile targets. The key factor is ignorance and unpreparedness. Fooling yourself with creative exercised covering up militant levels of ignorance does not change this one bit.

But you do you. The universe has this tendency to self correct.

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