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…
LLM Inevitabilism
801–810 of 1001 posts
Re: LLM Inevitabilism
#802Right 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…
Re: LLM Inevitabilism
#803Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
This isn't some niche outcry: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2024/03/19/is-the-p... And that was 18 months ago. Yes, believe it or not, people eventually wake up and realize slop is slop. But like everything else with LLM development, tech is trying to brute force it on people anyway.
You article isn’t making the point you seem to think it is.
Re: LLM Inevitabilism
#804This inevitabilist framing rests on an often unspoken assumption: that LLM's will decisively outperform human capabilities in myriad domains. If that assumption holds true, then the inevitabilist quotes featured in the article are convincing to me. If LLM's turn out to be less worthwhile at scale than many people assume, the inevitabilist interpretation is another dream of AI summer. Burying the core assumption and f…
Re: LLM Inevitabilism
#805Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I jsut want to comment here that this is the classic arrogant, underread “I reject half of humanities thoughts” foolishness that OP is referring to. I mean the lack of self awareness you have here is amazing.
Re: LLM Inevitabilism
#806Is it really building an AI company in the hopes that you find something that gets traction? Or would a better plan be building a private military force to take AI from whoever gets it? Would VC want to invest in that as a hedge?
Re: LLM Inevitabilism
#807This inevitabilist framing rests on an often unspoken assumption: that LLM's will decisively outperform human capabilities in myriad domains. If that assumption holds true, then the inevitabilist quotes featured in the article are convincing to me. If LLM's turn out to be less worthwhile at scale than many people assume, the inevitabilist interpretation is another dream of AI summer. Burying the core assumption and f…
Re: LLM Inevitabilism
#808Earlier 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'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
#809Re: LLM Inevitabilism
#810People 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…
> LLMs are the first step in the movement away from (...) the logic based language This dumb thing again.. The logic based language was and remains a major improvement [0] in being able to build abstractions because it allows the underlying implementations to be 'deterministic'. The natural language misses that mark by such a wide margin that it is impossible to explain in nicer language. And if one wants to make the…
A deterministic program given the same inputs will always give the same outputs.
We can debate about what is cool, cold or freezing but a thermometer will present the same numeric value to everyone.