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LLM Inevitabilism

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Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#821

Post by satvikpendem »

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

And how much of that is free usage, like the parent said? Even when users are paying, ChatGPT's costs are larger than their revenue.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#822

Post by niek_pas »

baxtr wrote: post #386
mg wrote: post #70

In the 90s a friend told me about the internet. And that he knows someone who is in a university and has access to it and can show us. An hour later, we were sitting in front of a computer in that university and watched his friend surfing the web. Clicking on links, receiving pages of text. Faster than one could read. In a nice layout. Even with images. And links to other pages. We were shocked. No printing, no shipp…

I am absolutely on board with the LLM inevitablism. It seems inevitable as you describe it. Everyone will use them everyday. Like smartphones. I am absolutely not on board with AGI inevitablism. Saying “AGI is inevitable because models keep getting better” is an inductive leap that is not guaranteed.

Yes, people often conflate the two. ChatGPT is nice for some coding things and asking what you want for dinner. That does not mean we're all out of a job and our society has to be radically rethought.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#823

Post by simplyluke »

rightbyte wrote: post #364
imiric wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Look for frantic efforts by companies to offload responsibility for LLM mistakes onto consumers. Not just by companies. We see this from enthusiastic consumers as well, on this very forum. Or it might just be astroturfing, it's hard to tell. The mantra is that in order to extract value from LLMs, the user must have a certain level of knowledge and skill of how to use them. "Prompt engineering", now reframed as "con…

> Or it might just be astroturfing, it's hard to tell. Compare the hype for commercial SaaS models to say Deepseek. I think there is an insane amount of astroturfing.

One of my recurring thoughts reading all kinds of social media posts over the past few years has been to wonder how many of the comments boosting are being written by AI.

Formulaic, unspecific in results while making extraordinary claims, and always of a specific upbeat tenor.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#824

Post by keiferski »

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…

I didn’t say that “it’s just a new god,” I said:

The notion that history is just on some inevitable pre-planned path is not a new idea, except now the actor has changed from God to technology.

This is a more nuanced sentence.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#825

Post by dmbche »

mumbisChungo wrote: post #163
imiric wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Look for frantic efforts by companies to offload responsibility for LLM mistakes onto consumers. Not just by companies. We see this from enthusiastic consumers as well, on this very forum. Or it might just be astroturfing, it's hard to tell. The mantra is that in order to extract value from LLMs, the user must have a certain level of knowledge and skill of how to use them. "Prompt engineering", now reframed as "con…

The more I learn about prompt engineering the more complex it seems to be, but perhaps I'm an idiot.

It's just iterating until you get what you want.

It's gonna seem complex if you don't know the subject and don't know how to do the thing without an LLM.

But it's just trying and trying until you get what you want

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#826

Post by lubujackson »

baxtr wrote: post #386
mg wrote: post #70

In the 90s a friend told me about the internet. And that he knows someone who is in a university and has access to it and can show us. An hour later, we were sitting in front of a computer in that university and watched his friend surfing the web. Clicking on links, receiving pages of text. Faster than one could read. In a nice layout. Even with images. And links to other pages. We were shocked. No printing, no shipp…

I am absolutely on board with the LLM inevitablism. It seems inevitable as you describe it. Everyone will use them everyday. Like smartphones. I am absolutely not on board with AGI inevitablism. Saying “AGI is inevitable because models keep getting better” is an inductive leap that is not guaranteed.

100%. AGI is some arbitrary threshold that has nothing to do with LLMs and their broad application, rapid improvement and exploding ecosystem. The only comparable shift in memory is the advent of the Internet, and that was much slower for obvious reasons (everyone needs a computer, needs to use the phone line, needs to upgrade to faster internet, etc., etc.)

LLMs are just here and accessible to everyone with all kinds of uses. And people that hate them and don't want LLMs shoved in their face: it doesn't matter. Chatbots were already a thing for customer service, now they are almost implicit. SaaS in general is going to be completely revamped. Huge companies are going to have a shift like they did when they first digitized paper files. This is seismic and a large-scale structural upgrade to many institutions.

And that is without giving a shit about public facing LLMs or Ghibli art or writing your term papers for you. It doesn't have anything to do with AI making you dumb or being shoved into products. That is random noise, big picture. Anyone that can't see the real changes to business and knowledge retrieval isn't thinking this through or is actively burying their heads in the sand.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#827

Post by techpineapple »

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…

“People like communicating in natural language”

I would actually want to see some research on this. Maybe? But I’d think there would be a lot of exceptions. At its most basic, I’d rather flick my thumb than constantly say “scroll down”. And I think that you’d want to extrapolate that out.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#828

Post by strange_quark »

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…

> There are many technologies that have seemed inevitable and seen retreats under the lack of commensurate business return (the supersonic jetliner)

I think this is a great analogy, not just to the current state of AI, but maybe even computers and the internet in general.

Supersonic transports must've seemed amazing, inevitable, and maybe even obvious to anyone alive at the time of their debut. But hiding under that amazing tech was a whole host of problems that were just not solvable with the technology of the era, let alone a profitable business model. I wonder if computers and the internet are following a similar trajectory to aerospace. Maybe we've basically peaked, and all that's left are optimizations around cost, efficiency, distribution, or convenience.

If you time traveled back to the 1970s and talked to most adults, they would have witnessed aerospace go from loud, smelly, and dangerous prop planes to the 707, 747 and Concorde. They would've witnessed the moon landings and were seeing the development of the Space Shuttle. I bet they would call you crazy if you told this person that 50 years later, in 2025, there would be no more supersonic commercial airliners, commercial aviation would basically look the same except more annoying, and also that we haven't been back to the moon. In the previous 50 years we went from the Wright Brothers to the 707! So maybe in 2075 we'll all be watching documentaries about LLMs (maybe even on our phones or laptops that look basically the same), and reminiscing about the mid-2020s and wondering why what seemed to be such a promising technology disappeared almost entirely.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#829

Post by rafaelero »

feoren wrote: post #779
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 i…

I have been working in software for about 6 years and we are working in a new startup building our product. LLM's have been fundamental and it makes things so much faster.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#830

Post by rafaelero »

callc wrote: post #790
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…

The “use LLMs or you will fall behind” narrative is pearl clutching. I don’t see anywhere in the near future our profession becoming something other than knowledge work. So, at the end of the day training your brain is what matters. Over-reliance on LLM is like skipping the brain gym. Under utilizing LLM may make you slower. There’s a good optimum of putting in the work so you learn and asking LLM If it’s mostly a so…

> If it’s mostly a social phenomenon in your company that non believers are pushed out, that does not seem like a fun place to work.

It's not really intentional. It's just that he's slower than the rest of the team and it is noticeable.

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