831–840 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…
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…
LLMs are nowhere near the first step. This is Python, an almost 35 year old language: for apple in sorted(bag): snake.eat(apple) The whole point of high-level programming languages is we can write code that is close enough to natural language while still being 100% precise and unambiguous.
What she wants is to tell her phone to switch it's background to the picture she took last night of the family.
That is the inevitabilism.
Forget about the tiny tech bubble for a moment and see the whole world.
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…
I think what scares people who code for a living the most is the loss of their craft. Many of you have spent years or decades honing the craft of producing clear, fast, beautiful code. Now there is something that can spit out (often) beautiful code in seconds. An existential threat to your self worth and livelihood. A perfectly reasonable thing to react to. I do think, however, that this is an inevitable change. Indu…
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> That is a such a wild claim. People like the output of LLMs so much that ChatGPT is the fastest growing app ever. 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.
Had someone put up a project plan for something that was not disclosed as LLM assisted output. While technically correct it came to the wrong conclusions about the best path forward and inevitably hamstrung the project. I only discovered this later when attempting to fix the mess and having my own chat with an LLM and getting mysteriously similar responses. The problem was that the assumptions made when asking the LL…
It IS possible for a LLM to challenge your assumptions, as its training material may include critical thinking on many subjects.
The helpful assistant, being almost by definition a sycophant, cannot.
My belief is that whatever technology can be invented by humans (under the constraints of the laws of physics, etc) will eventually be invented. I don't have a strong argument for this; it's just what makes sense to me. If true, then an immediate corollary is that if it is possible for humans to create LLMs (or other AI systems) which can program, or do some other tasks, better than humans can, that will happen. Inev…
>I don't have a strong argument for this I think you do. Have we ever been successful at slowing down technological efficiency? >If that comes to pass, then what people will do with that technology, and what will change as a result, will be up to the people who are alive at the time. If it is inevitable that technology will be developed, it is also inevitable that it will be used, and in turn, further technology deve…
Yes, we slow down technological efficiency all the time. Nuclear Power for one. I think you could argue we did the same for blockchain, once the hype died down. I might argue most technologies we slow down by divesting from them as their core use cases subside.
Facebook has been pivoting away from the metaverse which means we’re slowing down research in that area.
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Back in 1950s nuclear tech was seen as inevitable. Many people had even bought plates made from uranium glass. They still glow somewhere in my parents' cabinet or maybe I broke them
Well there are like 500 nuclear powerplants online today supplying 10% of the world's power, so it wasn't too far off. Granted it's not the Mr. Fusion in every car as they imagined it back then. We probably also won't have ASI taking over the world like some kind of vengeful comic book villain as people imagine it today.
Saying well, we got 500 nuclear power plants is like saying “well, we got excellent `npx create-app` style templates from AI. That’s pretty huge impact. I don’t know a single project post 2030 that didn’t start as an AI scaffolded project. That’s pretty huge dude”
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LLMs have already been absolutely worthwhile in many of my projects, so I guess it's already inevitable for me.
>that LLM's will decisively outperform human capabilities in myriad domains. Do your LLMs outperform you at your tasks? If not, were they to become more expensive by a non negligible margin, would you at any cost keep using them in their curent state?
I think what scares people who code for a living the most is the loss of their craft. Many of you have spent years or decades honing the craft of producing clear, fast, beautiful code. Now there is something that can spit out (often) beautiful code in seconds. An existential threat to your self worth and livelihood. A perfectly reasonable thing to react to. I do think, however, that this is an inevitable change. Indu…
Why would a human need to do high level software architecture design? That might be easier to automate than the coding itself.
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I'm confused with your second point. LLM companies are not making any money from current models? Openai generates 10b USD ARR and has 100M MAUs. Yes they are running at a loss right now but that's because they are racing to improve models. If they stopped today to focus on optimization of their current models to minimize operating cost and monetizing their massive user base you think they don't have a successful busi…
How many of those MAUs are crappy startups building a janky layer on top of the OpenAI API which will cease to exist in 2 years?
[1]: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/chatgpt-statistics/