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LLM Inevitabilism

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Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#841

Post by tines »

dmbche wrote: post #819
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…

Simple thought I had reading this: I've used a tool to do a task today. I used a suction sandblasting machine to remove corrosion from a part. Without the tool, had I wanted to remove the corrosion, I would've spent all day (if not more) scraping it with sandpaper (is that a tool too? With the skin of my hands then?) - this would have been tedious and could have taken me all day, scraping away millimeter by millimete…

The difference is that LLMs are not like any other tool. Reasoning by analogy doesn't work when things are sufficiently in-analogous.

For example, people try to compare this LLM tech with the automation of the car manufacturing industry. That analogy is a terrible one, because machines build better cars and are much more reliable than humans.

LLMs don't build better software, they build bad software faster.

Also, as a tool, LLMs discourage understanding in a way that no other tool does.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#842

Post by evantbyrne »

keiferski wrote: post #824
evantbyrne wrote: post #543

Earlier 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 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.

Before that quoted sentence you drew a line from the reformation to people believing that AI is inevitable, then went on to imply these people may even believe such a thing will happen without the involvement of people. These are generalizations which don't fit a lot of the literature and make their best ideas look a bit sillier than they are. It is situations like these that make me think that analogies are better suited as a debate tactic than a method of study.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#843

Post by tines »

I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#844

Post by JyB »

dmbche wrote: post #811
xandrius wrote: post #804

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It doesn’t have to be as performant nor fast. It can work and iterate alone when setup properly. All time spent is purely bonus. It is already inevitable.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#845

Post by kenjackson »

strange_quark wrote: post #828
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…

I think this is both right and wrong. There was a good book that came out probably 15 years ago about how technology never stops in aggregate, but individual technologies tend to grow quickly and then stall. Airplane jets were one example in the book. The reason why I partially note this as wrong is that even in the 70s people recognized that supersonic travel had real concrete issues with no solution in sight. I don't think LLMs share that characteristic today.

A better example, also in the book, are skyscrapers. Each year they grew and new ones were taller than the ones last year. The ability to build them and traverse them increased each year with new technologies to support it. There wasn't a general consensus around issues that would stop growth (except at more extremes like air pressure). But the growth did stop. No one even has expectations of taller skyscrapers any more.

LLMs may fail to advance, but not because of any consensus reason that exists today. And it maybe that they serve their purpose to build something on top of them which ends up being far more revolutionary than LLMs. This is more like the path of electricity -- electricity in itself isn't that exciting nowadays, but almost every piece of technology built uses it.

I fundamentally find it odd that people seem so against AI. I get the potential dystopian future, which I also don't want. But the more mundane annoyance seems odd to me.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#846

Post by rpdillon »

Centigonal wrote: post #678
dbalatero wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They might generate 10b ARR, but they lose a lot more than that. Their paid users are a fraction of the free riders. https://www.wheresyoured.at/openai-is-a-systemic-risk-to-the...

This echoes a lot of the rhetoric around "but how will facebook/twitter/etc make money?" back in the mid 2000s. LLMs might shake out differently from the social web, but I don't think that speculating about the flexibility of demand curves is a particularly useful exercise in an industry where the marginal cost of inference capacity is measured in microcents per token. Plus, the question at hand is "will LLMs be rele…

Yep. Remember when Amazon could never make money and we kept trying to explain they were reinvesting their earnings into R&D and nobody believed it? All the rhetoric went from "Amazon can't be profitable" to "Amazon is a monopoly" practically overnight. It's like people don't understand the explore/exploit strategy trade-off.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#847

Post by kenjackson »

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.

If I cared about the output from other people's queries then wouldn't they be my queries? I don't care about ChatGPTs response to your queries is because I don't care about your queries. I don't care if they came from ChatGPT or the world's foremost expert in whatever your query was about.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#848

Post by shervinafshar »

tines wrote: post #843

I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agenda…

Not quite in agreement about using this quotation in this context, but for those who care about attribution and credit and such, this is from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#849

Post by [deleted] »

osti wrote: post #704
seydor wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they said the same about VR glasses, about cryptocurrency ...

If you are seriously equating these two with AI, then you have horrible judgements and should learn to think critically, but unfortunately for you, I don't think critical thinking can be learned despite what people say. Note that I'm not even going to bother arguing against your point and instead resort to personal attacks,because I believe it would be a waste of time to argue against people with poor judgment.

[deleted]

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#850

Post by hosh »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #235
hosh wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the Internet and LLMs are huge turning points — the metaphor that comes to mind are phase change thresholds, from solid to gas, from gas to solids — there is a crucial difference between the internet and LLMs. The early internet connected personal computing together. It built on technology that was democratizing. LLMs appear to be democratizing, but it is not. The enshittification is proceeding much more rapidl…

For the internet to be democratizing it needed PCs first. Before that computing was like LLMs: the mainframe era. You either had access to an institution with a mainframe or you were luckily able to get a thin client to a mainframe (the early time-sharing systems.) Even after PCs were invented, for decades mainframes were inarguably better than PCs. Mainframes and thin clients were even some of the earliest computer…

I have been keenly watching for locally-run AIs. This includes the price point for running 70b models, such as the one recently announced by Switzerland. I've also been looking at what it would take to run these in much smaller compute, such as microcontrollers.

However, fine-tuning may be run locally -- what are you thinking about in terms of training?

"At some point your OS will ship with a local model, your system will have access to some Intelligence APIs, and that's that."

There's a secondary effect that I had not even discussed in detail here. I don't know how to explain it concisely because it requires reframing a lot of things just to be able to see it, let alone to understand it as a problem.

Let me see how concise I can be:

1. There are non-financial capital such as social capital, knowledge capital, political capital, natural capital, etc.

2. The propensity is to convert non-financial capital into financial capital at the expense of the other forms of capital. I think this is the core dynamic driving enshittification (beyond how Cory Doctrow described it when he coined it).

3. While LLMs and AIs can be designed to enhance the human experience, right now, the propensity is to deploy them in a way that does not develop social and knowledge capital for the next generation.

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