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LLM Inevitabilism

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Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#871

Post by MonkeyIsNull »

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,

I always think back to how Bezos and Amazon were railed against for losing money for years. People thought that would never work. And then when he started selling stuff other than books? People I know were like: please, he's desperate.

Someone, somewhere will figure out how to make money off it - just not most people.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#872

Post by throwawayoldie »

tete wrote: post #193

Of course! Just like like we have been using what we now call VR goggles and voice input since the 80s, oh and hand gestures and governments all around use Blockchain for everything, we also all take supersonic planes while we travel, also everyone knows how to program, also we use super high level programming languages, also nobody uses the keyboard anymore because it has been replaced by hundreds if not thousands b…

It's really something, how cheap clean fusion power made all that possible. Truly, we are in the best timeline.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#873

Post by mxschumacher »

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…

what I struggle with is that the top 10 providers of LLMs all have identical* products. The services have amazing capabilities, but no real moats.

The social media applications have strong network effects, this drives a lot of their profitability.

* sure, there are differences, see the benchmarks, but from a consumer perspective, there's no meaningful differentiation

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#874

Post by Earw0rm »

mxschumacher wrote: post #869
Earw0rm wrote: post #857

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a system optimisation perspective, SSTs solved the wrong problem. Want to save people time flying? Solve the grotesque inefficiency pit that is airport transit and check-in. Like, I'm sorry, STILL no high speed, direct to terminal rail at JFK, LAX and a dozen other major international airports? And that's before we get to the absolute joke of "border security" and luggage check-in. Sure, supersonic afterburning…

that's not a technology problem, many airports are super efficient, e.g. Singapore. Public transport in the US is held back by other forces.

It makes it all the dumber that we have the tech and still can't manage to implement the solution.

Like an org with crappy management and team structure shipping bloated, buggy code even though they've the budget to hire great engineers and the problems they're solving are largely known and well-trodden.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#875

Post by tricorn »

polotics wrote: post #318
benreesman wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has historically been very much an LLM inevitabalism skeptic and has recently decided that we've crossed the breakeven point with indiscriminant use of Opus 4, eh, it's precisely because we're in late LLM === AGI hype world. They're actually cutting the shit on "this can do anything, and in a month, twice that!". This thing is crazy operator aligned, wildly SFT'd on curated codebases, and running a TTF…

Can you translate "SFT'd" and "TTFT" and "TESCREAL" for the less clued-in members of the audience? On "one ine itabalism" I just gave up.

I just selected some of the text and my browser told me what they meant along with some background and some links for more information. The "one ine itabilism" actually found this conversation as a reference ...

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#876

Post by SJC_Hacker »

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…

The problem with supersonic commercial jets was mainly one of marketing/politics. The so called "sonic boom" problem was vastly overhyped, as anyone who lives near an air force base can tell you.

The conspiracy theorist tells me the American aerospace manufacturers at the time (Boening, McDonnell-Douglas, etc.), did everything they could to kill the Concorde. With limited flyable routes (NYC and DC to Paris and London I think were the only ones), the financials didn't make sense. If overland routes were available, especially opening up LA, San Francisco and Chicago, it might have been a different story.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#877

Post by anthonypasq »

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 you refused to learn excel during the PC revolution because you preferred doing the calculations by hand, you would have quickly found yourself unemployable.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#878

Post by citizenpaul »

kenjackson wrote: post #845
strange_quark wrote: post #828

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Was the problem that supersonic flight was expensive and the amount of customers willing to pay the price was even lower than the number of customers that could even if they wanted to?

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#879

Post by sumeno »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #863
underdeserver wrote: post #740

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Especially if it's not disclosed up front, and especially when it supplants higher-value content. I've been shocked how little time it's taken for AI slop SEO optimized blogs to overtake the articles written by genuine human experts, especially in niche product reviews and technical discussions. However, whether or not people like it is almost irrelevant. The thing that matters is not whether economics likes it. At l…

Eventually the economics will correct themselves once people yet again learn the old "you get what you pay for" lesson (or the more modern FAFO lesson)

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#880

Post by regus »

roadside_picnic wrote: post #748
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…

The article's main point is that "inevitabilism" is a rhetorical tactic used to frame the conversation in such a way you can easily dismiss any criticism as denying reality. So drawing comparisons to reformation ideology wouldn't be particularly meaningful. There's a also a bit of irony that you're presenting the secular view of predestination. As someone who once had a multi-volume set of "Institutes of the Christia…

> God's grace is given not earned (unlike the previous Catholic system ...

Catholicism does not hold that you can earn grace. Grace is a gift from God that is freely given.

> including cash donations, could be converted into salvation

I assume you are referring to selling indulgences. Indulgences are not something that can give you salvation.

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