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LLM Inevitabilism

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Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#881

Post by namcheapisdumb »

throwaway328 wrote: post #407
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…

And here's a list of stuff I've seen or that the non-computer-experts tell me they're doing with it, since the last month or two when suddenly even people who were against it are accepting it, along with people who'd never heard of it suddenly using it: - getting the do-re-mi notes for "twinkle twinkle little star" for the piano, just written out with no rhythm or audio anything - writing a groom's wedding speech ("t…

Most of these can be accomplished by 2B models running on top-of-the-line consumer phones. That's the damning stuff! The real pale horse is HBR reporting that most people use chatbots to chat. Reasoning models are pointless for most people. LLM initiatives are seeking its wide adoption, at the same time, the business models collapse if they become too commoditized. The entire industry undermines itself.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#882

Post by 12345hn6789 »

baxuz wrote: post #151
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…

The thing is that the data from actual research doesn't support your anecdotal proof of quality: - https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o... - https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/29/ai_agents_fail_a_lot/ But more importantly, it makes you stupid: - https://www.404media.co/microsoft-study-finds-ai-makes-human... - https://archive.is/M3lCG And it's an unsustainable bubble and wishful thinking, muc…

N=16

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#883

Post by ben_w »

DiscourseFan wrote: post #799
rafaelmn wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you claimed that AI was inevitable in the 80s and invested, or claimed people would be inevitably moving to VR 10 years ago - you would be shit out of luck. Zuck is still burning billions on it with nothing to show for it and a bad outlook. Even Apple tried it and hilariously missed the demand estimate. The only potential bailout for this tech is AR, but thats still years away from consumer market and widespread a…

>Tesla stock has been riding on the self driving robo-taxies meme for a decade now We do have self-driving taxis now, and they are so good that people will pay extra to take them. It's just not Tesla cars doing it.

Yes, and yet the rate of development and deployment is substantially slower than people like me were expecting.

Back in 2009, I was expecting normal people to be able to just buy a new vehicle with no steering wheel required or supplied by 2019, not for a handful of geo-fenced taxis that slowly expanded over the 6 years from 2019 to 2025.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#884

Post by quantumHazer »

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…

Dijkstra would like to have a word here

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667...

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#885

Post by reddit_clone »

citizenpaul wrote: post #878
kenjackson wrote: post #845

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

From what I had read in passing and remember.

  - They were loud (sonic booms were nasty).

  - They were expensive to maintain and operate. Guzzlers. (Britain and France clung to them as a matter of pride/ego)

  - They were narrow and uncomfortable. I have seen videos where there is space only for one stewardess to walk. I had been inside of one in Seattle museum. Very cramped.

  - As you mentioned, ticket cost was high.

  - I suspect people traveled in these mostly for bragging rights.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#886

Post by LtWorf »

henryfjordan wrote: post #813
pera wrote: post #742

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Google does put AI output at the top of every search now, and sometimes it's helpful and sometimes it's crap. They have been trying since long before LLMs to not just provide the links for a search but also the content. Google used to be interested in making sure you clicked either the paid link or the top link in the results, but for a few years now they'd prefer that a user doesn't even click a link after a search…

It made me switch away from google. The push I needed

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#887

Post by cmiles74 »

wyager wrote: post #506
cmiles74 wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This whole comparison is weird. The internet opened doors of communication between people who were very distant from each other. It enabled new methods of commerce and it made it easier for people to research and purchase product. Anyone interested in a particular subject could find other people interested in that same area and learn from them, increasing their knowledge. Ad-hoc organizations were much easier. These…

Many people were extremely skeptical of the internet in the early 90s. You can find old clips of news shows basically mocking the idea.

Many people are skeptical of LLMs today. Still, it's hard to argue that the non-technical population has the same level of interest in LLMs that they had in the internet back in the 90s.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#888

Post by reddit_clone »

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.

Low effort Youtube shorts with AI voice annoy the crap out of me.

After all this hype, they still can't do text to speech properly. Pause at the wrong part of the sentence all the time.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#889

Post by kenjackson »

da_chicken wrote: post #868
kenjackson wrote: post #845

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. The fundamental problem has already been mentioned: Nobody can figure out how to SELL it. Because few people are buying it. It's useful for aggregation and summarization of large amounts of text, but it'…

> Nobody can figure out how to SELL it. Because few people are buying it.

Just picking one company who basically just does AI, OpenAI. They reported it has 20 million PAID subscribers to ChatGPT. With revenue projected above $12b dollars (https://www.theverge.com/openai/640894/chatgpt-has-hit-20-mi...).

I think what you meant to say is that costs are high so they can't generate large profits. but saying that they can't figure out how to sell it seems absurd. Is it Netflix level of subscribers, no. But there can't be more than a couple of hundred products that have that type of subscription reach.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#890

Post by z2 »

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…

Yeah, and with LLMs the thing I can't shake, however, is that this time it's pretty strongly (maybe parasitically) latched onto the aggregate progress of Moore's law. Few other technologies have enjoyed such relatively unfettered exponential improvement. It's like if skyscraper materials double in strength every n years, and their elevators approach teleportation speed, the water pumps get twice as powerful, etc., which would change the economics vs the reality that most of the physical world doesn't improve that fast.
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