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LLM Inevitabilism

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Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#921

Post by ogogmad »

overgard wrote: post #896
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…

>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 do…

Vision and everyday-physics models are the answer: hallucinations will stop when the models stop thinking in words and start thinking in physical reality.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#922

Post by CommenterPerson »

Wow .. adding to the 1426 comments so far. Here is an interview with the author of "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" Professor Shoshana Zuboff, Harvard. Thanks to the OP for the pointer. 3 years old and even more relevant now:

https://time.com/6174614/shoshana-zuboff-twitter-surveillanc...

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#923

Post by 01100011 »

Animats wrote: post #46

There may be an "LLM Winter" as people discover that LLMs can't be trusted to do anything. Look for frantic efforts by companies to offload responsibility for LLM mistakes onto consumers. We've got to have something that has solid "I don't know" and "I don't know how to do this" outputs. We're starting to see reports of LLM usage having negative value for programmers, even though they think it's helping. Too much eff…

I find these LLM doomer takes as silly as LLM maximalist takes.

LLMs are literally performing useful functions today and they're not going away. Are they AGI? No, but so what?

There is waaay too much projecting and philosophizing going on in these comments and not enough engineering-minded comments from objective observers.

Is AI hyped? Sure. Are LLMs overshadowing other approaches? Sure. Are LLMs inefficient? Somewhat. Do they have problems like hallucinations? Yes. Do they produce useful output? Yes.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#924

Post by hilux »

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…

> 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.

It's hard for me to believe that anyone who works with technology in general, and LLMs in particular, could think this.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#925

Post by ogogmad »

camillomiller wrote: post #384
eric-burel wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Developers haven't even started extracting the value of LLMs with agent architectures yet. Using an LLM UI like open ai is like we just figured fire and you use it to warm you hands (still impressive when you think about it, but not worth the burns), while LLM development is about building car engines (here is you return on investment).

>> Developers haven't even started extracting the value of LLMs with agent architectures yet. What does this EVEN mean? Do words have any value still, or are we all just starting to treat them as the byproduct of probabilistic tokens? "Agent architectures". Last time I checked an architecture needs predictability and constraints. Even in software engineering, a field for which the word "engineering" is already quite…

Hallucinations might get solved by faster, cheaper and more accurate, vision and commonsense-physics models. Hypothesis: Hallucinations are a problem only because physical reality isn't text. Once people switch to models that predict physical states instead of missing text, then we'll have domestic robots and lower hallucination rates.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#926

Post by EasyMark »

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…

Oh I don't brush away spiritual or philisophical teachings from the "ancients", what I do brush aside with zero guilt is anything that requires me to believe in a sky daddy/mommy as an axiom for the consideration of the system.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#927

Post by itkovian_ »

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 reason for this is it’s horrifying to consider that things like the Ukrainian war didn’t have to happen. It provides a huge amount of phycological relief to view these events as inevitable. I actually don’t think as humans are even able to conceptualise/internalise suffering on those scales as individuals. I can’t at least.

And then ultimately if you believe we have democracies in the west it means we are all individually culpable as well. It’s just a line of logic that becomes extremely distressing and so there’s a huge, natural and probably healthy bias away from thinking like that.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#928

Post by EasyMark »

ygritte wrote: post #258
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 actor has changed from God to technology Agreed. You could say that technology has become a god to those people.

At least it actually exists, therefore still a superior take to "regular" religion

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#929

Post by tptacek »

SJC_Hacker wrote: post #876
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…

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 Londo…

Seems... wrong. Booms broke windows and drove zillions of complaints. Supersonic flight near airbases is controlled and happens on specific traffic corridors, right?

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#930

Post by seanmcdirmid »

Earw0rm wrote: post #853
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…

There are sound math reasons for skyscrapers topping out, mostly due to elevator capacity and the inability to effectively get people in and out of the floorspace as you go past a few hundred ft. There's no construction engineering reason you can't go taller - the Burj Khalifa, for example, is three times taller than a typical Western major city skyscraper - it just doesn't make economic sense unless you're a newly r…

Economic Concrete construction (what China specializes in) typically tops out at 30-40 floors, so the vast majority of buildings in Asia are that height, a sweet spot so to speak especially for residential (even in limited space HK).
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