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LLM Inevitabilism

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Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#941

Post by uncircle »

miningape wrote: post #577
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…

While it's a fair criticism, just because someone doesn't believe in a god doesn't mean the religious hardware in their brain has been turned off. It's still there and operational - I don't think it's a surprise that this hardware's attention would then be automatically tuned to a different topic. I think you can also see this in the intensification of political discussion, which has a similar intensity to religious…

> While it's a fair criticism, just because someone doesn't believe in a god doesn't mean the religious hardware in their brain has been turned off.

Max Stirner said that after the Enlightenment and the growth of liberalism, which is still very much in vogue to this day, all we’ve done is replace the idea of God with the idea of Man.

The object might be different, but it is still the unshakable belief in an idealised and subjective truth, with its own rituals and ministers i.e a religion.

I guess the Silicon Valley hyper-technological optimism of the past years is yet another shift from Man to religious belief in the Machine.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#942

Post by pi_22by7 »

This is a sharp dissection of ‘inevitabilism’ as a rhetorical strategy. I’ve noticed it too: the moment someone says ‘X is inevitable’, the burden of proof disappears and dissent becomes ‘denial’. But isn’t that framing itself... fragile? We’ve seen plenty of ‘inevitable’ futures (crypto, the Metaverse, even Web3) collapse under public pushback or internal rot.

The question I’m left with: if inevitabilism is so effective rhetorically, how do we counter it without sounding naïve or regressive?

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#943

Post by codebolt »

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 crucial point is that we simply do not know yet if there is an inherent limitation in the reasoning capabilities of LLMs, and if so whether we are currently near to pushing up against them. It seems clear that American firms are still going to increase the amount of compute by a lot more (with projects like the Stargate factory), so time will tell if that is the only bottleneck to further progress. There might also still be methodological innovations that can push capabilities further.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#944

Post by codebolt »

The crucial point is that we simply do not know (yet) if there is an inherent limitation in the reasoning capabilities of LLMs, and if so whether we are currently near to pushing up against them. It seems clear that American firms are still going to increase the amount of compute by a lot more (with projects like the Stargate factory), so time will tell if that is the only bottleneck to further progress. There might also still be methodological innovations that can push capabilities further.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#945

Post by guappa »

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.

Is still there some indian online to guide them through difficult intersections?

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#946

Post by solarkraft »

layer8 wrote: post #547
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…

People also like reliable and deterministic behavior, like when they press a specific button it does the same thing 99.9% of the time, and not slightly different things 90% of the time and something rather off the mark 10% of the time (give and take some percentage points). It's not clear that LLMs will get us to the former.

With the declining quality of consumer products (due to „just ship it“ culture), this unreliability is already commonplace.

I hate that, but this society has brought it upon itself through consumer choices.

People are really quick to depend on and trust technology that has shown itself to be useful. This can already be observed for LLMs.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#947

Post by ares623 »

mlsu wrote: post #35
HPsquared wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just remember that machines already do most of the work. Nobody ploughs fields anymore.

Yes, of course. What is AI freeing us of? Communicating with other human beings? Ah what a chore. Other human beings. Wish I could just enter into a cocoon of solitude for the rest of my life. I mean I'm kind of being glib here but the ~amazing future~ we all seem to take as inevitable has me playing solo orchestra conductor, prompt pupettering a massive fleet of hyper intelligent code bots, prompting an AI to make p…

I don't like talking to other people. I'm pretty sure I have social anxiety. It takes a lot of energy from me when I talk. But I will 100% choose to talk to a person than the alternative, a world where that person's worth is taken away by AI.

Fuck this AI shit. I will not smile and hype up something that promises to take away the liberties of my children when they grow up. Because that is what they promise, a future where my children, and other children that grow up with them, will have no jobs. At the very least, I can look my kids in the eye when they ask me what the fuck happened, and tell them I did not smile and welcome it.

"Yes, we're starving and homeless now. But for a beautiful moment in time, I was able to open 20 PRs in one day."

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#948

Post by munksbeer »

keiferski wrote: post #311
guelo wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry I don't buy your argument. (First I disagree with A Secular Age 's thesis that secularism is a new force. Christian and Muslim churches were jailing and killing nonbelievers from the beginning. People weren't dumber than we are today, all the absurdity and self-serving hypocrisy that turns a lot of people off to authoritarian religion were as evident to them as they are to us.) The idea is not that AI is on a p…

That isn’t the argument of the book, so I don’t think you actually read it, or even the Wikipedia page? The rest of your comment doesn’t really seem related to my argument at all. I didn’t say technological process stops or slows down, I pointed out how the thought patterns are often the same across time, and the inability and unwillingness to recognize this is psychologically lazy, to over simplify. And there are in…

> And there are indeed examples of technological acceleration or dispersal which was deliberately curtailed – especially with weapons

Which examples? Despite curtailment, new countries have acquired nuclear weapons over time.

Efforts to squash technology exist, such as cloning bans, and so on, but they will only work for so long. You might think I'm making a "predestination" argument here, but I'm not. I'm observing the powerful incentives at play (first past the post advantage), noting that historically technology has always advanced, and making a bet that technology will continue to advance. I am supremely confident in that bet. I could of course go out and protest, but there is also a part that doesn't seem present in the original post and your argument, many (maybe most) of us don't want to stop technological progress.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#949

Post by gkanai »

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…

> when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries;

America is a shrine to capitalism. Capitalism has driven most of the outsourcing that American companies did first to Japan (ship building, autos, then semiconductors), then to Korea (again shipbuilding, autos, semiconductors, smartphones), then to Taiwan (shipbuilding, semiconductors). Then to China- which is now a problem because the divergence between the US and CN post-Xi.

Tesla and Apple's investments in China specifically supercharged the EV and smartphone industries in China. Yes it meant that those companies benefitted from Chinese manufacturing, but it also trained Chinese industry to build those products at scale.

Also America did not reinvest enough in developing new industries or retraining in the regions which lost those industries.

America should never have moved critical manufacturing away from the US (certain shipbuilding, latest-edge semis) etc.

Re: LLM Inevitabilism

#950

Post by globular-toast »

hnfong wrote: post #661
layer8 wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People also like reliable and deterministic behavior, like when they press a specific button it does the same thing 99.9% of the time, and not slightly different things 90% of the time and something rather off the mark 10% of the time (give and take some percentage points). It's not clear that LLMs will get us to the former.

You can set the temperature of LLMs to 0 and that will make them deterministic. Not necessarily reliable though, and you could get different results if you typed an extra whitespace or punctuation.

So then people will just learn the language of the LLM, e.g. if a particular LLM always interprets "set my alarm for 8" as setting your alarm for 8am people will learn to just say that if they wanted 8am or specify pm (or use a 24 hour clock) if they want 8pm.

I can see this having odd effects with natural language. Natural language users are forever in a state of negotiation with each other. If you say something to someone and they don't understand they can ask for clarification (or, more likely, just look confused) but, equally, you can take that feedback and adjust your own language model. This happens all day, every day. If most people understand you but a few don't, it's on the few to adjust their models, but if more misunderstand than understand then it's on you to adjust yours.

With current LLMs it's one way. Only you, the human, are malleable. Of course, theoretically the LLM could continuously incorporate input into its model, but we're a long way off that being practical as far as I know.

We'll have to see how it pans out but I can it either ending up in a weird feedback loop where people just capitulate and use the language of the LLM, or they continue to use human language with humans and a special LLM language with LLMs. Both options seem pretty bad.

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