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LLM Inevitabilism

(tomrenner.com)
1619 points SwoopsFromAbove | 6 comments | 15 Jul 25 04:35 UTC | HN request time: 0.898s | source | bottom
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delichon ◴[15 Jul 25 04:49 UTC] No.44567913[source]▶
If in 2009 you claimed that the dominance of the smartphone was inevitable, it would have been because you were using one and understood its power, not because you were reframing away our free choice for some agenda. In 2025 I don't think you can really be taking advantage of AI to do real work and still see its mass adaptation as evitable. It's coming faster and harder than any tech in history. As scary as that is we can't wish it away.
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1. mbgerring ◴[15 Jul 25 05:23 UTC] No.44568062[source]▶
I’ve tried to use AI for “real work” a handful of times and have mostly come away disappointed, unimpressed, or annoyed that I wasted my time.

Given the absolutely insane hard resource requirements for these systems that are kind of useful, sometimes, in very limited contexts, I don’t believe its adoption is inevitable.

Maybe one of the reasons for that is that I work in the energy industry and broadly in climate tech. I am painfully aware of how much we need to do with energy in the coming decades to avoid civilizational collapse, and how difficult all of that will be, without adding all of these AI data centers into the mix. Without several breakthroughs in one or more hard engineering disciplines, the mass adoption of AI is not currently physically possible.

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2. dheera ◴[15 Jul 25 05:43 UTC] No.44568176[source]▶
That's how people probably felt about the first cars, the first laptops, the first <anything>.

People like you grumbled when their early car broke down in the middle of a dirt road in the boondocks and they had to eat grass and shoot rabbits until the next help arrived. "My horse wouldn't have broken down", they said.

Technologies mature over time.

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3. mbgerring ◴[15 Jul 25 05:55 UTC] No.44568230[source]▶
We actually don’t know whether or not meaningful performance gains with LLMs are available using current approaches, and we do know that there are hard physical limits to electricity generation. Yes, technologies mature over time. The history of most AI approaches since the 60s is a big breakthrough followed by diminishing returns. I have not seen any credible argument that this time is different.
4. ezst ◴[15 Jul 25 06:36 UTC] No.44568465[source]▶
We have been in the phase of diminishing returns for years with LLMs now. There is no more data to train them on. The hallucinations are baked in at a fundamental level and they have no ability to emulate "reasoning" past what's already in their training data. This is not a matter of opinion.
5. Disposal8433 ◴[15 Jul 25 07:26 UTC] No.44568803[source]▶
The first car and first laptop were infinitely better than no car and no laptop. LLMs is like having a drunk junior developer, that's not an improvement at all.
6. UncleMeat ◴[15 Jul 25 10:47 UTC] No.44569817[source]▶
There is a weird combination of "this is literal magic and everybody should be using them for everything immediately and the bosses can fire half their workforce and replace them with LLMs" and "well obviously the early technology will be barely functional but in the future it'll be amazing" in this thread.