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LLM Inevitabilism

(tomrenner.com)
1612 points SwoopsFromAbove | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.526s | source
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lsy ◴[] No.44568114[source]
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 expenditure of training and hosting them, the majority of consumer usage is at the free tier, the industry is seeing the first signs of pulling back investments, and model capabilities are plateauing at a level where most people agree that the output is trite and unpleasant to consume.

There are many technologies that have seemed inevitable and seen retreats under the lack of commensurate business return (the supersonic jetliner), and several that seemed poised to displace both old tech and labor but have settled into specific use cases (the microwave oven). Given the lack of a sufficiently profitable business model, it feels as likely as not that LLMs settle somewhere a little less remarkable, and hopefully less annoying, than today's almost universally disliked attempts to cram it everywhere.

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fendy3002 ◴[] No.44568145[source]
LLMs need significant optimization or we get significant improvement on computing power while keeping the energy cost the same. It's similar with smartphone, when at the start it's not feasible because of computing power, and now we have one that can rival 2000s notebooks.

LLMs is too trivial to be expensive

EDIT: I presented the statement wrongly. What I mean is the use case for LLM are trivial things, it shouldn't be expensive to operate

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1. trashchomper ◴[] No.44568305[source]
Calling LLMs trivial is a new one. Yea just consume all of the information on the internet and encode it into a statistical model, trivial, child could do it /s
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2. hammyhavoc ◴[] No.44568630[source]
> all of the information on the internet

Total exaggeration—especially given Cloudflare providing free tools to block AI and now tools to charge bots for access to information.

3. fendy3002 ◴[] No.44568725[source]
well I presented the statement wrongly. What I mean is the use case for LLM are trivial things, it shouldn't be expensive to operate