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LLM Inevitabilism

(tomrenner.com)
1612 points SwoopsFromAbove | 2 comments | 15 Jul 25 04:35 UTC | HN request time: 0.039s | source
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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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NBJack ◴[15 Jul 25 05:00 UTC] No.44567951[source]▶
Ironically, this is exactly the technique for arguing that the blog mentions.

Remember the revolutionary, seemingly inevitable tech that was poised to rewrite how humans thought about transportation? The incredible amounts of hype, the secretive meetings disclosing the device, etc.? That turned out to be the self-balancing scooter known as a Segway?

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HPsquared ◴[15 Jul 25 05:03 UTC] No.44567966[source]▶
1. The Segway had very low market penetration but a lot of PR. LLMs and diffusion models have had massive organic growth.

2. Segways were just ahead of their time: portable lithium-ion powered urban personal transportation is getting pretty big now.

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jdiff ◴[15 Jul 25 05:24 UTC] No.44568065[source]▶
Massive, organic, and unprofitable. And as soon as it's no longer free, as soon as the VC funding can no longer sustain it, an enormous fraction of usage and users will all evaporate.

The Segway always had a high barrier to entry. Currently for ChatGPT you don't even need an account, and everyone already has a Google account.

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etaioinshrdlu ◴[15 Jul 25 05:33 UTC] No.44568113[source]▶
This is wrong because LLMs are cheap enough to run profitably on ads alone (search style or banner ad style) for over 2 years now. And they are getting cheaper over time for the same quality.

It is even cheaper to serve an LLM answer than call a web search API!

Zero chance all the users evaporate unless something much better comes along, or the tech is banned, etc...

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scubbo ◴[15 Jul 25 05:41 UTC] No.44568161[source]▶
> LLMs are cheap enough to run profitably on ads alone

> It is even cheaper to serve an LLM answer than call a web search API

These, uhhhh, these are some rather extraordinary claims. Got some extraordinary evidence to go along with them?

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haiku2077 ◴[15 Jul 25 05:46 UTC] No.44568184{7}[source]▶
https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2025-06-02-llms-are-ch..., also note the "objections" section

Anecdotally thanks to hardware advancements the locally-run AI software I develop has gotten more than 100x faster in the past year thanks to Moore's law

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oblio ◴[15 Jul 25 06:00 UTC] No.44568256{8}[source]▶
What hardware advancement? There's hardly any these days... Especially not for this kind of computing.
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1. haiku2077 ◴[15 Jul 25 06:53 UTC] No.44568593{9}[source]▶
Specifically, I upgraded my mac and ported my software, which ran on Windows/Linux, to macos and Metal. Literally >100x faster in benchmarks, and overall user workflows became fast enough I had to "spend" the performance elsewhere or else the responses became so fast they were kind of creepy. Have a bunch of _very_ happy users running the software 24/7 on Mac Minis now.
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2. oblio ◴[15 Jul 25 21:53 UTC] No.44576206[source]▶
The thing is, these kinds of optimizations happen all the time. Some of them can be as simple as using a hashmap instead of some home-baked data structure. So what you're describing is not necessarily some LLM specific improvement (though in your case it is, we can't generalize to every migration of a feature to an LLM).

And nothing I've seen about recent GPUs or TPUs, from ANY maker (Nvidia, AMD, Google, Amazon, etc) say anything about general speedups of 100x. Heck, if you go across multiple generations of what are still these very new types of hardware categories, for example for Amazon's Inferentia/Trainium, even their claims (which are quite bold), would probably put the most recent generations at best at 10x the first generations. And as we all know, all vendors exaggerate the performance of their products.