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LLM Inevitabilism

(tomrenner.com)
1613 points SwoopsFromAbove | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.622s | 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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eric-burel ◴[] No.44568416[source]
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).
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1. camillomiller ◴[] No.44569602[source]
>> 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 a stretch in comparison to construction, electronics, mechanics.

Yet we just spew the non-speak "Agentic architectures" as if the innate inability of LLMs in managing predictable quantitative operations is not an unsolved issue. As if putting more and more of these things together automagically will solves their fundamental and existential issue (hallucinations) and suddenly makes them viable for unchecked and automated integration.

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2. eric-burel ◴[] No.44571385[source]
This means I believe we currently underuse LLM capabilities and their empirical nature makes it difficult to assess their limitations without trying. I've been studying LLMs from various angles during a few months before coming to this conclusion, as an experienced software engineer and consultant. I must admit it is however biased towards my experience as an SME and in my local ecosystem.
3. ogogmad ◴[] No.44578138[source]
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.