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LLM Inevitabilism

(tomrenner.com)
1612 points SwoopsFromAbove | 4 comments | 15 Jul 25 04:35 UTC | HN request time: 0.52s | source
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mg ◴[15 Jul 25 05:41 UTC] No.44568158[source]▶
In the 90s a friend told me about the internet. And that he knows someone who is in a university and has access to it and can show us. An hour later, we were sitting in front of a computer in that university and watched his friend surfing the web. Clicking on links, receiving pages of text. Faster than one could read. In a nice layout. Even with images. And links to other pages. We were shocked. No printing, no shipping, no waiting. This was the future. It was inevitable.

Yesterday I wanted to rewrite a program to use a large library that would have required me to dive deep down into the documentation or read its code to tackle my use case. As a first try, I just copy+pasted the whole library and my whole program into GPT 4.1 and told it to rewrite it using the library. It succeeded at the first attempt. The rewrite itself was small enough that I could read all code changes in 15 minutes and make a few stylistic changes. Done. Hours of time saved. This is the future. It is inevitable.

PS: Most replies seem to compare my experience to experiences that the responders have with agentic coding, where the developer is iteratively changing the code by chatting with an LLM. I am not doing that. I use a "One prompt one file. No code edits." approach, which I describe here:

https://www.gibney.org/prompt_coding

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1. baxtr ◴[15 Jul 25 10:04 UTC] No.44569621[source]▶
I am absolutely on board with the LLM inevitablism. It seems inevitable as you describe it. Everyone will use them everyday. Like smartphones.

I am absolutely not on board with AGI inevitablism. Saying “AGI is inevitable because models keep getting better” is an inductive leap that is not guaranteed.

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2. agos ◴[15 Jul 25 11:59 UTC] No.44570242[source]▶
I doubt that LLM will keep getting better, too. Or at least, not in an economically sustainable way
3. niek_pas ◴[15 Jul 25 18:59 UTC] No.44574640[source]▶
Yes, people often conflate the two. ChatGPT is nice for some coding things and asking what you want for dinner. That does not mean we're all out of a job and our society has to be radically rethought.
4. lubujackson ◴[15 Jul 25 19:07 UTC] No.44574724[source]▶
100%. AGI is some arbitrary threshold that has nothing to do with LLMs and their broad application, rapid improvement and exploding ecosystem. The only comparable shift in memory is the advent of the Internet, and that was much slower for obvious reasons (everyone needs a computer, needs to use the phone line, needs to upgrade to faster internet, etc., etc.)

LLMs are just here and accessible to everyone with all kinds of uses. And people that hate them and don't want LLMs shoved in their face: it doesn't matter. Chatbots were already a thing for customer service, now they are almost implicit. SaaS in general is going to be completely revamped. Huge companies are going to have a shift like they did when they first digitized paper files. This is seismic and a large-scale structural upgrade to many institutions.

And that is without giving a shit about public facing LLMs or Ghibli art or writing your term papers for you. It doesn't have anything to do with AI making you dumb or being shoved into products. That is random noise, big picture. Anyone that can't see the real changes to business and knowledge retrieval isn't thinking this through or is actively burying their heads in the sand.