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LLM Inevitabilism

(tomrenner.com)
1612 points SwoopsFromAbove | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.449s | 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. __loam ◴[] No.44569667[source]
3 years into automating all white collar labor in 6 months.
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2. erfgh ◴[] No.44571334[source]
It's 3 years away.
3. satyrun ◴[] No.44581011[source]
lol you must not be looking for a white collar job right now then outside of IT.

The only thing that is over hyped is there is no white collar bloodbath but a white collar slow bleed out.

Not mass firing events but transition by attrition over time. A bleed out in jobs that don't get back filled and absolutely nothing in terms of hiring reserve capacity for the future.

My current company is a sinking ship, I suspect it will go under in the next two years so I have been trying to get off but there is absolutely no place to go.

In 2-3 years I expect to be unemployed and unemployable, needing to retrain to do something I have never done before.

What is on display in this thread is that human's are largely denial machines. We have to be otherwise we would be paralyzed by our own inevitable demise.

It is more comforting to believe everything is fine and the language models are just some kind of doge coin tech hype bullshit.