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LLM Inevitabilism

(tomrenner.com)
1616 points SwoopsFromAbove | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | 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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erlend_sh ◴[] No.44569734[source]
Exactly. This is basically the argument of “AI as Normal Technology”.

https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43697717

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1. highfrequency ◴[] No.44569958{3}[source]
Thanks for the link. The comparison to electricity is a good one, and this is a nice reflection on why it took time for electricity’s usefulness to show up in productivity stats:

> What eventually allowed gains to be realized was redesigning the entire layout of factories around the logic of production lines. In addition to changes to factory architecture, diffusion also required changes to workplace organization and process control, which could only be developed through experimentation across industries.