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LLM Inevitabilism

(tomrenner.com)
1616 points SwoopsFromAbove | 7 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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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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Jensson ◴[] No.44568953[source]
> Developers haven't even started extracting the value of LLMs with agent architectures yet

There are thousands of startups doing exactly that right now, why do you think this will work when all evidence points towards it not working? Or why else would it not already have revolutionized everything a year or two ago when everyone started doing this?

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eric-burel ◴[] No.44569274[source]
Most of them are a bunch of prompts and don't even have actual developers. For the good reason that there is no training system yet and the wording of how you call the people that build these system isn't even there or clearly defined. Local companies haven't even setup a proper internal LLM or at least a contract with a provider. I am in France so probably lagging behind USA a bit especially NY/SF but the word "LLM developer" is just arriving now and mostly under the pressure of isolated developers and companies like me. This feel really really early stage.
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__loam ◴[] No.44569675[source]
The smartest and most well funded people on the planet have been trying and failing to get value out of this technology for years and the best we've come up with so far is some statistically unreliable coding assistants. Hardly the revolution its proponents keep eagerly insisting we're seeing.
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1. liveoneggs ◴[] No.44571073[source]
my company has already fired a bunch of people in favor of LLMs so they are realizing all kinds of value
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2. dasil003 ◴[] No.44571223[source]
I don’t know your company but this thinking doesn’t necessarily follow logically. In a large company the value of developers is not distributed evenly across people and time, and also has a strong dependency on market realities in front of them.

While it’s true that lots of companies are getting some value out of LLMs, a much larger number are using them as an excuse for layoffs they would have wanted to do anyway—LLMs are just a golden opportunity to tie in an unmitigated success narrative.

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3. Capricorn2481 ◴[] No.44571241[source]
Only as much as replacing all your devs with a frog is "realizing value"
4. SketchySeaBeast ◴[] No.44571416[source]
I imagine they HOPE they'll realize value. A lot of people are acting on what might be, rather than what is, which makes sense given that the AI "thought leaders" (CEOs with billions invested that need to start turning a profit) are all promising great things soon™.
5. sensanaty ◴[] No.44572040[source]
So has mine, and quite predictably our product has gone into the shitter and breaks constantly, requiring reverts almost daily. They've armed a couple of Juniors with Cursor and given them the workload of all those people they fired / have quit since the firings, some of which have been at the company for years and held a lot of institutional knowledge that is now biting them in the ass.

Now sure, "Just don't fire the useful people and get rid of the juniors and supercharge the good devs with AI tooling" or whatever, except the whole reason the C-level is obsessed with this AI shit is because they're sold on the idea of replacing their most expensive asset, devs, because they've been told by people who sell AI as a job that it can replace those pesky expensive devs and be replaced by any random person in the company prompting up a storm and vibecoding it all.

Churn rates are up, we're burning unfathomable amounts of money on the shitty AI tooling and the project has somehow regressed after we've finally managed to get a good foothold on it and start making real progress for once. Oh and the real funny part is they're starting to backpedal a bit and have tried to get some people back in.

I expect to hear a LOT more of this type of thing happening in the near future. As the idiots in charge start slowly realizing all the marketing sold to them on LinkedIn or wherever the fuck it is they get these moronic ideas from are literal, actual literal lies.

6. __loam ◴[] No.44574184[source]
Yeah callousness does seem to be the leaking area of improvement.
7. thewebguyd ◴[] No.44574544[source]
> a much larger number are using them as an excuse for layoffs they would have wanted to do anyway

It's a simple formula. Layoffs because of market conditions or company health = stock price go down. Layoffs because "AI took the jobs" = stock price go up.