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LLM Inevitabilism

(tomrenner.com)
1619 points SwoopsFromAbove | 1 comments | 15 Jul 25 04:35 UTC | HN request time: 0.208s | source
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JimmaDaRustla ◴[15 Jul 25 13:50 UTC] No.44571157[source]▶
The author seems to imply that the "framing" of an argument is done so in bad faith in order to win an argument but only provides one-line quotes where there is no contextual argument.

This tactic by the author is a straw-man argument - he's framing the position of tech leaders and our acceptance of it as the reason AI exists, instead of being honest, which is that they were simply right in their predictions: AI was inevitable.

The IT industry is full of pride and arrogance. We deny the power of AI and LLMs. I think that's fair, I welcome the pushback. But the real word the IT crowd needs to learn is "denialism" - if you still don't see how LLMs is changing our entire industry, you haven't been paying attention.

Edit: Lots of denialists using false dichotomy arguments that my opinion is invalid because I'm not producing examples and proof. I guess I'll just leave this: https://tools.simonwillison.net/

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jdiff ◴[15 Jul 25 14:01 UTC] No.44571266[source]▶
The IT industry is also full of salesmen and con men, both enjoy unrealistic exaggeration. Your statements would not be out of place 20 years ago when the iPhone dropped. Your statements would not be out of place 3 years ago before every NFT went to 0. LLMs could hit an unsolvably hard wall next year and settle into a niche of utility. AI could solve a lengthy list of outstanding architectural and technical problems and go full AGI next year.

If we're talking about changing the industry, we should see some clear evidence of that. But despite extensive searching myself and after asking many proponents (feel free to jump in here), I can't find a single open source codebase, actively used in production, and primarily maintained and developed with AI. If this is so foundationally groundbreaking, that should be a clear signal. Personally, I would expect to see an explosion of this even if the hype is taken extremely conservatively. But I can't even track down a few solid examples. So far my searching only reveals one-off pull requests that had to be laboriously massaged into acceptability.

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1. ToucanLoucan ◴[15 Jul 25 15:01 UTC] No.44571865[source]▶
> The IT industry is also full of salesmen and con men, both enjoy unrealistic exaggeration. Your statements would not be out of place 20 years ago when the iPhone dropped. Your statements would not be out of place 3 years ago before every NFT went to 0. LLMs could hit an unsolvably hard wall next year and settle into a niche of utility.

Not only is that a could, I'd argue they already are. The huge new "premier" models are barely any better than the big ticket ones that really kicked the hype into overdrive.

* Using them as a rubber duck that provides suggestions back for IT problems and coding is huge, I will fully cosign that, but it is not even remotely worth what OpenAI is valued at or would need to charge for it to make it profitable, let alone pay off it's catastrophic debt. Meanwhile every other application is a hard meh.

* The AI generated video ads just look like shit and I'm sorry, call me a luddite if you will, but I just think objectively less of companies that leverage AI video/voices/writing in their advertisements. It looks cheap, in the same way dollar store products have generic, crappy packaging, and makes me less willing to open my wallet. That said I won't be shocked at all if that sticks around and bolsters valuations, because tons of companies worldwide have been racing to the bottom for decades now.

* My employer has had a hard NO AI policy for both vetting candidates and communicating with them for our human resources contracting and we've fired one who wouldn't comply. It just doesn't work, we can tell when they're using bots to review resumes because applicants get notably, measurably worse.

LLMs are powerful tools that have a place, but there is no fucking UNIVERSE where they are the next iPhone that silicon valley is utterly desperate for. They just aren't.