LLM Inevitabilism

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/

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.

> I can't find a single open source codebase, actively used in production, and primarily maintained and developed with AI

This popular repo (35.6k stars) documents the fraction of code written by LLM for each release since about a year ago. The vast majority of releases since version 0.47 (now at 0.85) had the majority of their code written by LLM (average code written by aider per release since then is about 65%.)

https://github.com/Aider-AI/aider

https://github.com/Aider-AI/aider/releases