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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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nyarlathotep_ ◴[] No.44570870[source]
I do wonder where in the cycle this all is given that we've now seen yet another LLM/"Agentic" VSCode fork.

I'm genuinely surprised that Code forks and LLM cli things are seemingly the only use case that's approached viability. Even a year ago, I figured there'd be something else that's emerged by now.

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alonsonic ◴[] No.44570990{3}[source]
But there are a ton of LLM powered products in the market.

I have a friend in finance that uses LLM powered products for financial analysis, he works in a big bank. Just now anthropic released a product to compete in this space.

Another friend in real estate uses LLM powered lead qualifications products, he runs marketing campaigns and the AI handles the initial interaction via email or phone and then ranks the lead in their crm.

I have a few friends that run small businesses and use LLM powered assistants to manage all their email comms and agendas.

I've also talked with startups in legal and marketing doing very well.

Coding is the theme that's talked about the most in HN but there are a ton of startups and big companies creating value with LLMs

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1. Jach ◴[] No.44572626{4}[source]
Yup. Lots of products in the education space. Even doctors are using LLMs, while talking with patients. All sorts of teams are using the adjacent products for image and (increasingly) video generation. Translation freelancers have been hit somewhat hard because LLMs do "good enough" quite a bit better than old google translate.

Coding is relevant to the HN bubble, and as tech is the biggest driver of the economy it's no surprise that tech-related AI usages will also be the biggest causes of investment, but it really is used in quite a lot of places out there already that aren't coding related at all.