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LLM Inevitabilism

(tomrenner.com)
1616 points SwoopsFromAbove | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.208s | 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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alonsonic ◴[] No.44570711[source]
I'm confused with your second point. LLM companies are not making any money from current models? Openai generates 10b USD ARR and has 100M MAUs. Yes they are running at a loss right now but that's because they are racing to improve models. If they stopped today to focus on optimization of their current models to minimize operating cost and monetizing their massive user base you think they don't have a successful business model? People use this tools daily, this is inevitable.
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dbalatero ◴[] No.44570964[source]
They might generate 10b ARR, but they lose a lot more than that. Their paid users are a fraction of the free riders.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/openai-is-a-systemic-risk-to-the...

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Cthulhu_ ◴[] No.44571830[source]
That's fixable, a gradual adjusting of the free tier will happen soon enough once they stop pumping money into it. Part of this is also a war of attrition though, who has the most money to keep a free tier the longest and attract the most people. Very familiar strategy for companies trying to gain market share.
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sc68cal ◴[] No.44572182[source]
That assumes that everyone is willing to pay for it. I don't think that's an assumption that will be true.
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1. ebiester ◴[] No.44572986[source]
Consider the general research - in all, it doesn't eliminate people, but let's say it shakes out to speeding up developers 10% over all tasks. (That includes creating tickets, writing documentation, unblocking bugs, writing scripts, building proof of concepts, and more rote refactoring, but does not solve the harder problems or stop us from doing the hard work of software engineering that doesn't involve lines of code.)

That means that it's worth up to 10% of a developer's salary as a tool. And more importantly, smaller teams go faster, so it might be worth that full 10%.

Now, assume other domains end up similar - some less, some more. So, that's a large TAM.