←back to thread

LLM Inevitabilism

(tomrenner.com)
1616 points SwoopsFromAbove | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
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.

replies(26): >>44568145 #>>44568416 #>>44568799 #>>44569151 #>>44569734 #>>44570520 #>>44570663 #>>44570711 #>>44570870 #>>44571050 #>>44571189 #>>44571513 #>>44571570 #>>44572142 #>>44572326 #>>44572360 #>>44572627 #>>44572898 #>>44573137 #>>44573370 #>>44573406 #>>44574774 #>>44575820 #>>44577486 #>>44577751 #>>44577911 #
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).
replies(8): >>44568647 #>>44568953 #>>44568969 #>>44569090 #>>44569602 #>>44569667 #>>44570029 #>>44570985 #
dvfjsdhgfv ◴[] No.44570985[source]
> Developers haven't even started extracting the value of LLMs with agent architectures yet.

For sure there is a portion of developers who don't care about the future, are not interested in current developements and just live as before hoping nothing will change. But the rest already gave it a try and realized tools like Claude Code can give excellent results for small codebases to fail miserably at more complex tasks with the net result being negative as you get a codebase you don't understand, with many subtle bugs and inconsistencies created over a few days you will need weeks to discover and fix.

replies(1): >>44571363 #
eric-burel ◴[] No.44571363[source]
This is a bit developer centric, I am much more impressed by the opportunities I see in consulting rather than applying LLMs to dev tasks. And I am still impressed by the code it can output eventhough we are still in the funny intern stage in this area.
replies(1): >>44573813 #
1. Gormo ◴[] No.44573813[source]
> I am much more impressed by the opportunities I see in consulting rather than applying LLMs to dev tasks.

I expect there'll be a lot of consulting work in the near future in cleanup and recovery from LLM-generated disasters.