LLM Inevitabilism

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.

> “most people agree that the output is trite and unpleasant to consume”

That is a such a wild claim. People like the output of LLMs so much that ChatGPT is the fastest growing app ever. It and other AI apps like Perplexity are now beginning to challenge Google’s search dominance.

Sure, probably not a lot of people would go out and buy a novel or collection of poetry written by ChatGPT. But that doesn’t mean the output is unpleasant to consume. It pretty undeniably produces clear and readable summaries and explanations.

...I do wonder what percent of ChatGPT usage is just students cheating on their homework, though.

Neal Stephenson has a recent post that covers some of this. Also links to teachers talking about many students just putting all their work into chatgpt and turning it in.

https://nealstephenson.substack.com/p/emerson-ai-and-the-for...

He links to Reddit, a site where most people are aggressively against AI. So, not necessarily a representative slice of reality.

He links to a post about a teacher’s expertise with students using AI. The fact that it’s on Reddit is irrelevant.

If you're going to champion something that comes from a place of extreme political bias, you could at least acknowledge it.