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Controversial take: LLMs are the first time in a while that I have felt like emerging technology trends is doing something cool and adding value. For the past
by dghlsakjg 2y ago
Controversial take: LLMs are the first time in a while that I have felt like emerging technology trends is doing something cool and adding value.
For the past 8-10 years it has all felt like a bunch of apps that just aim to be mediocre middlemen/gig economy brokers with bad customer service.
- itishappy 2y ago> a bunch of apps that just aim to be mediocre middlemen/gig economy brokers with bad customer service Isn't this the new LLM playbook?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dghlsakjg 2y agoHow so? I pay Claude/ChatGPT trivial amounts of money for metered API access to their models, and they in turn provide it to me. Middlemen/marketplace models like "Uber for x" or "Etsy for x" or "Betterhelp for x" is a totally different business model.
- itishappy 2y agoI had in mind the surge in LLM chat support and the surge in thin ChatGPT wrappers with a custom system prompt. Claude/ChatGPT do seem useful, "an AI companion for Microsoft Paint" less so.
- vasco 2y agoAnd now we will have mediocre middlemen/gig economy brokers with bad customer service performed by AI agents that you can summarize with chatgpt and automatically reply back to. Progress!!
- otabdeveloper4 2y ago> doing something cool Yes. > and adding value. No. The only breakthrough innovation LLMs gave us is the ability to speedrun the making of racist pictures. Not sure the world really benefited.
- abixb 2y agoI agree. A good chunk of the tech trends in the last decade were indeed rent seeking, but silent revolution was happening in the transformers and the neural network architecture domain, which made today's products possible. And I'd wager that there are silent revolutions happening all across colossus that's the tech industry that will become apparent in the next decade. Jeff Bezos put it best during his recent interview at the 2024 NYTimes Dealbook Summit, "We're living in multiple golden ages at the same time." There's never been a better time to be alive.
- CuriouslyC 2y ago[flagged]
- TRiG_Ireland 2y agoThat's easy for a billionaire to say, isn't it? Jeff Bezos is not exactly a reliable narrator here. His business practices are built on exploitation and externalising his costs (such as the massive environmental damage).
- hypeatei 2y agoI agree about an abundance of apps, but what type of value are LLMs adding? It can sometimes be useful to input a more "human" search and have something get spit out but 60% of the time it completely lies to you. I'm talking about questions related to web specifications which are public documents. Section numbers, standards names, etc.. will be completely made up.
- jklinger410 2y ago> but 60% of the time it completely lies to you This is such an exhausting conversation
- hansonkd 2y agoi think when people say things like this it indicates that they tried LLMs in 2022 and solidified their opinion there. I had the same impression about the hallucinations 2 years ago. The reality is in at the end of 2024, you can get incredible value from LLMs. I've used copilot to code almost exclusively now for the past few months. Anyone still comparing it to text completion I feel is operating on completely out of date information either intentionally or unintentionally.
- beefnugs 2y agoWait do you expect people to retry every failed thing they have tried due to marketing lies every how often exactly?
- jklinger410 2y agoDo you expect the first iteration of every product to be perfect?
- dayjah 2y agoThis is a thin edge of the wedge issue, right? ChatGPT is pretty darn good for most things. I’ve used it extensively for the past 18 months and only in a few cases would I say it “completely lied to me”. My general rubric is: “would I trust someone on Reddit to correctly guide me on this”. If the answer is “yes” then ChatGPT is likely going to do well. If the volume on a particular subject is low / susceptible to false information then it’ll lie. Recently it lied hard about how to configure MikroTik routers. I lost many hours. But for a large construction project recently it completely balled out. Are you doing cutting edge / complicated stuff? Have you examples of where it lies?
- emptysea 2y agoHave you tried a Waymo yet? Honestly the coolest tech I’ve seen/used in ages Lots of engineering involved
- dghlsakjg 2y agoNo. Never even seen one, since I don't live in the US/California.
- zamadatix 2y agoI'd (generally) agree. About 5 minutes of using Flux, Claude or Suno would have provided more net new value than I've yet to get out of blockchain, self driving, gig brokers, metaverse, 5G, AR/VR, quantum computing, hyperloop, and whatever people were trying to make web3 be combined over the years. Not that I don't think all of these things will always perpetually fail to deliver (hell, if I had a chance to try Waymo already then self driving probably wouldn't be on the list), just the hype cycles were unrelated to when that delivery occurred (if ever). The hard part is, despite actually having some "real" value delivered, you still have to sort through the 99% of bullshit that comes along with it anyways.
- becquerel 2y agoI will personally say that if you ever get the chance, definitely try a Waymo. I did recently for the first time and it's a hell of an experience. You can very vividly imagine it being the future. I'm also going to stand up for AR/VR here. I'm in a long-distance relationship and me and my partner spend an hour or so in VRChat around two to three times a week. The power that has to reduce the badness of an LDR is well well well well worth the three hundred bucks I paid for a Quest. That and some of the golf games on it are fun.
- zamadatix 2y agoI am super stoked to try a Waymo when I'm in a city with one. It's hype failures have more to do with 10 years of hype about its public availability yet not being available to 99% of the world's population 10 years later. Hype is useless without the result. I've had an HTC Vive and an Oculus Rift 3 (Walkabout Mini Golf is one I tried!) and while I wouldn't try to argue NOBODY has found a use for it (somebody somewhere found uses for all of the things I mentioned, just not me and just not the majority of people like big new things are promised to) it never really ticked the "new value" box before they ended up in the closet for me.
- becquerel 2y agoThat's totally fair. The tech is only barely coming out of the enthusiast adopter phase and there's not a critical mass of content on there to keep most people putting on the headset daily. That and the ergonomics do still suck, even if I've mostly gotten used to them. I do think VR will make it, though - starting with the kids. Apparently Gorilla Tag broke 1.5 million players recently, and those are mostly under-15s. The next generation is going to have a strange relationship with computers.
- smokel 2y agoDon't forget the vast (and parallel) improvements in image processing.
- dylan604 2y agoyeah, we were definitely stagnant when the focus was on crypto
- TRiG_Ireland 2y agoThey're "adding" value they've stolen from artists and writers. It's an industry built on copyright infringement at a heroic scale.