4 ms·

I cannot imagine what it would be like to have such overconfidence in my own knowledge and imagination to think it was obvious to me what LLMs' primary usefulne

• Exoristos 1y ago
  Usefulness as of today, approximately. That is, that the massive interest and investment is not all speculation.
  • kragen 1y ago
    The massive interest and investment is about its usefulness (or profitability) in the future, not as of today, almost by definition! It's necessarily mostly speculative.
• forgetfreeman 1y ago
  This seems like a lack of perspective on your part. Why would AIs primary usefulness be substantially different than any other software? Steam engines don't really factor into this.
• GolfPopper 1y ago
  Steam engines move stuff. That was obvious from the start. How that was applied became complex beyond imagination. LLMs cheaply produce plausible and persuasive BS. This is what they've done from the start. Exactly how that ability will be applied we don't know, but it doesn't take a lot to see that the Venn Diagram of 'cheap & effective BS' and 'public good' does not have a great deal of overlap.
  • foxglacier 1y ago
    I guess you weren't around in the 2000's when every kid in school was taught not to trust information from random internet sources. Even Wikipedia was often not allowed by teachers as a reference, and probably still isn't. Society faced this problem already with the internet in general. Were or are you opposed to the internet in general, and especially the freedom for random people to publish what they like?
    • AngryData 1y ago
      Wikipedia is and never will be a good reference source, regardless of the accuracy of the information on it, because it is an encyclopedia. Everything on it is secondhand of the primary source. What you can be referencing is the primary sources that wikipedia is sourced from though.
  • inglor_cz 1y ago
    It wasn't obvious in 1780 if you could build a steam engine that would be reliable and small enough to move itself, for example. Or if you can produce enough steel rails to build a real railway network. It took 50 years of progress to find out that steam-powered railway was indeed viable. (For a modern parallel - we haven't built a small, portable nuclear reactor ever. The closest you get are nuclear-powered submarines, but no nuclear trucks.)
• alfalfasprout 1y ago
  What a nonsensical argument. Improved locomotion was an obvious result of steam engines. What followed from that could be reasonably predicted. With LLMs, suddenly we have a tool that can generate misinformation on a scale like never before. Messaging can be controlled. Given that the main drivers of this technology (zuck, nadella, altman, and others) have chosen to make befellows of autocrats what follows is surely not a surprise.
  • fuelled6532 1y ago
    Well, for the first 90 or so years, they were mostly used for draining water from mines. The locomotion thing might not have been as obvious at the time as it is in hindsight.
    • lupusreal 1y ago
      The water from mines was then put into canals, which floated canal boats loaded with coal from the mines into towns. This cheap energy allowed the populations of towns to grow, and soon later powered factories in those towns. The trains thing did come a bit later, but the steam engines were already causing a revolution.
      • fuelled6532 1y ago
        That's funny. Also nonsense. The canal boats were replaced by steam railways. A hundred years later. The water in the canals came from regular sources, by gravity. It took decades to even get steam engines that turned a shaft (as opposed to rocking a beam up and down).
        • lupusreal 1y ago
          You're confused and not even contradicting what I said. Read it again. Steam engines (which rocked a bar, not rotated a shaft) were put to use draining water out of coal mines. They were powered by that same coal, and the water they pumped out was put right into the canals (where else would you put it?). This made coal cheaper, which in turn allowed more people to move from the country to the cities because cities were no longer reliant on firewood. Growing urban populations was demanded and supported by growing industry in those cities. My whole point is that all of these factors complimented each other, they created a feedback loop that was the industrial revolution. Trains came later, after the industrial revolution was already well underway. That's what I said already.
• mindslight 1y ago
  War. The first application of new technology is always war. In the year x780 and today.
  • GeoAtreides 1y ago
    No, the first application of steam engines was pumping water from deep coal mines
    • mindslight 1y ago
      And kragen's comment wasn't even about the first application. Forgive me for being cynical while an American city is being attacked by the American military to the sound of cheers, seemingly because people have just had it too good. We just don't fucking learn.
  • inglor_cz 1y ago
    That is too simplistic. Plenty of new technology saw civilian use first, such as photography, X-ray, telephone, moveable type, smartphones or smallpox inoculation. Even FPV drones were mostly an over-the-counter toy for nerds until 2022. Now civilian use only, that would be different, few technologies are civilian-only, with no possible military use. But war as the first use is not as frequent case as you assert.
• Havoc 1y ago
  To be fair most technological leaps tend to be turned towards coercing others pretty fast so pretty safe bet