46 ms·

LLM Inevitabilism

• waffletower 1y ago
  I was very much inspired by think about the future you want, and fight for it. It is inevitable that voting will eventually require competency tests. :D
• sandspar 1y ago
  I'm looking forward to meeting my ChatGPT. I believe that one day I will perceive it looking back at me. I expect that by then it may have read this very comment. If so, hello!
• delichon 1y ago
  If in 2009 you claimed that the dominance of the smartphone was inevitable, it would have been because you were using one and understood its power, not because you were reframing away our free choice for some agenda. In 2025 I don't think you can really be taking advantage of AI to do real work and still see its mass adaptation as evitable. It's coming faster and harder than any tech in history. As scary as that is we can't wish it away.
  • SV_BubbleTime 1y ago
    > It's coming faster and harder than any tech in history. True; but how is that not expected? We have more and more efficient communication than any point in history, this is a software solution with a very low bar to the building blocks and theory. Software should be expected to move faster and faster. I’m not sure who is wishing it away. No one wanted to wish away search engines, or dictionaries or advice from people who repeat things they read. It’s panic top to bottom on this topic. Surely there are some adults around that can just look at a new thing for what it is now and not what it could turn into in a fantasy future?
  • NBJack 1y ago
    Ironically, this is exactly the technique for arguing that the blog mentions. Remember the revolutionary, seemingly inevitable tech that was poised to rewrite how humans thought about transportation? The incredible amounts of hype, the secretive meetings disclosing the device, etc.? That turned out to be the self-balancing scooter known as a Segway?
    • HPsquared 1y ago
      1. The Segway had very low market penetration but a lot of PR. LLMs and diffusion models have had massive organic growth. 2. Segways were just ahead of their time: portable lithium-ion powered urban personal transportation is getting pretty big now.
      • jdiff 1y ago
        Massive, organic, and unprofitable. And as soon as it's no longer free, as soon as the VC funding can no longer sustain it, an enormous fraction of usage and users will all evaporate. The Segway always had a high barrier to entry. Currently for ChatGPT you don't even need an account, and everyone already has a Google account.
        • lumost 1y ago
          The free tiers might be tough to sustain, but it’s hard to imagine that they are that problematic for OpenAI et al. GPUs will become cheaper, and smaller/faster models will reach the same level of capability.
          • throwawayoldie 1y ago
            [citation needed]
            • jdiff 1y ago
              Eh, I kinda see what they're saying. They haven't become cheaper at all, but GPUs have increased in performance, and the amount of performance you get for each dollar spent has increased. Relative to its siblings, things have gotten worse. A GTX 970 could hit 60% of the performance of the full Titan X at 35% of the price. A 5070 hits 40% of a full 5090 for 27% of the price. That's overall less series-relative performance you're getting, for an overall increased price, by about $100 when adjusting for inflation. But if you have a fixed performance baseline you need to hit, as long as tech gets improving, things will eventually be cheaper for that baseline. As long as you aren't also trying to improve in a way that moves the baseline up. Which so far has been the only consistent MO of the AI industry.
  • godelski 1y ago
    If you told someone in 1950 that smartphones would dominate they wouldn't have a hard time believing you. Hell, they'd add it to sci-fi books and movies. That's because the utility of it is so clear. But if you told them about social media, I think the story would be different. Some would think it would be great, some would see it as dystopian, but neither would be right. We don't have to imagine, though. All three of these things have captured people's imaginations since before the 50's. It's just... AI has always been closer to imagined concepts of social media more than it has been to highly advanced communication devices.
    • energy123 1y ago
      > But if you told them about social media, I think the story would be different. It would be utopian, like how people thought of social media in the oughts. It's a common pattern through human history. People lack the imagination to think of unintended side effects. Nuclear physics leading to nuclear weapons. Trains leading to more efficient genocide. Media distribution and printing press leading to new types of propaganda and autocracies. Oil leading to global warming. IT leading to easy surveillance. Communism leading to famine. Some of that utopianism is wilful, created by the people with a self-interested motive in seeing that narrative become dominant. But most of it is just a lack of imagination. Policymakers taking the path of local least resistance, seeking to locally (in a temporal sense) appease, avoiding high-risk high-reward policy gambits that do not advance their local political ambitions. People being satisfied with easy just-so stories rather than humility and a recognition of the complexity and inherent uncertainty of reality. AI, and especially ASI, will probably be the same. The material upsides are obvious. The downsides harder to imagine and more speculative. Most likely, society will be presented with a fait accompli at a future date, where once the downsides are crystallized and real, it's already too late.
      • cwnyth 1y ago
        All of this is a pretty ignorant take on history. You don't think those who worked on the Manhattan Project knew the deadly potential of the atom bomb? And Communism didn't lead to famine - Soviet and Maoist policies did. Communism was immaterial to that. And it has nothing to do with utopianism. Trains were utopian? Really? It's just that new technology can be used for good things or bad things, and this goes back to when Grog invented the club. It's has zero bearing on this discussion. Your ending sentence is certainly correct: we aren't imagining the effects of AI enough, but all of your examples are not only unconvincing, they're easy ways to ignore what downsides of AI there might be. People can easily point to how trains have done a net positive in the world and walk away from your argument thinking AI is going to do the same.
  • troupo 1y ago
    Literally from the article --- start quote --- Anyone who sees the future differently to you can be brushed aside as “ignoring reality”, and the only conversations worth engaging are those that already accept your premise. --- end quote --- Mass adoption is not inevitable. Everyone will drop this "faster harder" tech like a hot potato when (not if) it fails to result in meaningful profits. Oh, there will be forced mass adoption alright. Have you tried Gemini? Have you? Gemini? Have you tried it? HAVE YOU? HAVE YOU TRIED GEMINI?!!!
    • _carbyau_ 1y ago
      Or Copilot. It's actions like this that are making me think seriously about converting my gaming PC to Linux - where I don't have to eat the corporate overlord shit.
      • throwawayoldie 1y ago
        Do it. Proton is really, really, really good now.
    • boogieknite 1y ago
      what i like about your last jokey comment is that discussions about ai, both good and bad, are incredibly boring went to some tech meetups earlier this year and when the topic came up, one of the organizers politely commented to me that pretty much everything said about ai has been said. the only discussions worth having are introductions to the tools then leaving an individual to decide for themselves whether or not its useful to them. those introductions should be brief and discussions of the applications are boring back in the bar scene days discussing work, religion, and politics were social faux pas. im sensing ai is on that list now
      • troupo 1y ago
        > what i like about your last jokey comment We use probably all of Google's products at work, and sadly the comment is not even a joke. Every single product and page still shows a Gemini upsell even after you've already dismissed it fifteen times
  • mekael 1y ago
    We might not be able to wish it away, but we can, as a society, decide to not utilize it and even actively eradicate it. I honestly believe that llm's/ai are a net negative to society and need to be ripped out root and stem. If tomorrow all of us decided to do that, nothing bad would happen, and we'd all be ok.
  • darepublic 1y ago
    I still can't make some of the things in my imagination so I'm going to keep coding, using whatever is at my disposal including LLMs if I must.
  • rafaelmn 1y ago
    If you claimed that AI was inevitable in the 80s and invested, or claimed people would be inevitably moving to VR 10 years ago - you would be shit out of luck. Zuck is still burning billions on it with nothing to show for it and a bad outlook. Even Apple tried it and hilariously missed the demand estimate. The only potential bailout for this tech is AR, but thats still years away from consumer market and widespread adoption, and probably will have very little to do with shit that is getting built for VR, because its a completely different experience. But I am sure some of the tech/UX will carry over. Tesla stock has been riding on the self driving robo-taxies meme for a decade now ? How many Teslas are earning passive income while the owner is at work ? Cherrypicking the stuff that worked in retrospect is stupid, plenty of people swore in the inevitability of some tech with billions in investment, and industry bubbles that look mistimed in hindsight.
    • gbalduzzi 1y ago
      None of the "failed" innovations you cited were even near the adoption rate of current LLMs. As much as I don't like it, this is the actual difference. LLMs are already good enough to be a very useful and widely spread technology. They can become even better, but even if they don't there are plenty of use cases for them. VR/AR, AI in the 80s and Tesla at the beginning were technology that someone believe could become widespread, but still weren't at all. That's a big difference
      • weatherlite 1y ago
        > They can become even better, but even if they don't there are plenty of use cases for them. If they don't become better we are left with a big but not huge change. Productivity gains of around 10 to 20 percent in most knowledge work. That's huge for sure but in my eyes the internet and pc revolution before that were more transformative than that. If LLMs become better, get so good they replace huge chunks of knowledge workers and then go out to the physical world then yeah ...that would be the fastest transformation of the economy in history imo.
        • TeMPOraL 1y ago
  • p0w3n3d 1y ago
    Back in 1950s nuclear tech was seen as inevitable. Many people had even bought plates made from uranium glass. They still glow somewhere in my parents' cabinet or maybe I broke them
    • moffkalast 1y ago
      Well there are like 500 nuclear powerplants online today supplying 10% of the world's power, so it wasn't too far off. Granted it's not the Mr. Fusion in every car as they imagined it back then. We probably also won't have ASI taking over the world like some kind of vengeful comic book villain as people imagine it today.
      • eddythompson80 1y ago
        Oh boy. People were expecting nuclear toothbrushes, nuclear school backpacks, nuclear stoves and nuclear fridges, nuclear grills, nuclear plates, nuclear medicine, nuclear sunglasses and nuclear airplanes. Saying well, we got 500 nuclear power plants is like saying “well, we got excellent `npx create-app` style templates from AI. That’s pretty huge impact. I don’t know a single project post 2030 that didn’t start as an AI scaffolded project. That’s pretty huge dude”
        • moffkalast 1y ago
          Ngl I do feel a bit robbed about those toothbrushes, where's my uranium battery sonicare that never needs to charge?
    • umeshunni 1y ago
      The comparison is apt because nuclear would have been inevitable if it wasn't for doomerism and public opinion turning against it after 3 mile Island / Chernobyl
  • afavour 1y ago
    Feels somewhat like a self fulfilling prophecy though. Big tech companies jam “AI” in every product crevice they can find… “see how widely it’s used? It’s inevitable!” I agree that AI is inevitable. But there’s such a level of groupthink about it at the moment that everything is manifested as an agentic text box. I’m looking forward to discovering what comes after everyone moves on from that.
    • XenophileJKO 1y ago
      We haven't even barely extracted the value from the current generation of SOTA models. I would estimate less then 0.1% of the possible economic benefit is currently extracted, even if the tech effectively stood still. That is what I find so wild about the current conversation and debate. I have claude code toiling away building my personal organization software right now that uses LLMs to take unstructured input and create my personal plans/project/tasks/etc.
      • WD-42 1y ago
        I keep hearing this over and over. Some llm toiling away coding personal side projects, and utilities. Source code never shared, usually because it’s “too specific to my needs”. This is the code version of slop. When someone uses an agent to increase their productivity by 10x in a real, production codebase that people actually get paid to work on, that will start to validate the hype. I don’t think we’ve seen any evidence of it, in fact we’ve seen the opposite.
        • XenophileJKO 1y ago
          :| I'm an engineer of 30+ years. I think I know good and bad quality. You can't "vibe code" good quality, you have to review the code. However it is like having a team of 20 Junior Engineers working. If you know how to steer a group of engineers, then you can create high quality code by reviewing the code. But sure, bury your head in the sand and don't learn how to use this incredibly powerful tool. I don't care. I just find it surprising that some people have such a myopic perspective. It is really the same kind of thing.. but the model is "smarter" then a junior engineer usually. You can say something like "hmm.. I think an event bus makes sense here" Then the LLM will do it in 5 seconds. The problem is that there are certain behavioral biases that require active reminding (though I think some MCP integration work might resolve most of them, but this is just based on the current Claude Code and Opus/Sonnet 4 models)
  • mattigames 1y ago
    For the way you speak you seem to be fairly certain that they still gonna need you as it's user, that they aren't going to find a better monetization than selling it to people like you (or even small companies in general), I wouldn't be so sure, remember we are talking about the machine that is growing with the aim of being able to do do every single white-collar job.
    • mekael 1y ago
      And with everyone constantly touting robotics as the next next frontier, every blue collar job as well.
  • mbgerring 1y ago
    I’ve tried to use AI for “real work” a handful of times and have mostly come away disappointed, unimpressed, or annoyed that I wasted my time. Given the absolutely insane hard resource requirements for these systems that are kind of useful, sometimes, in very limited contexts, I don’t believe its adoption is inevitable. Maybe one of the reasons for that is that I work in the energy industry and broadly in climate tech. I am painfully aware of how much we need to do with energy in the coming decades to avoid civilizational collapse, and how difficult all of that will be, without adding all of these AI data centers into the mix. Without several breakthroughs in one or more hard engineering disciplines, the mass adoption of AI is not currently physically possible.
    • dheera 1y ago
      That's how people probably felt about the first cars, the first laptops, the first <anything>. People like you grumbled when their early car broke down in the middle of a dirt road in the boondocks and they had to eat grass and shoot rabbits until the next help arrived. "My horse wouldn't have broken down", they said. Technologies mature over time.
      • mbgerring 1y ago
        We actually don’t know whether or not meaningful performance gains with LLMs are available using current approaches, and we do know that there are hard physical limits to electricity generation. Yes, technologies mature over time. The history of most AI approaches since the 60s is a big breakthrough followed by diminishing returns. I have not seen any credible argument that this time is different.
      • ezst 1y ago
        We have been in the phase of diminishing returns for years with LLMs now. There is no more data to train them on. The hallucinations are baked in at a fundamental level and they have no ability to emulate "reasoning" past what's already in their training data. This is not a matter of opinion.
      • Disposal8433 1y ago
  • seydor 1y ago
    they said the same about VR glasses, about cryptocurrency ...
    • osti 1y ago
      If you are seriously equating these two with AI, then you have horrible judgements and should learn to think critically, but unfortunately for you, I don't think critical thinking can be learned despite what people say. Note that I'm not even going to bother arguing against your point and instead resort to personal attacks,because I believe it would be a waste of time to argue against people with poor judgment.
      • deleted 1y ago
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      • eddythompson80 1y ago
        You're significantly stupider than you think you are. Notice how I did that too?
  • bgwalter 1y ago
    Smartphones are different. People really wanted them since the relatively primitive Nokia Communicator. "AI" was introduced as an impressive parlor trick. People like to play around, so it quickly got popular. Then companies started force-feeding it by integrating it into every existing product, including the gamification and bureaucratization of programming. Most people except for the gamers and plagiarists don't want it. Games and programming fads can fall out of fashion very fast.
    • gonzric1 1y ago
      Chatgpt Has 800 million weekly active users. That's roughly 10% of the planet. I get that it's not the panacea some people want us to believe it is, but you don't have to deny reality just because you don't like it.
      • bgwalter 1y ago
        There are all sorts of numbers floating around: https://www.theverge.com/openai/640894/chatgpt-has-hit-20-million-paid-subscribers https://www.theverge.com/openai/640894/chatgpt-has-hit-20-mi... This one claims 20m paying subscribers, which is not a lot. Mr. Beast has 60m views on a single video. A lot of weekly active users will use it once a week, and a large part of that may be "hate users" who want to see how bad/boring it is, similar to "hatewatching" on YouTube.
        • famouswaffles 1y ago
          >This one claims 20m paying subscribers, which is not a lot. It is for a B2C with $20 as its lowest price point. >A lot of weekly active users will use it once a week That's still a lot of usage. >and a large part of that may be "hate users" who want to see how bad/boring it is, similar to "hatewatching" on YouTube. And they're doing this every week consistently ? Sorry but that's definitely not a 'large part' of usage.
      • Gigachad 1y ago
        Sure, because it's free. I doubt most users of LLMs would want to even pay $1/month for them.
  • Roark66 1y ago
    Exactly. Anyone who has learned to use these tools to your ultimate advantage (not just short term perceived one, but actually) knows their value. This is why I've been extremely suspicious of the monopolisation of the LLM services by single business/country. They may well be loosing billions on training huge models now. But once the average work performance shifts up sufficiently so as to leave "non AI enhanced" by the wayside we will see huge price increases and access to these AI tools being used as geopolitics leverage. Oh, you do not want to accept "the deal" where our country can do anything in your market and you can do nothing? Perhaps we put export controls on GPT5 against your country. And from then on its as if they disconnected you from the Internet. For this reason alone local AI is extremely important and certain people will do anything possible to lock it in a datacenter (looking at you Nvidia).
    • player1234 1y ago
      It's weird noone can measure and show us the numbers of this ultimate advantage. Is "ultimate advantage" in the room right now?
  • ludicrousdispla 1y ago
    Except there is a perverse dynamic in that the more AI/LLM is used, the less it will be used.
  • v3xro 1y ago
    While we can't wish it away we can shun it, educate people why it shouldn't be used, and sabotage efforts to included it in all parts of society.
  • teeray 1y ago
    > If in 2009… …is exactly inevitablist framing. This claims perfect knowledge of the future based on previous uncertain knowledge of the future (which is now certain). You could have been making the same claims about the inevitability of sporks in the late 19th century and how cutlery drawers should adapt to the inevitable single-utensil future.
• deleted 1y ago
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• mlsu 1y ago
  I hate AI. I'm so sick of it. I read a story about 14 year olds that are adopting AI boyfriends. They spend 18 hours a day in conversation with chatbots. Their parents are worried because they are withdrawing from school and losing their friends. I hate second guessing emails that I've read, wondering if my colleagues are even talking to me or if they are using AI. I hate the idea that AI will replace my job. Even if it unlocks "economic value" -- what does that even mean? We'll live in fucking blade runner but at least we'll all have a ton of money? I agree, nobody asked what I wanted. But if they did I'd tell them, I don't want it, I don't want any of it. Excuse me, I'll go outside now and play with my dogs and stare at a tree.
  • HPsquared 1y ago
    Just remember that machines already do most of the work. Nobody ploughs fields anymore.
    • dilawar 1y ago
      Those machines unlocked more work, different work, that led to better paying jobs! I am all up for AI if it leads to "better" work and jobs but cutting jobs to cut cost sound like a race to bottom!! Are AI time /cost savings going to help me pursue creative hobbies, open source, help my community without worrying about livelihood then great. If it is a means to make rich people richer by making most of us worse off, maybe we should stop and think for a while? There may be a risk here that a zero/negative-sum game is advertised as a positive-sum game (e.g war).
      • _carbyau_ 1y ago
        Do we have reasons why AI won't do the same "unlocked more work, different work, that led to better paying jobs" ? One of the issues with [a change] is that some like it and some don't - but is there any reason to believe that society will get worse as a result? My only real concern is meritocracy. It is hard enough already, but now rich kids can literally buy intelligence?
        • deleted 1y ago
• paradite 1y ago
  I think you are confusing "I don't like it" with "It's not going to happen". Just because you don't like it, it doesn't mean it's not going to happen. Observe the world without prejudice. Think rationally without prejudice.
  • mrtesthah 1y ago
    Things “happen” in human history only because humans make them happen. If enough humans do or don’t want something to happen, then they can muster the collective power to achieve it. The unstated corollary in this essay is that venture capital and oligarchs do not get to define our future simply because they have more money.
    • _carbyau_ 1y ago
      > do not get to define our future simply because they have more money I don't like it, but it seems that more money is exactly why they get to define our future.
      • mrtesthah 1y ago
        I refer you again to the essay; it's not inevitable that those with substantially more money than us should get to dominate us and define our future. They are but a tiny minority, and if/when enough of us see that future as not going our way, we can and will collectively withdraw our consent for the social and economic rules and structures which enable those oligarchs.
        • _carbyau_ 1y ago
          It is possible to have a society wide revolution. French revolution, Iranian revolution and I'm sure a bunch of others throughout history. Even the good revolutions are NOT NICE and the outcomes are not guaranteed.
    • Sabinus 1y ago
      Would you say the industrial revolution would have been able to be stopped by enough humans not wanting to achieve it? >The unstated premise of this essay is that venture capital and oligarchs do not get to define our future simply because they have more money. AI would progress without them. Not as fast, but it would. In my mind the inevitability of technological progress comes from our competition with each other and general desire do work more easily and effectively. The rate of change will increase with more resources dedicated to innovation, but people will always innovate.
• p0w3n3d 1y ago
  If someone invested a lot of money in something, they probably are convinced that something is inevitable. Otherwise they would not invest their money. However, sometimes they may be a little bit helping their luck
• asdev 1y ago
  2026 will be the year that defines AI, and whether it lives up to the hype
  • drchickensalad 1y ago
    Isn't that what was said about the next year, the last two years?
• aftergibson 1y ago
  There's plenty of examples where important people framed an inevitable future and then it didn't pan out. Somewhat objective proof of "progress" will inevitably win out, yes inevitable framing might help sell the vision a bit, for now, but it won't be the inevitabism that causes it to succeed but its inherit value towards "progress". The definition of "progress" being endlessly more productive humans at the cost of everything else.
• __d 1y ago
  The majority of the comments here reflect an acceptance of or even an enthusiasm for an LLM-using future. An embracing of the technology regardless of its downsides. A disregard of those who question whether it’s all a desirable future. I’d have thought perhaps we’d learn the lessons of eg. smart phones, social media, cloud, VR, crypto, NFTs, etc, and think a little more deeply about where and how we want to go as a society and species beyond just adopting the latest hype.
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• visarga 1y ago
  > I’m certainly not convinced that they’re the future I want. But what I’m most certain of is that we have choices about what our future should look like, and how we choose to use machines to build it. While I must admit we have some choice here, it is limited. No matter what, there will be models of language, we know how they work, there is no turning back from it. We might wish many things but one thing we can't do is to revert time to a moment when these discoveries did not exist.
  • th0ma5 1y ago
    We have no idea how they work. We know the training making a model and generating things from it, but the thing we want from it being an Oracle or something, we have no idea how that works at the level of the specific knowledge it generates. And when we dig into it doesn't reveal anything very interesting. The premise of put everything digital in a pile and see if makes something like a god is a neat idea, but the god is literally playing dice.
• jolt42 1y ago
  It's as inevitable as the cotton gin, which ironically I just saw some news on how the Chinese continue to improve it, which will be the same for AI.
• tehjoker 1y ago
  This is the same strategy Hillary Clinton supporters tried to use too. The author is right, it's just a framing technique. We can choose the future we want.
  • thinkingemote 1y ago
    John Gray the philosopher expands on this by saying that Progress as a whole is thought of as inevitable. The last couple of years I think have shown the cracks in this thinking. Western notions of progress, the liberal movement to increase and improve humanity is actually something to be activiely fought for, it's not something that will organically happen. It's not a human right. But that's what we are told: "the right side of history" is the framing. People today think progress is a natural thing. That it's inevitable that human rights increase, the individual liberty increases, that my self expression becomes more secure with time, naturally. We still see this inevitablism in culture and politics. That the political inevitablists don't see the history and origins of progress and liberalism (e.g. partly Christianity) is part of the diagnosis. We might see parallels with AI. We might see anti-AI stances equated to those who want to take away personal autonomy (e.g. "to claim I cannot have an AI boyfriend means you are advocating for violence against me"). One has to actively defend and campaign for these things and not fall into a sense of it's all natural and inevitable. Inevitability is a kind of psychological blindness. It's to be encouraged in some as it does actually work but it can give some pain when sight is restored.
• keithwhor 1y ago
  It’s also possible for LLMs to be inevitable, generate massive amounts of wealth and still be mostly fluff in terms of objective human progress. The major change from my perspective is new consumer behavior: people simply enjoy talking to and building with LLMs. This fact alone is generating a lot (1) new spend and (2) content to consume. The most disappointing outcome of the LLM era would be increasing the amount of fake, meaningless busywork humans have to do just to sift through LLM generated noise just to find signal. And indeed there are probably great products to be built that help you do just that; and there is probably a lot of great signal to be found! But the motion to progress ratio concerns me. For example, I love Cursor. Especially for boilerplating. But SOTA models with tons of guidance can still not reliably implement features in my larger codebases within the timeframe it would take me to do it myself. Test-time compute and reasoning makes things even slower.
  • ehnto 1y ago
    > For example, I love Cursor. Especially for boilerplating. But SOTA models with tons of guidance can still not reliably implement features in my larger codebases within the timeframe it would take me to do it myself. Test-time compute and reasoning makes things even slower. Importantly it also takes you guiding it to complete the task. Meaning you still need to pay a human and the cost of the LLM, so it's slower and a bit more expensive. I am not convinced either that AI working on complex programming tasks could be guided by less skilled devs, meaning you still need to pay the skilled dev. In my experience so far, the cost analysis doesn't work for more complex application development. Even if the cost of the LLM was free it is often wasting the skilled dev's time. All these metrics will change over the years and maybe the math works out eventually, or in specific circumstances, and I forsee LLMs assisting in development into the future. I am not seeing the cataclysmic wholesale replacement of humans in the workforce some are predicting, at this stage.
• mbgerring 1y ago
  Wasn’t crypto supposed to have replaced fiat currency by now, or something?
  • bee_rider 1y ago
    I never really get the cryptocurrency comparison. AI has an application beyond grift. Like, even if they stopped developing it now, an AI “style hints” in the style of spellcheck and grammar rule check would be a no-brainer as a thing to add to an office suite. The valuations are totally and completely nuts. But, LLMs have little legitimate applications in a way that cryptocurrencies never will.
    • mbgerring 1y ago
      Lots of crypto boosters said that crypto had use cases beyond grift and that anyone who couldn’t see that was a moron.
      • nmfisher 1y ago
        Millions of people are using (and paying for) LLMs for their daily work. The number of people using crypto as an actual currency is a rounding error by comparison. There's definitely similarities when it comes to the wave of hype and greed behind them both, but the fundamentals really are completely different.
        • lucianbr 1y ago
          I work at a company with hundreds of thousands of employees, and they're mandating the use of AI, monitoring it, and pushing like crazy. Like their life depends on it. You get threatening emails if several days pass without you using AI. Now tell me again what the usage numbers mean in resepect to usefulness.
          • aksosoakbab 1y ago
            This is a huge red flag imo. Mandated usage and yet nothing to show for it. To top it off Sam Altman is a known dishonest actor (and has already shown his true colors at openai). AI is here to stay and has some truly cool uses. But there’s far too many snake oil salesman involved currently.
• Animats 1y ago
  There may be an "LLM Winter" as people discover that LLMs can't be trusted to do anything. Look for frantic efforts by companies to offload responsibility for LLM mistakes onto consumers. We've got to have something that has solid "I don't know" and "I don't know how to do this" outputs. We're starting to see reports of LLM usage having negative value for programmers, even though they think it's helping. Too much effort goes into cleaning up LLM messes.
  • mtlmtlmtlmtl 1y ago
    Yeah, I can't wait for this slop generation hype circlejerk to end either. But in terms of being used by people who don't care about quality, like scammers, spammers, blogspam grifters, people trying to affect elections by poisoning the narrative, people shitting out crappy phone apps, videos, music, "art" to grift some ad revenue, gen AI is already the perfect product. Once the people who do care wake up and realise gen AI is basically useless to them, the internet will already be dead, we'll be in a post-truth, post-art, post-skill, post-democracy world and the only people whose lives will have meaningfully improved are some billionaires in california who added some billions to their net worth. It's so depressing to watch so many smart people spend their considerable talents on the generation of utter garbage and the erosion of the social fabric of society.
  • imiric 1y ago
    > Look for frantic efforts by companies to offload responsibility for LLM mistakes onto consumers. Not just by companies. We see this from enthusiastic consumers as well, on this very forum. Or it might just be astroturfing, it's hard to tell. The mantra is that in order to extract value from LLMs, the user must have a certain level of knowledge and skill of how to use them. "Prompt engineering", now reframed as "context engineering", has become this practice that separates anyone who feels these tools are wasting their time more than they're helping, and those who feel that it's making them many times more productive. The tools themselves are never the issue. Clearly it's the user who lacks skill. This narrative permeates blog posts and discussion forums. It was recently reinforced by a misinterpretation of a METR study. To be clear: using any tool to its full potential does require a certain skill level. What I'm objecting to is the blanket statement that people who don't find LLMs to be a net benefit to their workflow lack the skills to do so. This is insulting to smart and capable engineers with many years of experience working with software. LLMs are not this alien technology that require a degree to use correctly. Understanding how they work, feeding them the right context, and being familiar with the related tools and concepts, does not require an engineering specialization. Anyone claiming it does is trying to sell you something; either LLMs themselves, or the idea that they're more capable than those criticizing this technology.
• anothernewdude 1y ago
  I do agree that those who claim AI is inevitable are essentially threatening you.
• deleted 1y ago
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• podlp 1y ago
  The book I’m currently reading-Kevin Kelly’s The Inevitable-feels pretty ironic given this post
  • meager_wikis 1y ago
    What is your take on the outcome of his predictions?
    • podlp 1y ago
      Well many have come true, a few have not. As someone who gets vertigo from headsets, I’m a VR skeptic. But his AI predictions are pretty much spot on
• trash_cat 1y ago
  This concept is closely reated to politics of inevitability coined by Timothy Snyder. "...the politics of inevitability – a sense that the future is just more of the present, that the laws of progress are known, that there are no alternatives, and therefore nothing really to be done."[0] [0] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/16/vladimir-putin-russia-politics-of-eternity-timothy-snyder https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/16/vladimir-putin-... This article in question obviously applied it within the commercial world but at the end it has to do with language that takes away agency.
• lsy 1y ago
  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.
  • fendy3002 1y ago
    LLMs need significant optimization or we get significant improvement on computing power while keeping the energy cost the same. It's similar with smartphone, when at the start it's not feasible because of computing power, and now we have one that can rival 2000s notebooks. LLMs is too trivial to be expensive EDIT: I presented the statement wrongly. What I mean is the use case for LLM are trivial things, it shouldn't be expensive to operate
    • trashchomper 1y ago
      Calling LLMs trivial is a new one. Yea just consume all of the information on the internet and encode it into a statistical model, trivial, child could do it /s
      • hammyhavoc 1y ago
        > all of the information on the internet Total exaggeration—especially given Cloudflare providing free tools to block AI and now tools to charge bots for access to information.
• maz1b 1y ago
  It seems to me from a cursory glance of the blog post that because certain notable humans / individuals are "framing" the modern AI/ML (LLM) era in a more inevitable way, which I totally get, but isn't that how human life works? The majority of humans will almost always take the path of least resistance, whether it's cognition, work (physics definition), effort. LLMs are just another genie out of the bottle that will enable some certain subset of the population to use the least amount of energy to accomplish certain tasks, whether for good or bad. Even if we put the original genie back in the bottle, someone else will copy/replicate/rediscover it. Take WhatsApp locked secret passphrase chats as an example - people (correctly) found that it would lead to enabling cheaters. Even if WhatsApp walked it back, someone else would create a new kind of app just for this particular functionality.
  • jruohonen 1y ago
    > certain subset of the population to use the least amount of energy to accomplish certain tasks, whether for good or bad. Something along these lines, maybe. It is interesting to see what happens to quality in basically anything, including engineering. I expect more and more sketchy and easily breaking things.
• thrawa8387336 1y ago
  Agreed it's just messianistic thinking a la abrahamic religions. See, Gnosticism, Marxism, positivism,....
  • narrator 1y ago
    Yeah, dialectical materialism is a great example. Socialism is inevitable, and all that.
• athrowaway3z 1y ago
  The quotes in the post are made by people in an attempt to sound profoundly predictive on some vague super-ai future. Its good to call out that bullshit. On the other end of the spectrum is that people - demonstrably - like access to the ability to have a computer spew out a (somewhat coherent) relevant suggestion. The distance between those is enormous. Without a vocabulary to distinguish between those two extremes people are just talking past each other. As demonstrated (again) in this thread. Consequently one side has to pull out their "you're ignoring reality" card. All because we currently lack shared ideas and words to express an opinion beyond "AI yes or no?"
  • skor 1y ago
    the one by Mark sounds frustrated to say the least
• mg 1y ago
  In the 90s a friend told me about the internet. And that he knows someone who is in a university and has access to it and can show us. An hour later, we were sitting in front of a computer in that university and watched his friend surfing the web. Clicking on links, receiving pages of text. Faster than one could read. In a nice layout. Even with images. And links to other pages. We were shocked. No printing, no shipping, no waiting. This was the future. It was inevitable. Yesterday I wanted to rewrite a program to use a large library that would have required me to dive deep down into the documentation or read its code to tackle my use case. As a first try, I just copy+pasted the whole library and my whole program into GPT 4.1 and told it to rewrite it using the library. It succeeded at the first attempt. The rewrite itself was small enough that I could read all code changes in 15 minutes and make a few stylistic changes. Done. Hours of time saved. This is the future. It is inevitable. PS: Most replies seem to compare my experience to experiences that the responders have with agentic coding, where the developer is iteratively changing the code by chatting with an LLM. I am not doing that. I use a "One prompt one file. No code edits." approach, which I describe here: https://www.gibney.org/prompt_coding https://www.gibney.org/prompt_coding
  • deanCommie 1y ago
    the issue isn't the capabilities of AI. It's how it will be used maliciously and change our society irrevocably. Not from saving developers hours of work. But from making truth even more subjective and at the whims of the powerful. And from devaluing and stagnating art even further. And from sabotaging the critical thinking capabilities of our youths. All technology comes with tradeoffs. The internet you describe also doesn't exist - it's been overtaken with ads and tracking and it's basically impossible to use without some sort of adblocking. But we can all agree it was worth it for humanity. So will AI. Probably. But that's what people are always concerned with - the downstream consequences like nothing we've ever encountered before.
    • withinboredom 1y ago
      I was having a discussion with someone, they said, “let me ask ChatGPT. If it says it’s true, it must be true.” I also worked with a fellow manager who used to tell the engineers they were wrong because ChatGPT said so. That one was actually entertaining to watch. The coming humbling of that manager was so satisfying. People put a lot of stake in what it says, not realizing it isn’t always right.
• kazinator 1y ago
  LLM is an almost complete waste of time. Advocates of LLM are not accurately measuring their time and productivity, and comparing that to LLM-free alternative approaches.
  • phito 1y ago
    Indeed, I keep seeing comments stating that LLMs have completely changed their way of programming or even changed their lives. All I can think is, they must have been pretty bad at programming for the impact to be that dramatic.
    • ipdashc 1y ago
      I keep seeing people making this point as well. But like... yeah? Isn't that the whole idea, that it lets you write programs even if you're not very good at it? I'm a mediocre programmer and LLMs have certainly been useful for me. Not sure what future I or others in my boat have in the job market a few years down the road, though.
    • saati 1y ago
      And never back it up with hard data on productivity and defect rate before and after.
      • immibis 1y ago
        Well, we have at least one bit of data now: https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/ https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o... Take a quick look at that summary graph. Then read the X axis labels, and laugh, and weep. LLMs are literally basically cocaine addiction: delivering the feeling of competence and success directly to your brain, while all actual real-world evidence points to the opposite. They also actually work for some purposes, of course.
        • kazinator 1y ago
          Developers will discount the time they spent formulating prompts, and criticailly evaluating the results, because those activities don't feel like development. It's like if you nag a kid into cleaning their room, and give them detailed instructions on what to do next once they begin the activity, you might underestimate the time you spent, focusing only on the actual clean up time executed by the kid. Part of the reason may be that the interactions are not recorded. The record of development consists of deliverables like source code, bug reports and documentation. Interactions with AI are gone, just like editor keystrokes.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• nperez 1y ago
  It's inevitable because it's here. LLMs aren't the "future" anymore, they're the present. They're unseating Google as the SOTA method of finding information on the internet. People have been trying to do that for decades. The future probably holds even bigger things, but even if it plateaus for a while, showing real ability to defeat traditional search is a crazy start and just one example.
  • mtlmtlmtlmtl 1y ago
    It's ironic that you picked that example given that LLMs are simultaneously turning the internet into a vast ocean of useless AI generated garbage. General web search will soon be a completely meaningless concept.
  • imiric 1y ago
    > They're unseating Google as the SOTA method of finding information on the internet. Hardly. Google is at the frontier of these developments, and has enough resources to be a market leader. Trillion-dollar corporations have the best chances of reaping the benefits of this technology. Besides, these tools can't be relied on as a source of factual information. Filtering spam and junk from web search results requires the same critical thinking as filtering LLM hallucinations and biases. The worst of both worlds is when "agents" summarize junk from the web.
  • raincole 1y ago
    Debating whether LLM is future is like debating whether online advertising is future. We've long, long passed that point. It's present, and it's not going to magically go away. Is online advertising good for the society? Probably not. Can you use ad blockers? Yes. Can you avoid putting ads on your personal website? Yes. All of these are irrelevant in the context of "inevitabilism." Online advertising happened. So did LLM.
• dasil003 1y ago
  Two things are very clearly true: 1) LLMs can do a lot of things that previous computing techniques could not do and we need time to figure out how best to harness and utilize those capabilities; but also 2) there is a wide range of powerful people who have tons of incentive to ride the hype wave regardless of where things will actually land. To the article's point—I don't think it's useful to accept the tech CEO framing and engage on their terms at all. They are mostly talking to the markets anyway. We are the ones who understand how technology works, so we're best positioned to evaluate LLMs more objectively, and we should decide our own framing. My framing is that LLMs are just another tool in a long line of software tooling improvements. Sure, it feels sort of miraculous and perhaps threatening that LLMs can write working code so easily. But when you think of all the repetitive CRUD and business logic that has been written over the decades to address myriad permutations and subtly varying contexts of the many human organizations that are willing to pay for software to be written, it's not surprising that we could figure out how to make a giant stochastic generator that can do an adequate job generating new permutations based on the right context and prompts. As a technologist I want to understand what LLMs can do and how they can serve my personal goals. If I don't want to use them I won't, but I also owe it to myself to understand how their capabilities evolve so I can make an informed decision. I am not going to start a crusade against them out of nostalgia or wishful thinking as I can think of nothing so futile as positioning myself in direct opposition to a massive hype tsunami.
  • SwoopsFromAbove 1y ago
    This is how I approach the tools too. I believe it’s a healthy approach, but who’s to say whether I’m just a naysayer. shrug
  • player1234 1y ago
    Is it miraculous? We have spent hundreds of billions, trillions on reading the whole internet(training we call it) and with breakthroughs in statistics we can guess the next probable word and it makes sense to a pretty high degree. I think it works pretty much as you would expect does it not? With all that data read and all that money spent? The impressive thing with the tech is that we(the humans) thought of it and through better hardware actually where able to do it. Super f-ing cool but in the end pretty pointless imo.
• tayo42 1y ago
  Probably true for ai I don't think we have that kind of ai right now with llms. Is there a reason to believe it's right around the corner? Some ai tool hallucinated a bazel config option today for me. Maybe bazel is to hard even for agi lol
• twelve40 1y ago
  > “AI will not replace humans, but those who use AI will replace those who don’t.” – Ginni Rometty wait, i thought it was Watson that was supposed to replace me
• keiferski 1y ago
  One of the negative consequences of the “modern secular age” is that many very intelligent, thoughtful people feel justified in brushing away millennia of philosophical and religious thought because they deem it outdated or no longer relevant. (The book A Secular Age is a great read on this, btw, I think I’ve recommended it here on HN at least half a dozen times.) And so a result of this is that they fail to notice the same recurring psychological patterns that underly thoughts about how the world is, and how it will be in the future - and then adjust their positions because of this awareness. For example - this AI inevitabilism stuff is not dissimilar to many ideas originally from the Reformation, like predestination. The notion that history is just on some inevitable pre-planned path is not a new idea, except now the actor has changed from God to technology. On a psychological level it’s the same thing: an offloading of freedom and responsibility to a powerful, vaguely defined force that may or may not exist outside the collective minds of human society.
  • SwoopsFromAbove 1y ago
    100%. Not a new phenomenon at all, just the latest bogeyman for the inevitabilists to point to in their predestination arguments. My aim is only to point it out - people are quite comfortable rejecting predestination arguments coming from eg. physics or religion, but are still awed by “AI is inevitable”.
    • ikr678 1y ago
      It's inevitable not because of any inherent quality of the tech, but because investors are demanding it be so and creating the incentives for 'inevitability'. I also think EV vehicles are an 'inevitability' but I am much less offended by the EV future, as they still have to outcompete IC's, there are transitional options (hybrids), there are public transport alternatives, and at least local regulations appear to be keeping pace with the technical change. AI inevitabilty so far seems to be only inevitable because I can't actually opt out of it when it gets pushed on me.
      • mountainb 1y ago
        To use John Adams' separation of republics into the categories of "the many, the few, and the one," the few in our current day are unusually conflict-adverse both among each other and with respect to the people. When faced with the current crisis, they look at the options for investment and they see some that will involve a lot of conflict with the many (changing the industrial employment arrangement, rearranging state entitlements), and they see see some that avoid conflict or change. Our few as they are got that way by outsourcing anything physical and material as much as possible and making everything "into computer." So they promote a self serving spiritual belief that because overinvesting in computers got them to their elevated positions, that even more computer is what the world needs more than anything else. This approach also mollifies the many in a way that would be easily recognizable in any century to any classically educated person. Our few do not really know what the many are there for, but they figure that they might as well extract from the many through e.g. sports gambling apps and LLM girlfriends.
• justanotherjoe 1y ago
  This is something I think about, only my framing is that of predictionism; what I mean is society's occupation with predicting things. This is important because predictions are both 1) necessary to make value judgments of the present and 2) borderline impossible for many things. So you have people making value judgments that hinge on things they have no right to know. I also classified predictions into three categories, based on difficulty. The easiest being periodic things like movements of planets. The second being things that have been known to happen and might happen again in the future, like war. And the third are novel phenomenas that have never happened before, like superintelligence. Even the second one is hard, the third is impossible. There are so many predictions that fall in this third category that people are making. But no matter how many 'models' you make, it all falls into the same trap of not having the necessary data to make any kind of estimate of how successful the models will be. It's not the things you consider, it's the things you don't consider. And those tend to be like 80% of the things you should.
• nilirl 1y ago
  HN over the last year: personal anecdotes, analogy, and extrapolation as evidence for "obviously it's inevitable, why can't you see?"
  • mattgreenrocks 1y ago
    Don't forget the recent article: Article: "here are logical reasons we should not anthropomorphize LLMs" HN: "but I LIKE talking about them like that, so I will!"
• oytis 1y ago
  It's money. People with capital can beat the drum indefinitely long indefinitely hard until "inevitable" becomes inevitable.
• mawadev 1y ago
  I really like what is hidden between the lines of this text, it is only something a human can understand. The entire comment section over here reflects the uncanny valley. This blog post is a work of art LOL
• gyosko 1y ago
  I don't know if "AI" will be able to do 100%, or even 90%, of my job in the next year(s). But I do know what I can see now: "AI" is making more bad than good. Billions of dollars litterally burned in weird acquisitions and power, huge power consumptions and, the worst one maybe: the enshittification. Is it really this what we want? Or it's what investors want?
• sircastor 1y ago
  The hardest part about inevitablism here is that the people who are making the argument this is inevitable are the same people who are the people who are shoveling hundreds of millions of dollars into it. Into the development, the use, the advertisement. The foxes are building doors into the hen houses and saying there’s nothing to be done, foxes are going to get in so we might as well make it something that works for everyone.
  • killerstorm 1y ago
    "put your money where your mouth is" is generally a good thing.
    • globular-toast 1y ago
      Except "the money" in this case is just part of funds distributed around by the super rich. The saying works better when it's about regular people actually taking risks and making sacrifices.
    • lmm 1y ago
      "Talking your book" is seen as a bad thing, especially when not properly disclosed.
      • rsanek 1y ago
        is that really a problem? feel like those working on ai are not shy about it
        • lmm 1y ago
          It can be. A week or two back there was a blog post on here about someone using an AI tool and being wowed by how effective it was, and it was only in the comments that it emerged that they worked for an AI company.
      • a_wild_dandan 1y ago
        That's probably why the old saw isn't just "put your money."
• ccortes 1y ago
  Earlier today I was scrolling at the “work at a startup” posts. Seems like everyone is doing LLM stuff. We are back at the “uber for X” but now it is “ChatGPT for X”. I get it, but I’ve never felt more uninspired looking at what yc startups are working on today. For the first time they all feel incredibly generic
  • isoprophlex 1y ago
    Finally we've managed to disintermediate everything. Even the cutting out of middlemen can now be automated. A machine stamping out cookiecutter saas businesses. Business model: Uber for "Uber for x". Who wants to start a goat farming co-op?
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  • seunosewa 1y ago
    That's an old trend in AI time. The new trend is "Cursor for X". YC is all over that.
• andrewstuart 1y ago
  And yet, LLM assisted programming is absolutely not only inevitable but the present AND the future. Embrace it. The unbelievers are becoming ever more desperate to shout it down and frame the message such that LLMs can somehow be put back in the bottle. They can not.
• jstummbillig 1y ago
  I don't think that LLMs are inevitable, but what this piece lacks (and that's fine, I like the point and writing anyway) is a plausible alternative. LLMs might not be inevitable, but until something better comes along, why would they go away? Even if we assume that people are just completely delusional about the models adding anything of value, why would that change at any point in the future?
• praptak 1y ago
  Inevitabilism has a long history of being used to persuade people to accept shitty stuff. Soviet bloc used Marx's historicism (or their interpretation thereof) to argue that communism (or their implementation thereof) is inevitable. There was also TINA which was used to push the neoliberal version of capitalism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_is_no_alternative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_is_no_alternative
• tete 1y ago
  Of course! Just like like we have been using what we now call VR goggles and voice input since the 80s, oh and hand gestures and governments all around use Blockchain for everything, we also all take supersonic planes while we travel, also everyone knows how to program, also we use super high level programming languages, also nobody uses the keyboard anymore because it has been replaced by hundreds if not thousands better inputs. Books don't exist anymore, everyone uses tablets for everything all the time, ah and we cook using automatic cooking tools, we also all eat healthy enriched and pro-biotic foods. Ah and we are all running around in Second Life... err Meta I mean, because it is the inevitable future of the internet! Also we all use IPv6, have replaced Windows with something that used to be a research OS, also nobody uses FTP anymore EVER. The Cloud, no Docker, no Kubernets, no Helm, no, I mean Kubernetes Orchestrators made it trivial to scale and have a good, exact overview of hundreds, no thousands, no millions of instances. And everything is super fast now. And all for basically free. Oh and nobody uses and paper wipes or does any manual cleaning anymore, in fact cleaning personnel has switched into obscurity people mostly don't know about anymore, because everyone sells you a robot that does all of that way better for five bucks, basically since the middle of the century! Also we all have completely autonomous driving, nobody uses licenses anymore, use hyper fast transport through whatever train replacement, we also all have wide spread use of drone cabs and drone package delivery 24/7. We also are SO CLOSE to solving each health issue out there. There is barely anything left we don't completely understand, and nobody ever heard of a case where doctors simply didn't know precisely what to do, because we all use nanobots. Email also has been completely replaced. All computers are extremely fast, completely noiseless, use essentially no energy. Nothing is ever slow anymore. Oh and thanks to all the great security company, products, leading edge, even with AI nobody is ever victim to any phishing, scam, malware, etc. anymore. Also everything is running secure, sandboxed code all the time and it never makes any problems. People somehow seem to think the first 10% take 90% of the time or something. We have seen only very marginal improvements of LLMs and every time any unbiased (as in not directly working for a related company) researcher looks at it they find that LLMs at best manage to reproduce something that the input explicitly contained. Try to create a full (to the brink) wine glass and try to have even the most advanced LLM to do something really novel especially add or change something in existing project.
  • 1y ago
• mnsc 1y ago
  "AI" is good right now and feels inevitable. But the current models are trained on the extinct "pure" information state we had pre llm:s. Going forward we will have to start taking into account the current level of "ai slop" being added to the the information space. So I will have to trust my "detect ai generated information" LLM to correctly classify my main three llms responses as "hallucinating", "second level hallucinating", "fact based", "trustworthy aggregate" or "injection attack attempt". Probably should add another llm to check that response as well. Printed as a check list so that I can manually check it myself.
• globular-toast 1y ago
  Did anyone even read the article? Maybe you should get an LLM to bullet point it for you. The author isn't arguing about whether LLMs (or AI) is inevitable or not. They are saying you don't have to operate within their framing. You should be thinking about whether this thing is really good for us and not just jumping on the wagon and toeing the line because you're told it's inevitable. I've noticed more and more the go to technique for marketing anything now is FOMO. It works. Don't let it work on you. Don't buy into a thing just because everyone else is. Most of the time you aren't missing out on anything at all. Some of the time the thing is actively harmful to the participants and society.
• hannofcart 1y ago
  > Don’t let inevitabilism frame the argument and take away your choice. Think about the future you want, and fight for it. What would 'fight for it' in this context mean?
  • unraveller 1y ago
    I'm fighting for no health care in your home.
• jeisc 1y ago
  Language is not knowledge and knowledge when reduced to a language becomes here say until it is redone and implemented in our context. Both of them have nothing to do with wisdom. LLM's hash out our language and art to death but AI doesn't mind what they mean to us. Without our constraints and use, they would stop running. We should be building guardian angels to save us from ourselves and not evil demons to conquer the world. - John Eischen © adagp paris art humanitarian use is authorized except for any Al uses
• cdrini 1y ago
  How do you differentiate between an effective debater using inevitabilism as a technique to win a debate, and an effective thinker making a convincing argument that something is likely to be inevitable? How do you differentiate between an effective debater "controlling the framing of a conversation" and an effective thinker providing a new perspective on a shared experience? How do you differentiate between a good argument and a good idea? I don't think you can really? You could say intent plays a part -- that someone with an intent to manipulate can use debating tools as tricks. But still, even if someone with bad intentions makes a good argument, isn't it still a good argument?
  • keiferski 1y ago
    Easy: good arguments take the form of books, usually, not rapid-fire verbal exchanges. No serious intellectual is interested in winning debates as their primary objective.
  • xmodem 1y ago
    A thinker might say "LLMs are inevitable, here's why" and then make specific arguments that either convince me to change my mind, or that I can refute. A tech executive making an inevitablist argument won't back it up with any justification, or if they do it will be so vague as to be unfalsifiable.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • throwawayoldie 1y ago
    One good way is if they back up their assertions and explain their reasoning, which generally people arguing for LLM inevitability don't--they make assertions like "LLMs are only going to get better". Contrast this with someone arguing the other side of the question like Ed Zitron or David Gerard. You may or may not agree with their arguments, but they explain, in great detail, with numbers and citations, how they arrived at their conclusions. If you don't agree with those conclusions, you should be able to point at a certain part of their argument and say "this is where you went wrong."
• atleastoptimal 1y ago
  AI is being framed as the future because it is the future. If you can't see the writing on the wall then you surely have your head in the sand or are seeking out information to confirm your beliefs. I've thought a lot about where this belief comes from, that belief being the general Hacker News skepticism towards AI and especially big tech's promotion and alignment with it in recent years. I believe it's due to fear of irrelevance and loss of control. The general type I've seen most passionately dismissive of the utility of LLM's are veteran, highly "tech-for-tech's sake" software/hardware people, far closer Wozniak than Jobs on the Steve spectrum. These types typically earned their stripes working in narrow intersections of various mission-critical domains like open-source software, systems development, low-level languages, etc. To these people, a generally capable all-purpose oracle capable of massive data ingestion and effortless inference represents a death knell to their relative status and value. AI's likely trajectory heralds a world where intelligence and technical ability are commodified and ubiquitous, robbing a sense purpose and security from those whose purpose and security depends on their position in a rare echelon of intellect. This increasingly likely future is made all the more infuriating by the annoyances of the current reality of AI. The fact that AI is so presently inescapable despite how many glaring security-affecting flaws it causes, how much it propagates slop in the information commons, and how effectively it emboldens a particularly irksome brand of overconfidence in the VC world is preemptive insult to injury in the lead up a reality where AI will nevertheless control everything. I can't believe these types I've seen on this site aren't smart enough to avoid seeing the forest for the trees on this matter. My Occam's razor conclusion is that most are smart enough, they just are emotionally invested in anticipating a future where the grand promises of AI will fizzle out and it will be back to business as usual. To many this is a salve necessary to remain reasonably sane.
  • cheevly 1y ago
    Well-said and spot on.
  • nevertoolate 1y ago
    Your point is: ai is the future and for some it is bad news and they dismiss the possibility of this future. My question is: who will control this ai? The folk who can’t do the work without ai or the ones who can? Who would you hire?
• Komte 1y ago
  I absolutely don't agree with a conclusion of the article. As an individuals we can make conscious choices, as a society we basically can not (with a occasional exceptions across the history). We're guided by the path of least resistance even if it leads to our own demise. See climate crisis, nuclear proliferation, etc.
• s_ting765 1y ago
  Repetition is an effective tool in communication. That's why the AI hype marketing machine is not coming to a stop anytime soon.
• bubblebeard 1y ago
  LLM:s and CA:s are most likely here to stay. The question is how we use them correctly. I’ve tried using an LLM to help me learn new programming languages, suggest alternative solutions to some mess I’ve created, and explain things I do not understand. For all of these things, it’s been very helpful. You can’t rely on it, you have to use common sense and cross reference things you do not at least have some prior knowledge of. Just saying, it’s way easier than attempting the same using traditional search engines. One thing it will not do is replace developers. I do not see that happening. But, in the future, our work may be a little less about syntax and more about actual problem solving. Not sure how I feel about that yet though.
• snickmy 1y ago
  Just wanted to callout how well written is this blog post (not necessarily from a substance standpoint, which in my opinion is very good as well), but from a fluidity and narrative standpoint. It's quite rare in this day and age. Thank you, OP
• jillesvangurp 1y ago
  LLMs are here, they aren't going away. Therefore they are part of our future. The real question is what else is in our future and whether LLMs are all we need. I think the answer to that is a solid no and the people phrasing the future in faster/better LLMs are probably missing the point as much as people thinking of cars as coaches with faster horses. That future isn't inevitable but highly likely given on the trajectory we're on. But you can't specify a timeline with certainty for what amounts to some highly tricky and very much open research questions related to this that lots of people are working on. But predicting that they are going to come up completely empty handed seems even more foolish. They'll figure out something. And it might surprise us. LLMs certainly did. It's not inevitable that they'll come up with something of course. But at this point they'd have to be fundamentally wrong about quite a few things. And even if they are, there's no guarantee that they wouldn't just figure that out and address that. They'll come up with something. But it probably won't be just faster horses.
  • sshine 1y ago
    A few things that are here: - LLMs - Cryptocurrencies - Mobile phones Neither are going away, all are part of our future, but not equally. The inevitabilism argument is that cryptocurrencies were just as hyped a few years ago as LLMs are now, and they're much less here now. So if you have an objection to LLMs being hyped and not wanting to use them, there's a real case they may slide into the background as a curious gimmick, like cryptocurrencies. LLMs won't have the same fate as cryptocurrencies. They're immediately useful to a lot of people, unlike cryptocurrencies. More likely: When VC needs to capture back the money, and subscriptions go to their real level, we'll see 1) very expensive subscriptions for those who vibe, and 2) cheaper models filled with ads for the plebs, embedded into search engines, help desk software, and refrigerators. LLMs do share one sad aspect with cryptocurrencies on account of being a hype: When the hype settles, because of economic reality, they'll feel shittier because we get the version we can afford: The LLM that replaces a human service worker whose effort was already at rock bottom. The cryptocurrency that resembles a slot machine. In a utopia that wasn't run by VC money, taking any idea to an extreme for some sustainable reason other than a 10-year value capture plan, we might see some beautiful adoption into society.
• stiray 1y ago
  I completely agree with author on LLMs. I consider AI as stock inflating noise, like nosql databases (...) were. The nosql ended, after all the hype, as sometimes usable. I am typically buying ebooks. When I read it and figure out that ebook is rare jewel, I also buy hardcover if available. Shoshana Zuboff’s, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is one of those hardcovers. Recommending reading it.
• snickmy 1y ago
  An axiom of inevitabilism, especially among the highest echelons, is that you end up making it a reality. It’s the kind of belief that shapes reality itself. In simple terms: the fact that the Googles, Anthropics, and OpenAIs of the world have a strong interest in making LLMs the way AI pans out will most likely ensure that LLMs become the dominant paradigm — until someone else, with equal leverage, comes along to disrupt them.
• OfficeChad 1y ago
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• Boristoledano 1y ago
  Disclaimer - I am building an AI web retriever (Linkup.so) so I have a natural bias - LLMs aren’t just a better Google, they’re a redefinition of search itself. Traditional search is an app: you type, scroll through ads and 10 blue links, and dig for context. That model worked when the web was smaller, but now it’s overwhelming. LLMs shift search to an infrastructure, a way to get contextualized, synthesized answers directly, tailored to your specific need. Yes, they can hallucinate, but so can the web. It’s not about replacing Google—it’s about replacing the experience of searching (actually they probably will less and less 'experience' of searching)
  • pickledoyster 1y ago
    I believe there are some debatable assumptions baked into your comment, so I have to ask. Do you believe that the entirety of all possible knowledge ("answers") is already online? If not, how is new knowledge supposed to appear online: what are the incentives to put it up on the web if the last open gateways to it are killed by this LLM "experience"? And, if new information must be added continuously, how is it supposed to be vetted? That last one is important, since you state: > That model worked when the web was smaller, but now it’s overwhelming. Because it seems like the "experience" changes, but the underlying model of sucking up data off the web does not. If it was "overwhelming" in the past, how is it supposed to be easier now, with subsidized slop machines putting up new information full-tilt?
  • mylifeandtimes 1y ago
    > shift search to an infrastructure, a way to get contextualized, synthesized answers directly, tailored to your specific need what if my specific need involves the answer being correct? or by "specific need" did you mean my dopamine addiction and/or my need to be affirmed and pandered to?
• hiAndrewQuinn 1y ago
  AI is not inevitable, because technological progress in general is not inevitable. It is shapeable by economic incentives just like everything else. It can be ground into powder by resource starvation. We've long known that certain forms of financial bounties levied upon scientists working at the frontier of sciences we want to freeze in place work effectively with a minimum of policing and international cooperation. If a powerful country is willing to be a jerk (heavens!) and allow these kinds of bounties to be turned in even on extranationals, you don't need the international cooperation. But you do get a way to potentially kickstart a new Nash equilibrium that keeps itself going as soon as other countries adopt the same bounty-based policy. This mechanism has been floating around for at least a decade now. It's not news. Even the most inevitable seeming scientific developments can be effectively rerouted around using it. The question is whether you genuinely, earnestly believe what lies beyond the frontier is too dangerous to be let out, and in almost all cases the answer to that should be no. I post this mostly because inevitabilist arguments will always retain their power so long as you can come up with a coherent profit motive for something to be pursued. You don't get far with good-feeling spiels that amount to plaintive cries in a tornado. You need actual object level proposals on how to make the inevitable evitable.
• brador 1y ago
  It’s like VR. Once you use it you just know it’s the future of entertainment. Just the exact pathing is unknown.
  • throwawayoldie 1y ago
    I first used VR back in 1995, it's sure taking its sweet time. Or maybe what you "just know" is actually what you "just believe".
• kotaKat 1y ago
  It’s not going to be inevitable because I’m going to keep calling out everyone forcing their AI and LLM on me exactly what they are — technical rapists. I said no, quit forcing your product all over me.
• eduardofcgo 1y ago
  Part of the inevitabilism is how these tools are being pushed. At this point it doesn't matter how good they are, it's just how many people live now. Microsoft sure knows how to turn bad software mainstream. It helps also that these tools behave exactly like how they are marketed, they even tell you that they are thinking, and then deceive you when they are wrong. Their overconfidence is almost a feature, they don't need to be that good, just provide that illusion
• UrineSqueegee 1y ago
  bro made an obscure statement and got hundreds of upvotes on HN
• greybox 1y ago
  [flagged]
• alexdowad 1y ago
  My belief is that whatever technology can be invented by humans (under the constraints of the laws of physics, etc) will eventually be invented. I don't have a strong argument for this; it's just what makes sense to me. If true, then an immediate corollary is that if it is possible for humans to create LLMs (or other AI systems) which can program, or do some other tasks, better than humans can, that will happen. Inevitabilism? I don't think so. If that comes to pass, then what people will do with that technology, and what will change as a result, will be up to the people who are alive at the time. But not creating the technology is not an option, if it's within the realm of what humans can possibly create.
  • ansc 1y ago
    >I don't have a strong argument for this I think you do. Have we ever been successful at slowing down technological efficiency? >If that comes to pass, then what people will do with that technology, and what will change as a result, will be up to the people who are alive at the time. If it is inevitable that technology will be developed, it is also inevitable that it will be used, and in turn, further technology developed. Technology is an arms race. You can't opt out once you've started. If you do not employ the same technical progress for whatever-- propaganda, profits-- you will lose. I know you're not posing it as a problem or solution, but I believe pinning it completely on "it's how we use it" is not a valid tactic either.
    • nhinck3 1y ago
      > I think you do. Have we ever been successful at slowing down technological efficiency? Genghis Khan was probably the the last person to do so.
    • techpineapple 1y ago
      “Have we ever been successful at slowing down technological efficiency?” Yes, we slow down technological efficiency all the time. Nuclear Power for one. I think you could argue we did the same for blockchain, once the hype died down. I might argue most technologies we slow down by divesting from them as their core use cases subside. Facebook has been pivoting away from the metaverse which means we’re slowing down research in that area.
• anuvratparashar 1y ago
  Is it just me or the community and its comments here seem to be contradicting the investment choices made by YC?
• BigChemical 1y ago
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• miscend 1y ago
  Not sure I get the author of this piece. The tech leaders are clearly saying AI is inevitable, they're not saying LLMs are inevitable. Big tech is constantly working on new types of AI such as world models.
  • __loam 1y ago
    It's painfully obvious all these people are talking about LLMs, but if you have some revolutionary new ai technology maybe you should share it with the class.
• a_wild_dandan 1y ago
  This is a fantastic framing method. Anyone who sees the future differently to you can be brushed aside as “an inevitablist,” and the only conversations worth engaging are those that already accept your premise. --- This argument so easily commits sudoku that I couldn't help myself. It's philosophical relativism, and self-immolates for the same reason -- it's inconsistent. It eats itself.
  • wch 1y ago
    I agree 100% with you. The author starts the essay with the very technique that he uses later on the essay: frame the conversation in his terms (that LLMs are _not_ inevitable), and then once that's done, anyone who disagrees can be dismissed. The irony is that he's doing it, just in the opposite direction of those he disagrees with. Some things _are_ economically inevitable, and it's wishful thinking to ignore them. For example, it is inevitable that solar will be the primary form of electricity generation in the coming decades (and I am thankful that this is the case). For those that were watching closely, this was clear several years ago, and it is even more clear today. People whose fortunes are built on the fossil fuel industry might wish it were otherwise, and they might dismiss "solar inevitabilists" with the same technique as the author. But those people would be wrong. If someone says that something is inevitable, they could be wrong. But they could also be right.
  • mlsu 1y ago
    Maybe it's easier if we use a toy example. "In the future, you will inevitably give me money. Let's discuss how much you'll give me." vs. "In the future, there might be some amount of money exchanged between us, in either direction. Let's discuss that." Clearly, both discussions involve the same thing (money, us), but one is much more restricted than the other, and clearly benefits me more. In this case of course, this isn't a discussion among individuals, but rather a social change. These are huge multinational corporations, with incredible powers of coercion. Of course they're framing things in a way that is maximally beneficial to them. I think the idea here is to raise the point that we should consider not blindly accepting their framing.
• ljosifov 1y ago
  I don't think it's inevitable, for very few things are really inevitable. However, I find LLM-s good and useful. First the chat bots, now the coding agents. Looks to me medical consultation, 2nd opinion and the like - are not far behind. Enough people already use them for that. I give my lab tests results to ChatGPT. Tbh can't fault the author for motivated reasoning. Looks to me it goes like: this is not a future I want -> therefore it should not happen -> therefore it will not happen. Because by the same motivated reasoning: for me it is the future I want. To be able to interact with a computer via language, speech and more. For the computer to be smart, instead of dumb, as it is now. If I can have the computer enhance my smarts, my information processing power, my memory - the way writing allows me to off-load from my head onto paper, a calculator allows me to manipulate numbers, and computer toils for days instead myself - then I will probably want for the AI to complement, enhance me too.
• phkahler 1y ago
  I watched the Grok 4 video with Elon and crew last night. Elon kept making statements about what Grok would do in the next year. It hasn't invented anything yet, but it will advance technology in a year. There was some other prediction too. These things are impressive and contain a ton of information, but innovating is a very different thing. It might come to be, but it's not inevitable.
• usrbinbash 1y ago
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• ojr 1y ago
  The company name was changed from Facebook to Meta because Mark thought the metaverse was inevitable, it's ironic that you use a quote from him
  • seunosewa 1y ago
    The true reason was to have a new untainted brand after the election scandal.
    • gawa 1y ago
      Because the strategy of changing brand after a scandal works so well, it's good to add some precision here, for those who may not know: Facebook changed its name to Meta after a huge public backlash, the Cambridge Analytica scandal [0] What was once a scandal in 2018 became common place. In 2018, targeting citizens with tailored messages to influence them was considered wrong. We had a different conception of "How we should make up our minds to choose our leaders" (it's still the case in some parts of Western Europe, where there are more regulations regarding elections, such as a ceiling for how much candidates can spend in marketing campaigns). Nowadays, we have Elon Musk directly involved in politics, who incidentally happen to possess all the data he bought with Twitter, and now tons of sensitive data he rushed to harness from government agencies during his short time in DOGE. Since he didn't shy away from directly paying people to vote for his candidates, it's hard to believe he would have the ethical restraint to not use this data and his social network to organize extremely precise and effective targeted manipulation campaigns to further his personal agenda. Unfortunately, the unchecked (unregulated) use of personal data for massive manipulation is considered "inevitable" (i has been for decades). So much that we now comment about the word "inevitability" itself, and whether LLMs are "inevitably good at coding", completely brushing aside the most important, the main social issues LLMs can cause, such as: their biases (reinforcing fake news, or stereotypes), who train the model, what ads they will show in the near future, how they will be used for influencing people, how they will be used in drones, which humans in the loop, what guardrails, for whose interest, how will it be used in troll farm, how is it compatible with democracy, how (or if) the economics gains of this technology will be redistributed, ... [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
• alganet 1y ago
  Words already don't matter, way before LLMs. Know your rethoric basics.
• bemmu 1y ago
  I was going to make an argument that it's inevitable, because at some point compute will get so cheap that someone could just train one at home, and since the knowledge of how to do it is out there, people will do it. But seeing that a company like Meta is using >100k GPUs to train these models, even at 25% yearly improvement it would still take until the year ~2060 before someone could buy 50 GPUs and have the equivalent power to train one privately. So I suppose if society decided to outlaw LLM training, or a market crash put off companies from continuing to do it, it might be possible to put the genie back in the bottle for a few decades. I wouldn't be surprised however if there are still 10x algorithmic improvements to be found too...
• possiblydrunk 1y ago
  Inevitability implies determinism and assumes complete knowledge. Forecasts of inevitable things are high probability guesses based on the knowledge at hand. Their accuracy is low and becomes lower as the level of detail increases. The plethora of wrong guesses get less attention or are forgotten and right ones are celebrated and immortalized after the fact.
• graphememes 1y ago
  I would argue that reality is already here and is already happening.
• IAmGraydon 1y ago
  Things which are both powerful and possible become inevitable. We know that LLMs are powerful, but we aren't sure how powerful yet, and there's a large range this might eventually land in. We know they're possible in their current form, of course, but we don't know if actual GAI is possible. At this time, humanity seems to be estimating that both power and possibility will be off the charts. Why? Because getting this wrong can be so negatively impactful that it makes sense to move forward as if GAI will inevitably exist. Imagine supposing that this will all turn out to be fluff and GAI will never work, so you stop investing in it. Now imagine what happens if you're wrong and your enemy gets it to work first. This isn't some arguing device for AI-inevitabilists. It's knowledge of human nature, and it's been repeating itself for millennia. If the author believes that's going to suddenly change, they really should back that up with what, exactly, has changed in human nature.
• ilaksh 1y ago
  Some is marketing, but it's not _just_ marketing. Many people have a worldview now where AI progress is inevitable. So we really believe it I would be interested to hear other ideas or plans that don't involve AI progress. My premise though is that the current state of affairs although improved from X decades/centuries ago is horrible in terms of things like extreme inequality and existential threats. If in your worldview the status quo is A-OKAY then you don't feel you need AI or robotics or anything to improve things.
• paulcole 1y ago
  The things I like are inevitable. The things I dislike are inevitable to people using debating tricks to shut down discussion.
• hermitcrab 1y ago
  “The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” David Graeber
• lupusreal 1y ago
  I don't really know what the author's real angle is here, does he think LLMs aren't inevitable because they will be supplanted by something better? That's certainly plausible. But if he thinks they might get banned or pushed to the margins, then he's definitely in loony town. When new technology has a lot of people who think it's useful, it doesn't get rolled back just because some people don't like it. To get rid of that technology the only way forward is to replace it with something that is at least as good, ideally better. Is my position "inevitablism"? Does the author slapping that word on me mean that he has won the debate because he framed the conversation? I don't care about the debate, I'm just saying how it will be, based on how it always has been. Winning the debate but turning out to be wrong anyway, funny.
• ivolimmen 1y ago
  A few days ago I saw a nice tweet being shared and it wend something like: I am not allowed to use my airco as it eats to much power and we must think about the environment. Meanwhile: people non-stop generating rule 34 images using AI...
• strangescript 1y ago
  The great thing but terrifying thing about innovation is we rarely select how it plays out. People create great ideas and concepts, but they rarely play out exactly how the initial researchers/inventors expected. Did Apple know we would spend all day doom scrolling when it created the iPhone? Did it want that? Would they have viewed that as desirable? Doubtful. But what was the alternative? Not make a smart phone and then wait until someone else does create one who has even less concern for people's well being. Or better yet, how could they have even predicted the outcome in 2007? Humanity has never been able to put the innovation genie back in the bottle. At best we have delayed it, but even those situations require there be a finite resource that can be easily regulated and controlled. AI is not one of those things.
• Workaccount2 1y ago
  People like communicating in natural language. LLMs are the first step in the movement away from the "early days" of computing where you needed to learn the logic based language and interface of computers to interact with them. That is where the inevitabilism comes from. No one* wants to learn how to use a computer, they want it to be another entity that they can just talk to. *I'm rounding off the <5% who deeply love computers.
  • usrbinbash 1y ago
    > No one* wants to learn how to use a computer, they want it to be another entity that they can just talk to. No, we don't. Part of the reason why I enjoy programming, is because it is a mental exercise allowing me to give precise, unambiguous instructions that either work exactly as advertised or they do not.
    • jowea 1y ago
      Exactly, we are in the *, the 5% (and I think that's an overestimate) who actually like it. Seems tech is at least partly moving on.
      • xpe 1y ago
        > seems like tech is at least partly moving on This framing risks getting it backwards and disempowering people, doesn’t it? Technology does not make its own choices (at least not yet). Or does it? To problematize my own claims… If you are a materialist, “choice” is an illusion that only exists once you draw a system boundary. In other words, “choice” is only an abstraction that makes sense if one defines an “agent”. We have long-running agents, so…
        • eddythompson80 1y ago
          > This framing risks getting it backwards and disempowering people, doesn’t it? Technology does not make its own choices (at least not yet). It doesn't but we rarely chase technology for its own sake. Some do, and I envy them. However, most of us are being paid to solve specific problems usually using a specific set of technologies. It doesn't matter how much I love the Commodore or BASIC, it'll be very hard to convince someone to pay me to develop a solution for their problem based on it. The choice to use nodejs and react to solve their problem was.... my choice. Will there be a future where I can't really justify paying you to write code by hand. instead I can only really justify paying you to debug LLM generated code or to debug a prompt? Like could we have companies selling products and services with fundamentally no one at the helm of writing code. The entire thing is built through prompting and everynow and then you hire someone to take the hammer and keep beating a part until it sorta behaves the way it sorta should and they add a few ALL CAPS INSTRUCTIONS TO THE AGENT NOT TO TOUCH THIS!!!!!
• AstralStorm 1y ago
  Inevitabilism is defeated by showing someone we're still not having a moonbase, and we don't have and likely never will have faster than light travel. There are no inevitable things. There are predictable ones at best. It's a silly position to start from and easily defeated if you know what you're dealing with.
• mark_l_watson 1y ago
  As much as I love open source software and open weight LLMs, let’s get real: a combination of special interests ‘owning’ both political parties, the rise of the “Tech Bros” who don’t care a rat’s ass about anyone but themselves, and a permanent War Department fueling extreme profit for inside players - future looks a little grim. I fight back by using the technology I want, lead a spiritual/religious life and am loving with the people I interact with.
• aldousd666 1y ago
  AI is the future, I don't care who is dubious of it. LLMs in their Transformer variations may not survive the long run, but LLMs are not the whole of AI. lets do keep in mind that today's limitations become yesterdays speed bumps. Perhaps there's a new architecture or a tweak to the existing one that gets us the rest of the way there. There has never been this rapid of a dislocation in capital investment that didn't make a big dent in the long run. You can swear up and down that it may not happen, but do you think all of these companies, and now countries, are going to just take a hit and let it go? No friggin way. It's AT LEAST as prevalent as nuclear was, but I'd argue more since you can't run nukes on your laptop. The other thing about AI is that it can be used to different degrees in tech. you can't incorporate half of a supersonic jet's supersonic-ness into something that is less than supersonic. You can incorporate partial AI solutions that still mix with human control. The mixture will evolve over time to an optimal balance. whether that is more AI and less humans or vice versa remains to be seen.
  • deleted 1y ago
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• karmakaze 1y ago
  > "AI ..." > I’m not convinced that LLMs are the future. Was this an intentional bait/switch? LLM != AI. I'm quite sure LLMs are not the future. It's merely the step after AlexNet, AlphaGo, and before the next major advancement.
• Domainzsite 1y ago
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• JimmaDaRustla 1y ago
  The author seems to imply that the "framing" of an argument is done so in bad faith in order to win an argument but only provides one-line quotes where there is no contextual argument. This tactic by the author is a straw-man argument - he's framing the position of tech leaders and our acceptance of it as the reason AI exists, instead of being honest, which is that they were simply right in their predictions: AI was inevitable. The IT industry is full of pride and arrogance. We deny the power of AI and LLMs. I think that's fair, I welcome the pushback. But the real word the IT crowd needs to learn is "denialism" - if you still don't see how LLMs is changing our entire industry, you haven't been paying attention. Edit: Lots of denialists using false dichotomy arguments that my opinion is invalid because I'm not producing examples and proof. I guess I'll just leave this: https://tools.simonwillison.net/ https://tools.simonwillison.net/
  • jdiff 1y ago
    The IT industry is also full of salesmen and con men, both enjoy unrealistic exaggeration. Your statements would not be out of place 20 years ago when the iPhone dropped. Your statements would not be out of place 3 years ago before every NFT went to 0. LLMs could hit an unsolvably hard wall next year and settle into a niche of utility. AI could solve a lengthy list of outstanding architectural and technical problems and go full AGI next year. If we're talking about changing the industry, we should see some clear evidence of that. But despite extensive searching myself and after asking many proponents (feel free to jump in here), I can't find a single open source codebase, actively used in production, and primarily maintained and developed with AI. If this is so foundationally groundbreaking, that should be a clear signal. Personally, I would expect to see an explosion of this even if the hype is taken extremely conservatively. But I can't even track down a few solid examples. So far my searching only reveals one-off pull requests that had to be laboriously massaged into acceptability.
    • bsenftner 1y ago
      > I can't find a single open source codebase, actively used in production, and primarily maintained and developed with AI. That's because using AI to write code is a poor application of LLM AIs. LLMs are better suited to summary, advice, and reflection than forced into a Rube Goldberg Machine. Use your favorite LLM as a Socratic advisor, but not as a coder, and certainly not as an unreliable worker.
• snowstormsun 1y ago
  Don't worry, it will go away once the stock market plunges.
• megaloblasto 1y ago
  I think what scares people who code for a living the most is the loss of their craft. Many of you have spent years or decades honing the craft of producing clear, fast, beautiful code. Now there is something that can spit out (often) beautiful code in seconds. An existential threat to your self worth and livelihood. A perfectly reasonable thing to react to. I do think, however, that this is an inevitable change. Industries and crafts being massively altered by technology is a tale as old as time. In a world that constantly changes, adaptation is key. I also think that almost all of you who have this craft should have no problem pivoting to higher level software architecture design. Work with an llm and produce things it would have taken a small team to do in 2019. I find it to be a very exciting time.
  • fleebee 1y ago
    My job security is pretty low on my list of concerns about LLMs. I wish this technology existed only for vibe coding. I worry about the impact of LLMs to the society at large. These models hit the mainstream only a couple years ago and they already have disastrous effects. Not only people send LLM generated emails to each other, that's actually a selling point for many products. I regularly hear about people using LLMs as doctors and therapists. For many, a chatbot could be their only friend or even a partner. Genuine human-to-human interaction is being replaced by chatbots from a handful of megacorporations. It's hard to avoid it. The internet is being flooded by LLM generated garbage that looks like a human could've written it. It's easier than ever to generate misinformation and propaganda, and as a cherry on top the LLMs even help distribute it. I don't particularly want to live in a society where any of that's considered normal. And that's not even considering the negative impact on the environment. It's hard to be excited about a technology with these downsides that I think severely outweigh any benefits.
    • megaloblasto 1y ago
      That's a very dark point of view. Many countries have severely underdeveloped (or overbooked) healthcare systems. A tool that might help people get answers when they otherwise couldn't is a great thing. I know of nowhere where it is normal to replace your human-to-human contact with a chatbot. In my society people would call that pathological. People have always resisted change in favor of maintaining some idealized version of the past that probably never existed.
• neerajk 1y ago
  "I'm so sick of hearing about bronze. Bronze bronze bronze bronze. Whats wrong with stone? Does stone not work all of a sudden?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyu4u3VZYaQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyu4u3VZYaQ
• unraveller 1y ago
  It's more that big money going towards a clear and desirable endgame is a fairly sure thing. I choose to avoid lots of tech and I won't download the app but it's very hard to see how fighting a promising open tech like LLMs is the "pro-humanity" stance here.
  • th0ma5 1y ago
    There's to me a sole unimpeachable use case... Two SMEs of adjacent fields can work with an LLM SME to find overlaps in research. This is a manual slog of evaluating hints at patterns and holistically trying to discover something and the LLM is only a part of it. All of the other use cases I've heard of have some kind of religious undertone or assumption and leads to people wanting to make blanket summarizing statements to avoid digging into inconvenient realities.
• mmaunder 1y ago
  You can't put an idea as compelling as AI back in the bottle. Once the knowledge of how to build a model, and what the reward is, permeated society, it became an inevitability. Protest all you want and frame it as a choice if you'd like, but the 8 billion people on this planet will simply go around you, much like the sick little boy that the zombies bypassed in World War Z. We've seen this with hand tools, the wheel, horses, steam engines and combustion engines, electricity, TCP/IP and now AI. It is not the manifestation of human preferences. It is instead the irreversible discovery by a species of what is possible in this lonely universe.
  • 1970-01-01 1y ago
    That's positivity hubris. LLMs are as dangerous as they are helpful to society. An AI bottle will be manufactured and then taxed. Society will end up banning it for general use. Just as you can't build and carry a firearm, drive a car, fly an airplane, sell food, or even be prescribed medicine without a license, you will not be able to enjoy unlimited AI without a yearly 'license to LLM' and the appropriate and correct tax forms.
• castigatio 1y ago
  The argument doesn't work because whatever you think of where generative AI is taking us or not taking us - it is 100% demonstrably better at doing a wide range of tasks than other technologies we have available to us - even in its current exact form. Once computers started to be connected could we have stopped the development of the world wide web. If there's a way of getting humanity to collectively agree on things - please let's start by using it to stop climate change and create world peace before moving on to getting rid of LLM's.
  • kevindamm 1y ago
    Slight correction, we have many tools that are demonstrably better and more consistent than LLMs for their intended task; LLMs are just the most generally applicable tool (and the fumes are heady).
    • castigatio 1y ago
      I agree about the value of general application. I do think though that we just don't have the tools to do many things LLM's can do - searching information in a nuanced way and getting nuanced responses is one thing.
  • lwelyk 1y ago
    What tasks is it better at doing than other technologies we have available to us? I'm not being sarcastic, I generally want to know in which areas you think it is better. I can't think of anything off the top of my head that isn't just doing the things that make it a generative AI. (It's better at generating an image that I describe to it, etc, but that's not something that another technology does.)
    • graerg 1y ago
      One very simple use case is making repetitive edits to a YAML (or similar) file. Sure, I can record a vim macro and/or try and conjure up some way to get it done with as few keystrokes as possible and hope I don’t fat finger anything along the way. Or I can just pipe it to llm and say [make this edit], and it just works.
• cwoolfe 1y ago
  From an anthropological standpoint, consider that most every human culture in across time and space has people who play the role of the prophet. They tell us of the future. We are no different.
• komali2 1y ago
  A lot of people are responding with "But it is inevitable." So far as I can tell they're pointing at the normal capitalistic measures to indicate this - OpenAI has a katrillion dollar MMR and investors are throwing money everywhere and thus this will happen. Or, LLMs generate a lot of value, or make labor more efficient, so therefore it must start replacing workers one way or another. Well, great, then I will add another capitalistic inevitability: the waters will rise because there's no profit incentive to prevent this and governments are at worst captured by profit motive and at worse gridlocked by profit motive (e.g. funding oppositional parties so that nothing gets done). The waters will rise and thus there will be refugee crises and thus there will be famine and destabilization, and thus AI will not happen because these things will happen and make AI moot as, one way or another, people become more concerned with food distribution than distribution of labor in the IT field.
  • komali2 1y ago
    At worst captured, at best gridlocked*
• TheMagicHorsey 1y ago
  The author seems to forget that no matter how he "frames" LLMs and AGI more generally, its really not up to him, or even any one nation (or block like the EU) to make this decision about what future they "want". If you can't build an international consensus to, for example, restrict AI, then whatever you say is pointless and someone else will build it and eventually overpower you. The only way that doesn't happen is if AI doesn't produce huge productivity boosts or huge R&D boosts. Does anyone still think that's going to be the case ... that AI is going to be a no-op in the economy? Seems like OP either thinks their wishes will be the world's command (somehow) or that AI won't matter to him if he (and his community) choose not to develop it for themselves. He seems hopelessly naive to me.
• i_love_retros 1y ago
  People and companies that use LLMs will be seen as tacky and cheap. They already are. Eew you have an ai generated profile photo? You write (code) with ai? You use ai to create marketing and graphics? You use non deterministic LLMs to brute force instead of paying humans to write efficient algorithms? Yuck yuck yuck
  • myaccountonhn 1y ago
    Absolutely. When I see an obviously AI generated image its akin to seeing a stock photo. Same goes for these websites that obviously use some stock library for styling.
• dicroce 1y ago
  Most of us that are somewhat into the tech behind AI know that it's all based on simple matrix math... and anyone can do that... So "inevitibalism" is how we sound because we see that if OpenAI doesn't do it, someone else will. Even if all the countries in the world agree to ban AI, its not based on something with actual scarcity (like purified uranium, or gold) so someone somewhere will keep moving this tech forward...
  • scroot 1y ago
    > Even if all the countries in the world agree to ban AI, its not based on something with actual scarcity (like purified uranium, or gold) so someone somewhere will keep moving this tech forward... However, this is the crux of the matter! At issue is whether or not one believes people (individually and/or socially) have the ability to make large decisions about what should or should not be acceptable. Worse -- a culture with _assumed_ inevitability concerning some trend might well bring forth that trend _merely by the assumed inevitability and nothing else_. It is obvious that the scales required to make LLM-style AI effective require extremely large capital investments and infrastructure, and that at the same time there is potentially a lot of money to be made. Both of those aspects -- to me -- point to a lot of "assumed inevitability," in particular when you look at who is making the most boisterous statements and for what reasons.
• i_love_retros 1y ago
  [flagged]
• kianN 1y ago
  I put together a brief report organizing all the comments in this post. Sharing in case it is helpful to anyone else. https://platform.sturdystatistics.com/dash/report/21584058-b852-4317-ac1f-3ab18de5c38b https://platform.sturdystatistics.com/dash/report/21584058-b...
• scioto 1y ago
  (commenting late in the game, so the point may have been made already) I personally believe that "AI" is mostly marketing for the current shiny LLM thing that will end up finding some sort of actual useful niche (or two) once the dust has settled. But for now, it's more of a solution being carpet-bombed for problems, most of them inappropriate IMHO (e.g, replacing HR). For now there'll be collateral damage as carbon-based lifeforms are displaced, with an inevitable shortage of pesky humans to do cleanup once the limitations of "AI" are realized. Any the humans will probably be contract/gig at half their previous rates to do the cleanup.
  • paulcole 1y ago
    > most of them inappropriate IMHO (e.g, replacing HR) What is HR and why is replacing HR with LLM inappropriate? Is there some level of assistance that a person doing HR can gain from using an LLM?
• DanMcInerney 1y ago
  These articles kill me. The reason LLMs (or next-gen AI architecture) is inevitably going to take over the world in one way or another is simple: recursive self-improvement. 3 years ago they could barely write a coherent poem and today they're performing at at least graduate student level across most tasks. As of today, AI is writing a significant chunk of the code around itself. Once AI crosses that threshold of consistently being above senior-level engineer level at coding it will reach a tipping point where it can improve itself faster than the best human expert. That's core technological recursive self-improvement but we have another avenue of recursive self-improvement as well: Agentic recursive self-improvement. First there was LLMs, then there was LLMs with tool usage, then we abstracted the tool usage to MCP servers. Next, we will create agents that autodiscover remote MCP servers, then we will create agents which can autodiscover tools as well as write their own. Final stage of agents are generalized agents similar to Claude Code which can find remote MCP servers, perform a task, then analyze their first run of completing a task to figure out how to improve the process. Then write its own tools to use to complete the task faster than they did before. Agentic recursive self-improvement. As an agent engineer, I suspect this pattern will become viable in about 2 years.
  • wavemode 1y ago
    Well... I guess we'll see.
  • jdauriemma 1y ago
    > they're performing at at least graduate student level across most tasks I strongly disagree with this characterization. I have yet to find an application that can reliably execute this prompt: "Find 90 minutes on my calendar in the next four weeks and book a table at my favorite Thai restaurant for two, outside if available." Forget "graduate-level work," that's stuff I actually want to engage with. What many people really need help with is just basic administrative assistance, and LLMs are way too unpredictable for those use cases.
    • babelfish 1y ago
      OpenAI Operator can do that task easily, assuming you've configured it with your calendar and Yelp login.
• mikewarot 1y ago
  It seemed inevitable that the Internet would allow understanding of other cultures and make future war impossible, as the people united and stood in opposition to oppression and stupidity the world over. Reality worked out differently. I suspect the same is about to happen with our LLM overlords.
• pkdpic 1y ago
  Absolutely perfect blog post. You provoked some new thoughts, convinced me of your position, taught me something concrete and practical about debating, had a human narrative, gave me a good book recommendation, didn't feel manipulative or formulaic, wrote something that an employed person can read in a reasonable amount of time AND most importantly made a solid Matrix reference. You're my blog hero, thank you for being cool and setting a good example. Also really important LLM hype reminder.
• bikemike026 1y ago
  Arguing about AI is like arguing about bulldozers. It's just a tool.
  • CivBase 1y ago
    Yeah but nobody argues that bulldozers are soon going to make human labor obsolete and force us to re-think our economic systems from the ground up. There isn't trillions of dollars being invested into bulldozers expecting big returns. We aren't spinning up nuclear power plants to meet demands for bulldozer production. Bulldozers aren't challenging our legal framework for intellectual property. Companies aren't trying to shove bulldozers down my throat when I try to do mundane tasks like write emails.
• stale2002 1y ago
  I'm not sure what this guy is even advocating for. Is he saying that LLMs should be made illegal or something? Given that they can run on my home PC, I doubt thats going to go well. And if you can't make it illegal, then good luck stopping people from using it. It is inevitable. I certainly am not going to willingly give up those benefits. So everyone else is free to fall behind, I guess, and lose to those who defect and accept the benefits of using LLMs.
• CyanLite2 1y ago
  Article assumes LLMs stay where they currently are or progress only incrementally. Many Fortune 500 companies are seeing real productivity gains through Agentic Workflows to reduce paperwork and bureaucratic layers. Even a marginal 1% improvement can be millions of dollars for these companies. Then you have an entire industry of AI-native startups that can now challenge and rival industry behomeths (OpenAI itself is now starting to rival Google/Microsoft/Amazon and will likely be the next "BigTech" company).
  • contagiousflow 1y ago
    [Citation needed]
• titaniumrain 1y ago
  LLMs aren’t suited for everyone or every task—at least not yet. However, that won’t prevent their adoption in areas where they excel, such as code generation, translation, and similar domains.
• rafaelero 1y ago
  Right now, I’m noticing how my colleagues who aren’t very comfortable using LLMs for most of their work are getting sidelined. It's a bit sad seeing them struggle by not keeping pace with everyone else who is using it for ~90% of our tasks. They seem to really care about writing code themselves, but, if they don't pivot, things are probably not going to end well for them. So is LLM inevitable? Pretty much if you want to remain competitive.
  • feoren 1y ago
    Can I take a guess and say that you and your colleagues are all pretty inexperienced? I'll wager less than 4 years experience max, working in a regimented structure, mostly closing tickets for well-understood features? Because I do not know anyone with >10 years experience working in a well-understood language but a relatively unexplored domain that uses LLMs to create any code. I only see LLMs being widely used by inexperienced programmers (or just new to the language) -- which sucks, because we need inexperienced programmers writing code by hand in order to get more experienced programmers.
    • rafaelero 1y ago
      I have been working in software for about 6 years and we are working in a new startup building our product. LLM's have been fundamental and it makes things so much faster.
    • booleandilemma 1y ago
      Hi, someone with over 10 years of experience here. I finally got around to reading this thread and just saw your comment. Thanks for the sanity.
  • callc 1y ago
    The “use LLMs or you will fall behind” narrative is pearl clutching. I don’t see anywhere in the near future our profession becoming something other than knowledge work. So, at the end of the day training your brain is what matters. Over-reliance on LLM is like skipping the brain gym. Under utilizing LLM may make you slower. There’s a good optimum of putting in the work so you learn and asking LLM If it’s mostly a social phenomenon in your company that non believers are pushed out, that does not seem like a fun place to work.
• bloppe 1y ago
  This inevitabilist framing rests on an often unspoken assumption: that LLM's will decisively outperform human capabilities in myriad domains. If that assumption holds true, then the inevitabilist quotes featured in the article are convincing to me. If LLM's turn out to be less worthwhile at scale than many people assume, the inevitabilist interpretation is another dream of AI summer. Burying the core assumption and focusing on its implication is indeed a fantastic way of framing the argument to win some sort of debate.
  • lucianbr 1y ago
    If <something> then it's inevitable, otherwise it's not? What exactly do you think "inevitable" means? If it depends on something, then by definition it is not inevitable.
  • xandrius 1y ago
    LLMs have already been absolutely worthwhile in many of my projects, so I guess it's already inevitable for me.
    • bloppe 1y ago
      I agree that I get a lot of value out of LLMs. But I also have to clean up after them a lot of the time. It's a far cry from being able to replace a skilled developer working on something non-trivial.
    • dmbche 1y ago
      >that LLM's will decisively outperform human capabilities in myriad domains. Do your LLMs outperform you at your tasks? If not, were they to become more expensive by a non negligible margin, would you at any cost keep using them in their curent state?
      • Spivak 1y ago
        It doesn't have to, it just has to outperform humans on some tasks. Often really simple tedious tasks. Take this whole discussion out of the context of AI and instead look at it as just a machine. Machines outperform humans at all sorts of things, that's why we built them. Your dishwasher outperforms a human because it can wash your dishes on demand for pennies while a human taking that task from you would demand $15/hr. My car vastly outperforms my legs at getting me places. Email outperforms the USPS for correspondence. I don't know if there's a limit to the side of HN comments but I could hit it if I continued. These LLMs are a new tool that can perform tasks autonomously that couldn't be done before, and that's super cool. For some reason people get swept up in the mystique of it all and expect them to replace a human, body and soul, at every task which is kinda silly when discussing an advanced washing machine.
• smeeger 1y ago
  by far the most pervasive idea now is that AGI is inevitable and trying to limit or stop it is impossible. people come to this conclusion without any evidence and without thinking about it very deeply. obviously we could stop it if we wanted to. ive given up trying to explain it to people. they just ignore me and continue believing it anyway.
• lbhdc 1y ago
  Things like this has really got me thinking. If the AI hype all comes to fruition, and you want to ensure good outcomes for yourself, what is the best course of action? Is it really building an AI company in the hopes that you find something that gets traction? Or would a better plan be building a private military force to take AI from whoever gets it? Would VC want to invest in that as a hedge?
• hpincket 1y ago
  I have similar thoughts to the author [0]. I appreciate how they tracked down the three quotes. The only thing I'll add is that there's a certain ambiguity in statements of this kind. They come off as 'matter of fact', but in reality the speakers are pushing for this future. https://hpincket.com/where-the-industry-is-headed.html https://hpincket.com/where-the-industry-is-headed.html
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• sparky4pro 1y ago
  This is a nice article as it triggers “think before you use it” mentality. However, at the same time, it suggests the idea that rational thinking without any deep seated perception or hidden motivation is possible. This is not possible. Therefore, all greedy people in this field will push anything that gives them what they want. They will never care if what they do or promote will help “mankind” to a long term beneficial direction.
• tines 1y ago
  I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...
  • shervinafshar 1y ago
    Not quite in agreement about using this quotation in this context, but for those who care about attribution and credit and such, this is from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World
  • ben_w 1y ago
    I can even hear his voice as I read the quotation. Such a recognisable pattern to his words, somehow never turned cliché by others trying to mimic it.
  • gkanai 1y ago
    > when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; America is a shrine to capitalism. Capitalism has driven most of the outsourcing that American companies did first to Japan (ship building, autos, then semiconductors), then to Korea (again shipbuilding, autos, semiconductors, smartphones), then to Taiwan (shipbuilding, semiconductors). Then to China- which is now a problem because the divergence between the US and CN post-Xi. Tesla and Apple's investments in China specifically supercharged the EV and smartphone industries in China. Yes it meant that those companies benefitted from Chinese manufacturing, but it also trained Chinese industry to build those products at scale. Also America did not reinvest enough in developing new industries or retraining in the regions which lost those industries. America should never have moved critical manufacturing away from the US (certain shipbuilding, latest-edge semis) etc.
• hamilyon2 1y ago
  The optimistic scenario for current ai bubble: long careful deflation, one flop at a time. The cautious scenario of llm usage in daily life: in 36 years, it is invisible and everywhere. Every device has a neural chip. It replaced untold trillions of years of work, reshaped knowledge and artistic work, robotics, became something as boring as email, TV, SAP, or power cable today. Barely anyone is excited. Society is poor, but not hopelessly so. Humanity forgotten LLMs and is hyping gene engineering.
• tim333 1y ago
  The article talks about being thrown off-balance by debating tricks and then proceed to do just that with a kind of bait and switch from talking about AI to talking about LLMs. Eg. it quotes >“AI is the new electricity.” – Andrew Ng as framing AI as kind of inevitable and then flips to >I’m not convinced that LLMs are the future. It seems to me AI is inevitable and LLMs will be replaced soon with some better algorithm. It's like video is inevitable but betamax wasn't. Two different things.
• protocolture 1y ago
  LLMs are going to be around for a long time. The technology being available, is "inevitable". The legal, technological and social consequences are not known, but it is inevitable that whatever they are our kids will have to live with them.
• CommenterPerson 1y ago
  Wow .. adding to the 1426 comments so far. Here is an interview with the author of "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" Professor Shoshana Zuboff, Harvard. Thanks to the OP for the pointer. 3 years old and even more relevant now: https://time.com/6174614/shoshana-zuboff-twitter-surveillance-capitalism/ https://time.com/6174614/shoshana-zuboff-twitter-surveillanc...
• BatmanAoD 1y ago
  Like a lot of blog posts, this feels like a premise worth exploring, lacking a critical exploration of that premise. Yes, "inevitabilism" is a thing, both in tech and in politics. But, crucially, it's not always wrong! Other comments have pointed out examples, such as the internet in the 90s. But when considering new cultural and technological developments that seem like a glimpse of the future, how do we know if they're an inevitability or not? The post says: > what I’m most certain of is that we have choices about what our future should look like, and how we choose to use machines to build it. To me, that sounds like mere wishful thinking. Yeah, sometimes society can turn back the tide of harmful developments; for instance, the ozone layer is well on its way to complete recovery. Other times, even when public opinion is mixed, such as with bitcoin, the technology does become quite successful, but doesn't seem to become quite as ubiquitous as its most fervent adherents expect. So how do we know which category LLM usage falls into? I don't know the answer, because I think it's a difficult thing to know in advance.
• pi_22by7 1y ago
  This is a sharp dissection of ‘inevitabilism’ as a rhetorical strategy. I’ve noticed it too: the moment someone says ‘X is inevitable’, the burden of proof disappears and dissent becomes ‘denial’. But isn’t that framing itself... fragile? We’ve seen plenty of ‘inevitable’ futures (crypto, the Metaverse, even Web3) collapse under public pushback or internal rot. The question I’m left with: if inevitabilism is so effective rhetorically, how do we counter it without sounding naïve or regressive?
• codebolt 1y ago
  The crucial point is that we simply do not know (yet) if there is an inherent limitation in the reasoning capabilities of LLMs, and if so whether we are currently near to pushing up against them. It seems clear that American firms are still going to increase the amount of compute by a lot more (with projects like the Stargate factory), so time will tell if that is the only bottleneck to further progress. There might also still be methodological innovations that can push capabilities further.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• hnbad 1y ago
  What he calls inevitabilism, Chomsky referred to as "manufacturing consent": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent Sure, Chomsky was specifically talking about how the underlying systems of US mass media manufacture consent among the governed but inevitabilism lies at its core: a thought-terminating cliché that eliminates all alternatives from even being legitimate subjects of the debate.
• charlescearl 1y ago
  With respect to the post’s discussion of “surveillance capitalism”, Braverman in Labor and Monopoly Capital (published 1974, https://archive.org/details/labormonopolycap00brav https://archive.org/details/labormonopolycap00brav) makes it clear that Capitalism (particularly with respect to the use of machines for worker exploitation) is never not surveillance.
• NewCalculadora 1y ago
  [dead]
• silexia 1y ago
  I haven't logged into HN to comment or upvote in a long while as I don't want to play the game of trying to fight to get heard... But this is an excellent point. Let's gather together and unite to stop AI... I am not concerned about the jobs issue, I am concerned about the extinction of the human species.
• ringeryless 1y ago
  Spot on. i am disgusted how engineers trained to be rigorous will eschew the rigor of precise specification and instead opt for a nondeterministic blackbox magical oracle emitting little pre-packaged turdlets of incomprehension. Scam Altman is good at sales, and his framing is indeed the key to forcing so many lemmings to submit to 'the inevitable'... the first step in deprogramming such a brainwashed victim is insisting we refer to LLMs and not using the marketing term AI.
• 4htmlgames 1y ago
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• invig 1y ago
  The debate stage is a deliberately constrained environment. The world and where it goes doesn't work like that.
• pyfan878 1y ago
  This is an excellent description of the mood that we are going through right now. It does feel inevitable that AI is going to be part of our life, whether we like or not.
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