10 ms·

> There are many technologies that have seemed inevitable and seen retreats under the lack of commensurate business return (the supersonic jetliner) I think th

> There are many technologies that have seemed inevitable and seen retreats under the lack of commensurate business return (the supersonic jetliner) I think this is a great analogy, not just to the current state of AI, but maybe even computers and the internet in general. Supersonic transports must've seemed amazing, inevitable, and maybe even obvious to anyone alive at the time of their debut. But hiding under that amazing tech was a whole host of problems that were just not solvable with the technology of the era, let alone a profitable business model. I wonder if computers and the internet are following a similar trajectory to aerospace. Maybe we've basically peaked, and all that's left are optimizations around cost, efficiency, distribution, or convenience. If you time traveled back to the 1970s and talked to most adults, they would have witnessed aerospace go from loud, smelly, and dangerous prop planes to the 707, 747 and Concorde. They would've witnessed the moon landings and were seeing the development of the Space Shuttle. I bet they would call you crazy if you told this person that 50 years later, in 2025, there would be no more supersonic commercial airliners, commercial aviation would basically look the same except more annoying, and also that we haven't been back to the moon. In the previous 50 years we went from the Wright Brothers to the 707! So maybe in 2075 we'll all be watching documentaries about LLMs (maybe even on our phones or laptops that look basically the same), and reminiscing about the mid-2020s and wondering why what seemed to be such a promising technology disappeared almost entirely.

kenjackson 1y ago
I think this is both right and wrong. There was a good book that came out probably 15 years ago about how technology never stops in aggregate, but individual technologies tend to grow quickly and then stall. Airplane jets were one example in the book. The reason why I partially note this as wrong is that even in the 70s people recognized that supersonic travel had real concrete issues with no solution in sight. I don't think LLMs share that characteristic today. A better example, also in the book, are skyscrapers. Each year they grew and new ones were taller than the ones last year. The ability to build them and traverse them increased each year with new technologies to support it. There wasn't a general consensus around issues that would stop growth (except at more extremes like air pressure). But the growth did stop. No one even has expectations of taller skyscrapers any more. LLMs may fail to advance, but not because of any consensus reason that exists today. And it maybe that they serve their purpose to build something on top of them which ends up being far more revolutionary than LLMs. This is more like the path of electricity -- electricity in itself isn't that exciting nowadays, but almost every piece of technology built uses it. I fundamentally find it odd that people seem so against AI. I get the potential dystopian future, which I also don't want. But the more mundane annoyance seems odd to me.
- Earw0rm 1y ago
  There are sound math reasons for skyscrapers topping out, mostly due to elevator capacity and the inability to effectively get people in and out of the floorspace as you go past a few hundred ft. There's no construction engineering reason you can't go taller - the Burj Khalifa, for example, is three times taller than a typical Western major city skyscraper - it just doesn't make economic sense unless you're a newly rich nation looking to prove a point.
  - seanmcdirmid 1y ago
    Economic Concrete construction (what China specializes in) typically tops out at 30-40 floors, so the vast majority of buildings in Asia are that height, a sweet spot so to speak especially for residential (even in limited space HK).
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  > even in the 70s people recognized that supersonic travel had real concrete issues with no solution in sight. I don't think LLMs share that characteristic today I think they pretty strongly do The solution seems to be "just lower your standards for acceptable margin of error to whatever the LLM is capable of producing" which should be concerning and absolutely unacceptable to anyone calling themselves an Engineer
  - Aeolun 1y ago
    > absolutely unacceptable to anyone calling themselves an Engineer Isn’t that exactly what engineers do? Even very strong bridges aren’t designed to survive every possible eventuality.
    - wrs 1y ago
      That's what a "margin of error" is. The margin of error of a bridge is predictable thanks to well-established techniques of physical analysis. An LLM system, on the other hand, can fail because you moved some punctuation around.
Earw0rm 1y ago
From a system optimisation perspective, SSTs solved the wrong problem. Want to save people time flying? Solve the grotesque inefficiency pit that is airport transit and check-in. Like, I'm sorry, STILL no high speed, direct to terminal rail at JFK, LAX and a dozen other major international airports? And that's before we get to the absolute joke of "border security" and luggage check-in. Sure, supersonic afterburning engines are dope. But it's like some 10GHz single-core CPU that pulls 1.2kW out of the wall. Like it or not, an iPhone 16 delivers far more compute utility in far more scenarios.
- dingnuts 1y ago
  SST came and went in an era when none of that security theater existed to begin with
  - Earw0rm 1y ago
    It did for international, maybe not at the dawn of SSTs but after a string of hijackings in the 70s/80s they brought it in. Not for US internal flights, it's true.
- mxschumacher 1y ago
  that's not a technology problem, many airports are super efficient, e.g. Singapore. Public transport in the US is held back by other forces.
  - Earw0rm 1y ago
    It makes it all the dumber that we have the tech and still can't manage to implement the solution. Like an org with crappy management and team structure shipping bloated, buggy code even though they've the budget to hire great engineers and the problems they're solving are largely known and well-trodden.
- Lu2025 1y ago
  They don't optimize for our convenience, they optimize for their profit.
SJC_Hacker 1y ago
The problem with supersonic commercial jets was mainly one of marketing/politics. The so called "sonic boom" problem was vastly overhyped, as anyone who lives near an air force base can tell you. The conspiracy theorist tells me the American aerospace manufacturers at the time (Boening, McDonnell-Douglas, etc.), did everything they could to kill the Concorde. With limited flyable routes (NYC and DC to Paris and London I think were the only ones), the financials didn't make sense. If overland routes were available, especially opening up LA, San Francisco and Chicago, it might have been a different story.
- tptacek 1y ago
  Seems... wrong. Booms broke windows and drove zillions of complaints. Supersonic flight near airbases is controlled and happens on specific traffic corridors, right?
- rightbyte 1y ago
  > The so called "sonic boom" problem was vastly overhyped, as anyone who lives near an air force base can tell you. The pilots don't shit where they eat. Ask some farmer a bit further away how many sheep die a year from panic instead.
- hollerith 1y ago
  >as anyone who lives near an air force base can tell you. In the US, the Air Force is simply not allowed to fly supersonic anywhere near a city or a suburb with only a few exceptions. One exception is Edwards Air Force Base in the California desert: there are houses nearby, but the base (and supersonic warplanes) preceded the construction of the homes, so the reasoning is that the home builders and home buyers knew what they were buying into. Another exception (quoting Google Gemini): >From 1964 to 1966, the FAA and U.S. Air Force conducted supersonic flights over St. Louis and other cities like Oklahoma City to gauge public reaction to daily sonic booms. The goal was to understand public tolerance for commercial supersonic transport (SST) operations. Reactions in St. Louis, as elsewhere, were largely negative, contributing to the eventual ban on commercial supersonic flight over land in the U.S. Have you have experienced sonic booms? I have (when my family visited West Germany in 1970) and I certainly would not want to be subjected to them regularly.
Lu2025 1y ago
Oh no, LLMs won't disappear but they will be a lot less loud. Progress is often an S shaped curve and we are nearing saturation.
hilux 1y ago
> So maybe in 2075 we'll all be watching documentaries about LLMs (maybe even on our phones or laptops that look basically the same), and reminiscing about the mid-2020s and wondering why what seemed to be such a promising technology disappeared almost entirely. It's hard for me to believe that anyone who works with technology in general, and LLMs in particular, could think this.
- player1234 1y ago
  Technology has been stagnant for over 50 years, so it is easy to believe if you live in reality. But sure if you exclusively look at the one field that has been advancing until about now I can see how one would end up where you are. But this is exactly right, we are incrementally moving into the lamest cyberpunk future one can imagine, and we have been for some time.
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.
- eschaton 1y ago
  What reasoning capabilities?
  - codebolt 1y ago
    You are simply deluding yourself if you still refuse to accept that LLMs are capable of some level of reasoning.
    - eschaton 1y ago
      Nah. I’m pretty sure I’m not the one being deluded here.
yieldcrv 1y ago
slower, no fast option, no smoking in the cabins, less leg room, but with TVs plastered on the back of every chair, sometimes its actually kind of scary to think of a world where generative AI in the cloud goes away due to costs, in favor of some other lesser chimera version that can't currently be predicted but good news is that locally run generative AI is still getting better and better with fewer and fewer resources consumed to use
gniv 1y ago
I don't think we're anywhere near peak capability for LLMs yet. It won't take 50 years but still it's been just 4 years.

kenjackson 1y ago

I think this is both right and wrong. There was a good book that came out probably 15 years ago about how technology never stops in aggregate, but individual technologies tend to grow quickly and then stall. Airplane jets were one example in the book. The reason why I partially note this as wrong is that even in the 70s people recognized that supersonic travel had real concrete issues with no solution in sight. I don't think LLMs share that characteristic today. A better example, also in the book, are skyscrapers. Each year they grew and new ones were taller than the ones last year. The ability to build them and traverse them increased each year with new technologies to support it. There wasn't a general consensus around issues that would stop growth (except at more extremes like air pressure). But the growth did stop. No one even has expectations of taller skyscrapers any more. LLMs may fail to advance, but not because of any consensus reason that exists today. And it maybe that they serve their purpose to build something on top of them which ends up being far more revolutionary than LLMs. This is more like the path of electricity -- electricity in itself isn't that exciting nowadays, but almost every piece of technology built uses it. I fundamentally find it odd that people seem so against AI. I get the potential dystopian future, which I also don't want. But the more mundane annoyance seems odd to me.

Earw0rm 1y ago
There are sound math reasons for skyscrapers topping out, mostly due to elevator capacity and the inability to effectively get people in and out of the floorspace as you go past a few hundred ft. There's no construction engineering reason you can't go taller - the Burj Khalifa, for example, is three times taller than a typical Western major city skyscraper - it just doesn't make economic sense unless you're a newly rich nation looking to prove a point.
- seanmcdirmid 1y ago
  Economic Concrete construction (what China specializes in) typically tops out at 30-40 floors, so the vast majority of buildings in Asia are that height, a sweet spot so to speak especially for residential (even in limited space HK).
bluefirebrand 1y ago
> even in the 70s people recognized that supersonic travel had real concrete issues with no solution in sight. I don't think LLMs share that characteristic today I think they pretty strongly do The solution seems to be "just lower your standards for acceptable margin of error to whatever the LLM is capable of producing" which should be concerning and absolutely unacceptable to anyone calling themselves an Engineer
- Aeolun 1y ago
  > absolutely unacceptable to anyone calling themselves an Engineer Isn’t that exactly what engineers do? Even very strong bridges aren’t designed to survive every possible eventuality.
  - wrs 1y ago
    That's what a "margin of error" is. The margin of error of a bridge is predictable thanks to well-established techniques of physical analysis. An LLM system, on the other hand, can fail because you moved some punctuation around.

Earw0rm 1y ago

From a system optimisation perspective, SSTs solved the wrong problem. Want to save people time flying? Solve the grotesque inefficiency pit that is airport transit and check-in. Like, I'm sorry, STILL no high speed, direct to terminal rail at JFK, LAX and a dozen other major international airports? And that's before we get to the absolute joke of "border security" and luggage check-in. Sure, supersonic afterburning engines are dope. But it's like some 10GHz single-core CPU that pulls 1.2kW out of the wall. Like it or not, an iPhone 16 delivers far more compute utility in far more scenarios.

dingnuts 1y ago
SST came and went in an era when none of that security theater existed to begin with
- Earw0rm 1y ago
  It did for international, maybe not at the dawn of SSTs but after a string of hijackings in the 70s/80s they brought it in. Not for US internal flights, it's true.
mxschumacher 1y ago
that's not a technology problem, many airports are super efficient, e.g. Singapore. Public transport in the US is held back by other forces.
- Earw0rm 1y ago
  It makes it all the dumber that we have the tech and still can't manage to implement the solution. Like an org with crappy management and team structure shipping bloated, buggy code even though they've the budget to hire great engineers and the problems they're solving are largely known and well-trodden.
Lu2025 1y ago
They don't optimize for our convenience, they optimize for their profit.

SJC_Hacker 1y ago

The problem with supersonic commercial jets was mainly one of marketing/politics. The so called "sonic boom" problem was vastly overhyped, as anyone who lives near an air force base can tell you. The conspiracy theorist tells me the American aerospace manufacturers at the time (Boening, McDonnell-Douglas, etc.), did everything they could to kill the Concorde. With limited flyable routes (NYC and DC to Paris and London I think were the only ones), the financials didn't make sense. If overland routes were available, especially opening up LA, San Francisco and Chicago, it might have been a different story.

tptacek 1y ago
Seems... wrong. Booms broke windows and drove zillions of complaints. Supersonic flight near airbases is controlled and happens on specific traffic corridors, right?
rightbyte 1y ago
> The so called "sonic boom" problem was vastly overhyped, as anyone who lives near an air force base can tell you. The pilots don't shit where they eat. Ask some farmer a bit further away how many sheep die a year from panic instead.
hollerith 1y ago
>as anyone who lives near an air force base can tell you. In the US, the Air Force is simply not allowed to fly supersonic anywhere near a city or a suburb with only a few exceptions. One exception is Edwards Air Force Base in the California desert: there are houses nearby, but the base (and supersonic warplanes) preceded the construction of the homes, so the reasoning is that the home builders and home buyers knew what they were buying into. Another exception (quoting Google Gemini): >From 1964 to 1966, the FAA and U.S. Air Force conducted supersonic flights over St. Louis and other cities like Oklahoma City to gauge public reaction to daily sonic booms. The goal was to understand public tolerance for commercial supersonic transport (SST) operations. Reactions in St. Louis, as elsewhere, were largely negative, contributing to the eventual ban on commercial supersonic flight over land in the U.S. Have you have experienced sonic booms? I have (when my family visited West Germany in 1970) and I certainly would not want to be subjected to them regularly.

Lu2025 1y ago

Oh no, LLMs won't disappear but they will be a lot less loud. Progress is often an S shaped curve and we are nearing saturation.

hilux 1y ago

> So maybe in 2075 we'll all be watching documentaries about LLMs (maybe even on our phones or laptops that look basically the same), and reminiscing about the mid-2020s and wondering why what seemed to be such a promising technology disappeared almost entirely. It's hard for me to believe that anyone who works with technology in general, and LLMs in particular, could think this.

player1234 1y ago
Technology has been stagnant for over 50 years, so it is easy to believe if you live in reality. But sure if you exclusively look at the one field that has been advancing until about now I can see how one would end up where you are. But this is exactly right, we are incrementally moving into the lamest cyberpunk future one can imagine, and we have been for some time.

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.

eschaton 1y ago
What reasoning capabilities?
- codebolt 1y ago
  You are simply deluding yourself if you still refuse to accept that LLMs are capable of some level of reasoning.
  - eschaton 1y ago
    Nah. I’m pretty sure I’m not the one being deluded here.

yieldcrv 1y ago

slower, no fast option, no smoking in the cabins, less leg room, but with TVs plastered on the back of every chair, sometimes its actually kind of scary to think of a world where generative AI in the cloud goes away due to costs, in favor of some other lesser chimera version that can't currently be predicted but good news is that locally run generative AI is still getting better and better with fewer and fewer resources consumed to use

gniv 1y ago

I don't think we're anywhere near peak capability for LLMs yet. It won't take 50 years but still it's been just 4 years.