5 ms·

This article matches my experience as well. Chatting with LLM has helped me to crystalize ideas I had before and explore relevant topics to widen the understand

This article matches my experience as well. Chatting with LLM has helped me to crystalize ideas I had before and explore relevant topics to widen the understanding. Previously, I wouldn't even know where to begin with when getting curious about something, but ChatGPT can tell you if your ideas have names, if they were explored previously, what primary sources there are. It's like a rabbit hole of exploring the world, a more interconnected one where barriers of entry to knowledge are much lower. It even made me view things I previously thought of as ultra boring in different, more approachable manner - for example, I never liked writing, school essays were a torture, and now I may even consider doing that out of my own will.

snek_case 9mo ago
In the early 2000s Wikipedia used to fill that role. Now it's like you have an encyclopedia that you can talk to. What I'm slightly worried about is that eventually they are going to want to monetize LLMs more and more, and it's not going to be good, because they have the ability to steer the conversation towards trying to get you to buy stuff.
- idiotsecant 9mo ago
  It's also inevitable that better and better open source models will be distilled as frontier models advance.
  - snek_case 9mo ago
    I agree. I think the local models you can run on the "average computer" are not quite good enough yet, but I have hope that we will see much better small local models in the future.
- deadbabe 9mo ago
  Enshittification is always inevitable in a capitalist world, but not always easy to predict how it will happen.
  - marsven_422 9mo ago
    [dead]
- pmarreck 9mo ago
  > they are going to want to monetize LLMs more and more Not only can you run reasonably intelligent models on recent relatively powerful PC's "for free", but advances are undoubtedly coming that will increase the efficient use of memory and CPU in these things- this is all still early-days Also, some of those models are "uncensored"
  - OGEnthusiast 9mo ago
    How do you verify the models you download also aren't trying to get you to buy stuff?
    - awesome_dude 9mo ago
      Proudly bought to you by Slurm
    - tvink 9mo ago
      I guess you.. ask them a bunch of recommendations? I would imagine this would not be incredibly hard to test as a community
      - ben_w 9mo ago
        Before November 30, 2022 that would have worked, but I think it stopped being reliable sometime between the original ChatGPT and today. As per dead internet theory, how confident are we that the community which tells us which LLM is safe or unsafe is itself made of real people, and not mostly astroturfing by the owners of LLMs which are biased to promote things for money? Even DIY testing isn't necessarily enough, deceptive alignment has been shown to be possible as a proof-of-concept for research purposes, and one example of this is date-based: show "good" behaviour before some date, perform some other behaviour after that date.
  - vjk800 9mo ago
    Can you? I imagine e.g. Google is using material not available to the public to train their models (unsencored Google books, etc.). Also, the chat bots, like Gemini, are not just pure LLMs anymore, but they also utilize other tools as part of their computation. I've asked Gemini computationally heavy questions and it successfully invokes Python scripts to answer them. I imagine it can also use other tools than Python, some of which might not even be publicly known. I'm not sure what the situation is currently, but I can easily see private data and private resources leading to much better AI tools, which can not be matched by open source solutions.
- Klaster_1 9mo ago
  One of the approaches to this that I haven't seen being talked about on HN at all is LLM as public infrastructure by the government. I think EU can pull this off. This also addresses overall alignment and compute-poverty issue. I wouldn't mind if my taxes paid for that instead of a ChatGPT subscription.
  - attila-lendvai 9mo ago
    this assumes that "the government" is "us" and not "them"...
  - Nevermark 9mo ago
    This is not a good idea at all. Government should not be in a position to directly and pervasively shape people’s understanding of the world. That would be the infinite regress opposite of a free (in a completely different sense) press. A non-profit providing an open data and training regime for an open WikiBrain would be nice. With standard pricing for scaled up use.
    - squidbeak 9mo ago
      > Government should not be in a position to directly and pervasively shape people’s understanding of the world. You disagree with national curricula, state broadcasters, publicly funded research and public information campaigns?
      - deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]
      - cloverich 9mo ago
        Many Americans these days absolutely do disagree with all of those things. Educated ones. Theres simply a short circuit belief based pathway in peoples brains that bypasses everything rational on arbitrary topics. Most of us used to see it as isolated to religion or niche political points, but increasingly everything os being swept into the "its political" camp.
      - 9mo ago
- resonious 9mo ago
  Right, this is what happened with search engines. And "SEO for LLMs" is already a thing.
- attila-lendvai 9mo ago
  or more generally than just ads: make you believe stuff that makes you act in ways that is detrimental to you, but benefitial to them (whoever sits in the center and can control and shape the LLM). i.e. the Nudge Unit on steroids... care must be taken to avoid that.
- anon_anon12 9mo ago
  I can envision this as being in the boots of Truman from Truman Show where some advertisement is thrown at your face randomly
- michaelbrave 9mo ago
  I sort of already had an experience where it did kinda. I was consulting with it potential fashion choices to upgrade my work uniform, to look professional but still creative, basically to look more like a creative director. It recommended brands, colors, styles etc. Then I was asking about eyeglass frames showed it three pictures, described my facial features and it was like "you have to buy this one now" more enthusiastic than expected. It wasn't ads or anything but there was a bit of salesyness in there.
gradus_ad 9mo ago
I think the best existing "product" analogy for LLM's is coffee. Coffee is a universally available, productivity enhancing commodity. There are some varieties certainly, but at the end of the day, a bean is a bean. It will get the job done. Many love it, many need it, but it doesn't really cost all that much. Where people get fancy is in all the fancy but unnecessary accoutrements for the brewing of coffee. Some choose to spend a lot on appliances that let you brew at home rather than relying on some external provider. But the quality is really no different. Apparently global coffee revenue comes out to around $500B. I would not be surprised if that is around what global AI revenue ends up being in a few years.
- gwilikz 9mo ago
  [dead]
- normie3000 9mo ago
  Enjoyable analogy. > Some choose to spend a lot on appliances that let you brew at home rather than relying on some external provider. This makes it sound like buying brewed coffee is the budget option. But the real budget option I've seen is to brew at home. Almost any household will have an appliance to boil water. Then add instant coffee. I don't understand why, but in my experience instant coffee seems to be the baseline even in coffee-producing countries.
  - arctic-true 9mo ago
    I think the idea is that there are higher startup costs to brew at home. Even a cheap coffee machine is going to cost more than a cup of coffee at a diner, in the same way that a computer that can run a local LLM is going to cost more than a bunch of API calls to a commercial model. Eventually, those diner coffees add up, but you’re stuck with them if you can’t afford the coffee machine.
    - normie3000 9mo ago
      > Even a cheap coffee machine is going to cost more than a cup of coffee at a diner I think I understood but disagree - the cheapest "coffee machine" is a kettle or cooking pot.
afro88 9mo ago
I'm not great with math beyond high school level. But I am very interested in, among many things, analog synthesiser emulations. The "zero delay filter" was a big innovation in the mid 2000s that led to a big jump in emulation accuracy. I tried to understand how they work and hit a brick wall. Recently I had a chat with an LLM and it clicked. I understand how the approximation algorithm works that enables solving for the next sample without the feedback paradox of needing to know it's value to complete the calculation. Just one example of many. It's similar to sitting down with a human and being able to ask questions that they patiently answer so you can understand the information in the context of what you already know. This is huge for students if educational institutions can get past the cheating edge of the double edged sword.
- attila-lendvai 9mo ago
  educational institutions became pretty much obsolete with the advent of the internet (i.e. marginalized the cost of the flow of information). what we need (if anything besides reputation tracking), is (maybe) a separate institution for testing and issuing diplomas... which, BTW, can be trusted more with QA than the very producers themselves. producers = QA has always been such a contradiction of schools...
- fatherwavelet 9mo ago
  audio DSP is a great example. Especially because the proof is in the output if you are then able to make a cool sounding analog filter emulation that you would not have otherwise. I disagree on the students in educational institutions though. This is the biggest thing for the autodidact who doesn't have the privilege of the educational institution. I think of time, money and effort that would be needed to talk to a professor one on one about analog filter emulation. It is not happening for me. There are also societal/social high pass filters to even get in the door for these educational institutions. I would just get filtered out anyway. It seems to me in time that entire concept will simply become null and void.
whatever1 9mo ago
LLM as a rubber duck is a great use case.
- NitpickLawyer 9mo ago
  Especially with the great unlock that was made possible by large (usable) context windows. You can now literally "throw the book" at an LLM and get grounded stuff that is at or above what you could do yourself. But it can be done on-demand, on almost every subject there is, at lower and lower cost.
montag 9mo ago
Wasn’t it George Orwell who said “writing is thinking”?
- Klaster_1 9mo ago
  That sounds true when you have already internalized the idea. But my environment never even suggested in can be approached this way. My school didn't teach me how to write, we just had to. Uni didn't explain this either and that was part of the reason why I dropped out. You can't make progress when you don't know what questions to ask and nobody sees your struggles and provides guidance.

snek_case 9mo ago

In the early 2000s Wikipedia used to fill that role. Now it's like you have an encyclopedia that you can talk to. What I'm slightly worried about is that eventually they are going to want to monetize LLMs more and more, and it's not going to be good, because they have the ability to steer the conversation towards trying to get you to buy stuff.

idiotsecant 9mo ago
It's also inevitable that better and better open source models will be distilled as frontier models advance.
- snek_case 9mo ago
  I agree. I think the local models you can run on the "average computer" are not quite good enough yet, but I have hope that we will see much better small local models in the future.
deadbabe 9mo ago
Enshittification is always inevitable in a capitalist world, but not always easy to predict how it will happen.
- marsven_422 9mo ago
  [dead]
pmarreck 9mo ago
> they are going to want to monetize LLMs more and more Not only can you run reasonably intelligent models on recent relatively powerful PC's "for free", but advances are undoubtedly coming that will increase the efficient use of memory and CPU in these things- this is all still early-days Also, some of those models are "uncensored"
- OGEnthusiast 9mo ago
  How do you verify the models you download also aren't trying to get you to buy stuff?
  - awesome_dude 9mo ago
    Proudly bought to you by Slurm
  - tvink 9mo ago
    I guess you.. ask them a bunch of recommendations? I would imagine this would not be incredibly hard to test as a community
    - ben_w 9mo ago
      Before November 30, 2022 that would have worked, but I think it stopped being reliable sometime between the original ChatGPT and today. As per dead internet theory, how confident are we that the community which tells us which LLM is safe or unsafe is itself made of real people, and not mostly astroturfing by the owners of LLMs which are biased to promote things for money? Even DIY testing isn't necessarily enough, deceptive alignment has been shown to be possible as a proof-of-concept for research purposes, and one example of this is date-based: show "good" behaviour before some date, perform some other behaviour after that date.
- vjk800 9mo ago
  Can you? I imagine e.g. Google is using material not available to the public to train their models (unsencored Google books, etc.). Also, the chat bots, like Gemini, are not just pure LLMs anymore, but they also utilize other tools as part of their computation. I've asked Gemini computationally heavy questions and it successfully invokes Python scripts to answer them. I imagine it can also use other tools than Python, some of which might not even be publicly known. I'm not sure what the situation is currently, but I can easily see private data and private resources leading to much better AI tools, which can not be matched by open source solutions.
Klaster_1 9mo ago
One of the approaches to this that I haven't seen being talked about on HN at all is LLM as public infrastructure by the government. I think EU can pull this off. This also addresses overall alignment and compute-poverty issue. I wouldn't mind if my taxes paid for that instead of a ChatGPT subscription.
- attila-lendvai 9mo ago
  this assumes that "the government" is "us" and not "them"...
- Nevermark 9mo ago
  This is not a good idea at all. Government should not be in a position to directly and pervasively shape people’s understanding of the world. That would be the infinite regress opposite of a free (in a completely different sense) press. A non-profit providing an open data and training regime for an open WikiBrain would be nice. With standard pricing for scaled up use.
  - squidbeak 9mo ago
    > Government should not be in a position to directly and pervasively shape people’s understanding of the world. You disagree with national curricula, state broadcasters, publicly funded research and public information campaigns?
    - deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
    - cloverich 9mo ago
      Many Americans these days absolutely do disagree with all of those things. Educated ones. Theres simply a short circuit belief based pathway in peoples brains that bypasses everything rational on arbitrary topics. Most of us used to see it as isolated to religion or niche political points, but increasingly everything os being swept into the "its political" camp.
    - 9mo ago
resonious 9mo ago
Right, this is what happened with search engines. And "SEO for LLMs" is already a thing.
attila-lendvai 9mo ago
or more generally than just ads: make you believe stuff that makes you act in ways that is detrimental to you, but benefitial to them (whoever sits in the center and can control and shape the LLM). i.e. the Nudge Unit on steroids... care must be taken to avoid that.
anon_anon12 9mo ago
I can envision this as being in the boots of Truman from Truman Show where some advertisement is thrown at your face randomly
michaelbrave 9mo ago
I sort of already had an experience where it did kinda. I was consulting with it potential fashion choices to upgrade my work uniform, to look professional but still creative, basically to look more like a creative director. It recommended brands, colors, styles etc. Then I was asking about eyeglass frames showed it three pictures, described my facial features and it was like "you have to buy this one now" more enthusiastic than expected. It wasn't ads or anything but there was a bit of salesyness in there.

gradus_ad 9mo ago

I think the best existing "product" analogy for LLM's is coffee. Coffee is a universally available, productivity enhancing commodity. There are some varieties certainly, but at the end of the day, a bean is a bean. It will get the job done. Many love it, many need it, but it doesn't really cost all that much. Where people get fancy is in all the fancy but unnecessary accoutrements for the brewing of coffee. Some choose to spend a lot on appliances that let you brew at home rather than relying on some external provider. But the quality is really no different. Apparently global coffee revenue comes out to around $500B. I would not be surprised if that is around what global AI revenue ends up being in a few years.

gwilikz 9mo ago
[dead]
normie3000 9mo ago
Enjoyable analogy. > Some choose to spend a lot on appliances that let you brew at home rather than relying on some external provider. This makes it sound like buying brewed coffee is the budget option. But the real budget option I've seen is to brew at home. Almost any household will have an appliance to boil water. Then add instant coffee. I don't understand why, but in my experience instant coffee seems to be the baseline even in coffee-producing countries.
- arctic-true 9mo ago
  I think the idea is that there are higher startup costs to brew at home. Even a cheap coffee machine is going to cost more than a cup of coffee at a diner, in the same way that a computer that can run a local LLM is going to cost more than a bunch of API calls to a commercial model. Eventually, those diner coffees add up, but you’re stuck with them if you can’t afford the coffee machine.
  - normie3000 9mo ago
    > Even a cheap coffee machine is going to cost more than a cup of coffee at a diner I think I understood but disagree - the cheapest "coffee machine" is a kettle or cooking pot.

afro88 9mo ago

I'm not great with math beyond high school level. But I am very interested in, among many things, analog synthesiser emulations. The "zero delay filter" was a big innovation in the mid 2000s that led to a big jump in emulation accuracy. I tried to understand how they work and hit a brick wall. Recently I had a chat with an LLM and it clicked. I understand how the approximation algorithm works that enables solving for the next sample without the feedback paradox of needing to know it's value to complete the calculation. Just one example of many. It's similar to sitting down with a human and being able to ask questions that they patiently answer so you can understand the information in the context of what you already know. This is huge for students if educational institutions can get past the cheating edge of the double edged sword.

attila-lendvai 9mo ago
educational institutions became pretty much obsolete with the advent of the internet (i.e. marginalized the cost of the flow of information). what we need (if anything besides reputation tracking), is (maybe) a separate institution for testing and issuing diplomas... which, BTW, can be trusted more with QA than the very producers themselves. producers = QA has always been such a contradiction of schools...
fatherwavelet 9mo ago
audio DSP is a great example. Especially because the proof is in the output if you are then able to make a cool sounding analog filter emulation that you would not have otherwise. I disagree on the students in educational institutions though. This is the biggest thing for the autodidact who doesn't have the privilege of the educational institution. I think of time, money and effort that would be needed to talk to a professor one on one about analog filter emulation. It is not happening for me. There are also societal/social high pass filters to even get in the door for these educational institutions. I would just get filtered out anyway. It seems to me in time that entire concept will simply become null and void.

whatever1 9mo ago

LLM as a rubber duck is a great use case.

NitpickLawyer 9mo ago
Especially with the great unlock that was made possible by large (usable) context windows. You can now literally "throw the book" at an LLM and get grounded stuff that is at or above what you could do yourself. But it can be done on-demand, on almost every subject there is, at lower and lower cost.

montag 9mo ago

Wasn’t it George Orwell who said “writing is thinking”?

Klaster_1 9mo ago
That sounds true when you have already internalized the idea. But my environment never even suggested in can be approached this way. My school didn't teach me how to write, we just had to. Uni didn't explain this either and that was part of the reason why I dropped out. You can't make progress when you don't know what questions to ask and nobody sees your struggles and provides guidance.