4 ms·

It's worth questioning the underlying assumptions. It's humans - all humans - that benefit from LLMs. I see a lot of people having this attitude, but I can't he

It's worth questioning the underlying assumptions. It's humans - all humans - that benefit from LLMs. I see a lot of people having this attitude, but I can't help but see it as really being about seeking credit instead of generosity, and/or Dog in the Manger mindset.

davebren 7mo ago
I'm not seeing how the benefits have outweighed the positives at this point. Spam, scams, porn, being inundated with slop, people losing their skills and getting dumber, mass surveillance... Is that worth possibly maybe saving some time programming, but then not gaining the knowledge you would have if you did it yourself, that can be built on in the future? I don't see technological advancement as good in itself if morality is in decline.
- hirako2000 7mo ago
  I reached the same conclusion. It also made me realised how most technologies degraded our lives. Before the TV people would go to the theatre. It's becoming hard to find a theatre these days. Artificial light is convenient, it made billion or people develop sleep disorder and we can't see stars at at night. Mass food production supposedly nourished more people: veggies today have 20% the minerals content they had 70y ago..the list go on and on.
  - dasil003 7mo ago
    I think it's more fair to say that with every technology there are tradeoffs. Consider the wheel, before the wheel people probably were more physically fit, but they couldn't move as large of loads. Well, except in the Andes where they figured out how to move gigantic stones well beyond the weight that any wooden wheel would have been able to carry anyway and cut and place them into configurations that were earthquake resistant. Technology and civilization is path dependent, and I think it's silly to make blanket statements about the merit of technological progress overall. Everything choice (including the choice to do nothing) has unintended consequences. I would never condemn anyone for inventing a new technological solution to a problem, but once the systematic effects are understood then we do need the collective ability to course correct (eg. social media, AI, etc).
    - hirako2000 7mo ago
      Everything has tradeoffs. I imply technology rarely yields a net positive. I could call out the positive, those are so obvious. It's the subtle cost of the benefits that almost never gets discussed.
      - dasil003 7mo ago
        > technology rarely yields a net positive This is a super bold statement that I guest most people would disagree with, and I suspect if you somehow brought people forward from the past, even fewer would agree with. I do agree with you the subtle cost is rarely discussed. I also would say that the unintended consequences of technology are sometimes very very bad in unforeseeable ways, but that's very different from the "net negative" framing which I think is too reductive to be useful. Technology is not a zero sum game, effects are multifaceted, so any quantitative comparison relies on extremely subjective value judgements.
  - azan_ 7mo ago
    > Mass food production supposedly nourished more people: veggies today have 20% the minerals content they had 70y ago..the list go on and on. I suggest you should have a look at malnutrition rates 100 years ago vs now. Without mass food production we would not be able to sustain even 50% of current population.
    - mountainb 7mo ago
      Why would that be bad? Why is more better?
      - TeMPOraL 7mo ago
        Would you ask that your starving great-n-grandparents worried about whether they're able to feed the infant that would later become your ancestor?
        djeastm 7mo ago
        Isn't that a food distribution problem not a food production one?
        TeMPOraL 7mo ago
        It is now, because of mass production, industrialization of agriculture, and Haber Bosch process.
      - azan_ 7mo ago
        Do YOU want to die of starvation? Or are you ok with just others dying?
        hirako2000 7mo ago
        typical emotionally charged, false dichotomy. To your question I'm not ok with either. We will likely ALL die from the impact of industrialization.
  - yw3410 7mo ago
    It's odd to me that you live in a place where it's hard to find a theatre. Living in a cosmopolitan city there's so many theatres with anything from professional shows to amateur dramatics all at very reasonable price points.
    - hirako2000 7mo ago
      Sure, Edinburgh, London, New York, got plenty enough. My point is that technology displaces or replace activities. In many cities there are no theatre. To be clear I meant performance theatres by the way. We used to consume live performance. Drama, dance and whatnot. Comedy for instance is now for the masses, more or less controlled. Costing pennies to distribute via air or streaming platforms. They compete with a more valuable but harder to afford media. so they win. Is it a net positive that we can converse in almost real time for virtually no cost, with niche communities on the other side of the world. Yes. Anyone can still walk into a Café or the park and engage in conversations with others. But overall, the compounding of all tech advancements and what they displace, I think, is an overall net negative. Not because I'm an anti progress or losing my job because of technology, quite the opposite. I sat down and wrote down the list. How technology enables VS affects me personally, and other persona. From upperclass worker in New York, to the cocoa bean farmer in Ivory Coast. Overall it appears that technology isn't benefitial to humanity. I then challenge those who disagree. Typically, they haven't taken into account the negative seriously. The few who concede to do so, eventually agree that the question is in fact complicated and abandon the debate. It doesn't mean I'm right. I read the detractors in there, perhaps there is something I missed. So far there isn't.
shimman 7mo ago
Humans aren't benefiting from LLMs, only a few individuals are. Let's stop with the fake platitudes and realize that unless this technology isn't completely open sourced from top to bottom, it's a complete farce to think humans are going to benefit and not just the rich getting richer.
- altruios 7mo ago
  Gemma4 is apache2 licensed. I am unsure about the openness of the training data itself. That too should be required for a LLM to be considered 'open'. Open source is the only way forward, I agree.
- rubslopes 7mo ago
  > Humans aren't benefiting from LLMs, only a few individuals are. Honest question: how is this different from traditional Open Source? Linux powers most of the internet, yet the biggest beneficiaries are cloud providers, not individual users. Good open weights models already exist and people can run them locally. The gap between "open" and "everyone benefits equally" has always been there...
  - TeMPOraL 7mo ago
    Same is true about science as well. Taxpayer money is spent on research, but the outcomes of that research primarily benefits the corporate interests. I'm the last person to cheer for unrestrained capitalism, but this anti-billionaire / anti-AI narrative is getting ridiculous even for general population standards, much less for HN. It's like people think their food or medicine or LLMs grow on fucking trees. No. Companies and corporations is how adults do stuff for other adults, at scale. Everyone understands that, except of a part of software industry, that by accidental confluence of factors, works by different rules than literally the rest of the world.
  - watwut 7mo ago
    Because opposite is true for open source? It is actually for free, whether you contribute to it or not. Anyone can legally use it for free. Torwalds can not just wake up one day and decide to charge more. If you feel like linux is a too much of a monopoly, you can actually fork it and compete.
balamatom 7mo ago
> seeking credit instead of generosity, and/or Dog in the Manger mindset. I have tried being generous to enemies. It only turns them them into... bigger, hungrier enemies. I'm happy with never getting "credit" for anything I "accomplish" (whatever those notions even mean under a system where thoughts can be property). I mean: as long as my labor output cannot be subverted to benefit hostiles even the tiniest bit. > It's humans - all humans - that benefit from LLMs The set of "all humans" includes that power-hungry majority who find nothing wrong with subjecting other sentient beings to sadistic treatment. Those who, as soon as they take notice of me - or my kind, or our speech, or our trail - more often than not become terrified into outright aggression. So far we had been protected from their stupidity and lack of imagination, by their stupidity and lack of imagination. Now they've had brain prostheses developed for 'em, and... well I can't really do much for those who haven't already begun to reevaluate their baseline safety, now can I?
cyclopeanutopia 7mo ago
Corporations are not humans. And while sociopaths - who benefit the most from corporations - technically are humans, I don't consider them parts of humanity, more like a cancer tissue on top of it. So whatever benefit humanity gets is more than cancelled by the growing cancer.
- TeMPOraL 7mo ago
  So I am to assume you're not using LLMs yourself, or any technology employing those models in the pipeline (which at this point includes many features in smartphones made in the last 3 years)? If that's not the case, then you are a beneficiary too.
  - cyclopeanutopia 7mo ago
    There are some local benefits, there are some local and global costs. My point is that we are in a strongly net negative situation, mr Jack.
  - balamatom 7mo ago
    "Samantha Altgirl and the Involuntary Beneficiaries" (Russian doomer band)
  - card_zero 7mo ago
    Is the argument "LLMs must be greatly beneficial because they get everywhere"?
- balamatom 7mo ago
  The concept of "sociopaths" is more of a cop-out than anything. It amounts to a (vaguely pseudoscientific) dehumanization of those whose modus operandi transgresses our values most severely. Imagining a subset of the population as literal cancer cells does not help us understand better the systemic issue which makes those people benefit disproportionately from metahuman entities (such as corporations or political agglomerations).
  - 7mo ago
watwut 7mo ago
> It's humans - all humans - that benefit from LLMs This is not true tho. The moment LLM will be necessary, we will all have to pay to the monopoly owners, as much as they can extract. But, they will never pay to us.

davebren 7mo ago

I'm not seeing how the benefits have outweighed the positives at this point. Spam, scams, porn, being inundated with slop, people losing their skills and getting dumber, mass surveillance... Is that worth possibly maybe saving some time programming, but then not gaining the knowledge you would have if you did it yourself, that can be built on in the future? I don't see technological advancement as good in itself if morality is in decline.

hirako2000 7mo ago
I reached the same conclusion. It also made me realised how most technologies degraded our lives. Before the TV people would go to the theatre. It's becoming hard to find a theatre these days. Artificial light is convenient, it made billion or people develop sleep disorder and we can't see stars at at night. Mass food production supposedly nourished more people: veggies today have 20% the minerals content they had 70y ago..the list go on and on.
- dasil003 7mo ago
  I think it's more fair to say that with every technology there are tradeoffs. Consider the wheel, before the wheel people probably were more physically fit, but they couldn't move as large of loads. Well, except in the Andes where they figured out how to move gigantic stones well beyond the weight that any wooden wheel would have been able to carry anyway and cut and place them into configurations that were earthquake resistant. Technology and civilization is path dependent, and I think it's silly to make blanket statements about the merit of technological progress overall. Everything choice (including the choice to do nothing) has unintended consequences. I would never condemn anyone for inventing a new technological solution to a problem, but once the systematic effects are understood then we do need the collective ability to course correct (eg. social media, AI, etc).
  - hirako2000 7mo ago
    Everything has tradeoffs. I imply technology rarely yields a net positive. I could call out the positive, those are so obvious. It's the subtle cost of the benefits that almost never gets discussed.
    - dasil003 7mo ago
      > technology rarely yields a net positive This is a super bold statement that I guest most people would disagree with, and I suspect if you somehow brought people forward from the past, even fewer would agree with. I do agree with you the subtle cost is rarely discussed. I also would say that the unintended consequences of technology are sometimes very very bad in unforeseeable ways, but that's very different from the "net negative" framing which I think is too reductive to be useful. Technology is not a zero sum game, effects are multifaceted, so any quantitative comparison relies on extremely subjective value judgements.
- azan_ 7mo ago
  > Mass food production supposedly nourished more people: veggies today have 20% the minerals content they had 70y ago..the list go on and on. I suggest you should have a look at malnutrition rates 100 years ago vs now. Without mass food production we would not be able to sustain even 50% of current population.
  - mountainb 7mo ago
    Why would that be bad? Why is more better?
    - TeMPOraL 7mo ago
      Would you ask that your starving great-n-grandparents worried about whether they're able to feed the infant that would later become your ancestor?
      - djeastm 7mo ago
        Isn't that a food distribution problem not a food production one?
        TeMPOraL 7mo ago
        It is now, because of mass production, industrialization of agriculture, and Haber Bosch process.
    - azan_ 7mo ago
      Do YOU want to die of starvation? Or are you ok with just others dying?
      - hirako2000 7mo ago
        typical emotionally charged, false dichotomy. To your question I'm not ok with either. We will likely ALL die from the impact of industrialization.
- yw3410 7mo ago
  It's odd to me that you live in a place where it's hard to find a theatre. Living in a cosmopolitan city there's so many theatres with anything from professional shows to amateur dramatics all at very reasonable price points.
  - hirako2000 7mo ago
    Sure, Edinburgh, London, New York, got plenty enough. My point is that technology displaces or replace activities. In many cities there are no theatre. To be clear I meant performance theatres by the way. We used to consume live performance. Drama, dance and whatnot. Comedy for instance is now for the masses, more or less controlled. Costing pennies to distribute via air or streaming platforms. They compete with a more valuable but harder to afford media. so they win. Is it a net positive that we can converse in almost real time for virtually no cost, with niche communities on the other side of the world. Yes. Anyone can still walk into a Café or the park and engage in conversations with others. But overall, the compounding of all tech advancements and what they displace, I think, is an overall net negative. Not because I'm an anti progress or losing my job because of technology, quite the opposite. I sat down and wrote down the list. How technology enables VS affects me personally, and other persona. From upperclass worker in New York, to the cocoa bean farmer in Ivory Coast. Overall it appears that technology isn't benefitial to humanity. I then challenge those who disagree. Typically, they haven't taken into account the negative seriously. The few who concede to do so, eventually agree that the question is in fact complicated and abandon the debate. It doesn't mean I'm right. I read the detractors in there, perhaps there is something I missed. So far there isn't.

shimman 7mo ago

Humans aren't benefiting from LLMs, only a few individuals are. Let's stop with the fake platitudes and realize that unless this technology isn't completely open sourced from top to bottom, it's a complete farce to think humans are going to benefit and not just the rich getting richer.

altruios 7mo ago
Gemma4 is apache2 licensed. I am unsure about the openness of the training data itself. That too should be required for a LLM to be considered 'open'. Open source is the only way forward, I agree.
rubslopes 7mo ago
> Humans aren't benefiting from LLMs, only a few individuals are. Honest question: how is this different from traditional Open Source? Linux powers most of the internet, yet the biggest beneficiaries are cloud providers, not individual users. Good open weights models already exist and people can run them locally. The gap between "open" and "everyone benefits equally" has always been there...
- TeMPOraL 7mo ago
  Same is true about science as well. Taxpayer money is spent on research, but the outcomes of that research primarily benefits the corporate interests. I'm the last person to cheer for unrestrained capitalism, but this anti-billionaire / anti-AI narrative is getting ridiculous even for general population standards, much less for HN. It's like people think their food or medicine or LLMs grow on fucking trees. No. Companies and corporations is how adults do stuff for other adults, at scale. Everyone understands that, except of a part of software industry, that by accidental confluence of factors, works by different rules than literally the rest of the world.
- watwut 7mo ago
  Because opposite is true for open source? It is actually for free, whether you contribute to it or not. Anyone can legally use it for free. Torwalds can not just wake up one day and decide to charge more. If you feel like linux is a too much of a monopoly, you can actually fork it and compete.

balamatom 7mo ago

> seeking credit instead of generosity, and/or Dog in the Manger mindset. I have tried being generous to enemies. It only turns them them into... bigger, hungrier enemies. I'm happy with never getting "credit" for anything I "accomplish" (whatever those notions even mean under a system where thoughts can be property). I mean: as long as my labor output cannot be subverted to benefit hostiles even the tiniest bit. > It's humans - all humans - that benefit from LLMs The set of "all humans" includes that power-hungry majority who find nothing wrong with subjecting other sentient beings to sadistic treatment. Those who, as soon as they take notice of me - or my kind, or our speech, or our trail - more often than not become terrified into outright aggression. So far we had been protected from their stupidity and lack of imagination, by their stupidity and lack of imagination. Now they've had brain prostheses developed for 'em, and... well I can't really do much for those who haven't already begun to reevaluate their baseline safety, now can I?

cyclopeanutopia 7mo ago

Corporations are not humans. And while sociopaths - who benefit the most from corporations - technically are humans, I don't consider them parts of humanity, more like a cancer tissue on top of it. So whatever benefit humanity gets is more than cancelled by the growing cancer.

TeMPOraL 7mo ago
So I am to assume you're not using LLMs yourself, or any technology employing those models in the pipeline (which at this point includes many features in smartphones made in the last 3 years)? If that's not the case, then you are a beneficiary too.
- cyclopeanutopia 7mo ago
  There are some local benefits, there are some local and global costs. My point is that we are in a strongly net negative situation, mr Jack.
- balamatom 7mo ago
  "Samantha Altgirl and the Involuntary Beneficiaries" (Russian doomer band)
- card_zero 7mo ago
  Is the argument "LLMs must be greatly beneficial because they get everywhere"?
balamatom 7mo ago
The concept of "sociopaths" is more of a cop-out than anything. It amounts to a (vaguely pseudoscientific) dehumanization of those whose modus operandi transgresses our values most severely. Imagining a subset of the population as literal cancer cells does not help us understand better the systemic issue which makes those people benefit disproportionately from metahuman entities (such as corporations or political agglomerations).
- 7mo ago

watwut 7mo ago

> It's humans - all humans - that benefit from LLMs This is not true tho. The moment LLM will be necessary, we will all have to pay to the monopoly owners, as much as they can extract. But, they will never pay to us.