3 ms·

Things can easily change for the worse, such as a stock market crash. Who knows? Will we get AGI or will we see more homeless? History says... AGI for sure!

wat10000 2mo ago
It's very difficult for this sort of thing to change for the worse. It's basically impossible on the software side. If next year's model is worse then keep using this year's model. Hardware technology can potentially go backwards, but things have to get really bad for that to happen.
- oblio 2mo ago
  LLMs are inherently unreliable. We do already work with unreliable technologies for many things but there's this engineering principle called "use the right tool for the job". And it's a lot more likely that LLMs can't be changed to become unreliable, it's just how they work. So we would need more basic research, that doesn't grow on trees and for which the timelines are basically open ended. Maybe tomorrow, maybe right after cold fusion hits mass adoption.
  - wat10000 2mo ago
    They’ve become a lot more reliable. It would be strange if that progress stopped now. It’s possible. My main point is that they won’t get worse, as the other commenter suggested.
    - DrewADesign 1mo ago
      This isn’t a theoretical or technical problem; in fact, it’s not about the models at all: it’s about the available services getting worse. When they preview a new model and people are benchmarking it, they afford them a shitload of compute and they work great. Then, they get worse. That extra compute is surely in the billions of dollars OpenAI allotted to marketing, and especially in higher-volume periods, people talk about Anthropic‘s responses being lower quality all the time. The finances don’t indicate these companies’ current MOs are sustainable. Since self-hosted models don’t stand a chance of competing with frontier model capabilities, there is a very real chance that the available services will get much worse, and where the rubber hits the road, that’s really all that matters in the foreseeable future.

wat10000 2mo ago

It's very difficult for this sort of thing to change for the worse. It's basically impossible on the software side. If next year's model is worse then keep using this year's model. Hardware technology can potentially go backwards, but things have to get really bad for that to happen.

oblio 2mo ago
LLMs are inherently unreliable. We do already work with unreliable technologies for many things but there's this engineering principle called "use the right tool for the job". And it's a lot more likely that LLMs can't be changed to become unreliable, it's just how they work. So we would need more basic research, that doesn't grow on trees and for which the timelines are basically open ended. Maybe tomorrow, maybe right after cold fusion hits mass adoption.
- wat10000 2mo ago
  They’ve become a lot more reliable. It would be strange if that progress stopped now. It’s possible. My main point is that they won’t get worse, as the other commenter suggested.
  - DrewADesign 1mo ago
    This isn’t a theoretical or technical problem; in fact, it’s not about the models at all: it’s about the available services getting worse. When they preview a new model and people are benchmarking it, they afford them a shitload of compute and they work great. Then, they get worse. That extra compute is surely in the billions of dollars OpenAI allotted to marketing, and especially in higher-volume periods, people talk about Anthropic‘s responses being lower quality all the time. The finances don’t indicate these companies’ current MOs are sustainable. Since self-hosted models don’t stand a chance of competing with frontier model capabilities, there is a very real chance that the available services will get much worse, and where the rubber hits the road, that’s really all that matters in the foreseeable future.