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Comment by lm28469 | Hacker News Reader

~2 years into the LLM revolution, not a single productivity metric has significantly gone up in any country while we collectively spent hundred of billions on it.

What really happened: LLMs are fuelling the phishing and scam industry like never before, search engine results are shittier than ever, every other website is an automated LLM generated seo placeholder, every other image is ai generated, students are heavily using these techs for homeworks with unknown long term effects, scientists are using them to write their papers: quality--, quantity++, bots on social media increased dramatically and probably playing a huge role in social tensions. You can probably add a few dozen things in the list

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It's unfair to dismiss and simplify this technology when it only just started reaching critical mass ~2 years ago. Looking at history, transformative technologies rarely show immediate productivity gains. The internet took nearly a decade from the early 1990s before we saw clear economic impact. Electricity needed 30 years (1890s-1920s) to significantly transform industrial productivity, as factories had to completely redesign their operations. Personal computers were around since the late 1970s, but their productivity impact wasn't measurable until the late 1980s/early 1990s. Major technological shifts require time for society to develop optimal use cases, build supporting infrastructure, and adapt workflows

Agreed, but is this technology promise too much to bet on a single company? Are we being sold R&D dreams or tangible products?

Compare this with firms that had an actual working product (ex: Lightbulb, Internet, Windows, iPhone) and not the mimics of one (ChatGPT, Bitcoin, Metaverse, Nanotechnology, Quantum).

PS: There is just too much money in the economy now (infused from covid), so chasing speculative investments is expected.

Those "actual" working products had little use until infrastructure was built around it to make it useful. The same could definitely be happening to LLMs, we'll just have to wait and see. It is just way too early to claim that they're a mimic of a product.

People expecting this technology to have such an impact so fast says a lot about the technology

Or how good is its marketing and how gullible and greedy people are. Remember big tech control the fundraising narrative through social media

Not really. A lot of people are happy to take in a metric ton of cash from what is very questionable hype. Nvidia certainly doesn’t mind everyone overselling AI, and neither do CEOs drooling at the thought of AI replacing workers. That’s the reason behind all this insanity.

So your point is: 1. The LLM revolution had no significant positive impact so far 2. A dozen areas (phishing, web search, web content, images, education, science, social media) were completely changed by LLMs for the worst

Your point 2 seems to indicate that the potential for impact is huge. People also think of positive impacts, not only negative ones, that's why they invest.

> People also think of positive impacts, not only negative ones, that's why they invest.

They invest because greedy mfers don't want to miss the next apple or google. They'll throw millions at the walls and see what sticks, remember juicero and theranos ?

> we collectively spent hundred of billions on it

Remember the Metaverse? We are talking about entities that can burn billions on speculative projects and it is just a rounding error on quarterly profits. Let alone that frequently the outlay is in-part recovered via the various "sell shovels in a gold rush" strategies.

This is what total stranglehold of a critical sector helps with. Inefficiency of capital allocation at interplanetary scale - but that's another story.

LLM's might be new but the ML/AI type of efficiency/productivity argument is decades old. The domains where it leads to "gains" are generally when the org deploying algos manages not to be held responsible for the externalities unleashed.

The shorttermism of traditional shareholder capitalism is hardly a more preferable outcome

Companies having more money than god and spending it speculatively at least got us self driving cars

Oligopolistic / Competitive vs Short-termist / Long-term are rather orthogonal dimensions and derive from different types of regulations and incentives.

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