Are LLMs really going to own the world?
They're a wildly overhyped solution in search of a problem.
* "I know how this works and it's just numbers all the way down" is not an argument of any validity, just to be clear- everything eventually is just physics, blind mechanics.
The amount of “work” done there is staggering and yet adoption appears abysmal, using such solutions with success only happens as part of a really “well oiled” machine.
And what about the simple difficulty going from 99% to 99.9%. What percentage are we even talking about today? We don’t know, but very rich people think it is cool and blindly keep investing more billions.
It's fine to chase hype for hobbyist or starter projects, but part of being an engineer is understanding how things actually work and what their limitations are.
It's not a virtue to deify a statistics model and make it your entire personality.
Maybe LLMs can't work on huge code bases yet, but for writing bespoke software for individuals who need a computer to do xyz but can't speak the language, it already is working wonders.
Being dismissive of LLMs while sitting above their current scope of capabilities gives strong Microsoft 2007 vibes; "The iPhone is a laughable device that presents no threat to windows mobile".
its also not just about code base size, but also about your expectation of output quality/correctness.
If you aren't an engineer, I get why you think it's magic. Everything is magic when you don't understand how it works.
Nobody thought the iPhone was magic. It was an instant hit because the capabilities were immediate and obvious, and Apple had a long history of being able to execute.
If you find it useful, by all means, use it. But this is the new blockchain.
I think the idea that the United States "owns" Grok 3 would be news to Musk and the idea it "owns" ChatGPT would be news to Altman.
Having hardware and software suppliers all together makes it more likely even if you assume (like I do) that we're at least one paradigm shift away from the right architecture, despite how impressively general Transformers have been.
But software is easy to exfiltrate, so I think anyone with hardware alone can catch up extremely fast.
If one country moves along this direction faster than the others, no country will stand a chance to compete with them militarily or economically.
It really depends on how they go about it. It can easily instead end up with lots of people without work, no social security and disillusioned with the country. Instead of being economically great, the country may end up fighting uprisings and sabotage.
ASI also will not be magic. Like what exactly would it be doing that enables the country to subject the others? Develop new weapons? We already have the capability to destroy earth. Actually come to think of it, if ASI is an existential threat to other nations, maybe the rational action would be to nuke whichever country develops it first. To safe the world.
You see what I am saying? There is such a thing as the real world with real constraints.
I have not noticed companies or colleagues 10x'ing (hell, or even 1.5x'ing) their productivity from these tools. What am I missing?
I see people getting replaced by AI left and right.
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