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Comment by crote | Hacker News Reader

> At some point things will mature and we’ll be left with plentiful, cheap, high end LLM access, on the back of the investment that has been made.

Okay, and? What if the demand for LLMs plummets because people get disillusioned due to the failure to solve issues like hallucinations? If nobody is willing to buy, who cares how cheap it gets?

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The idea that people will suddenly decide LLMs are useless after two years of exponential growth in usage is a fantasy.

That's essentially what was said about Tamagotchi in the 90s, and everyone of their "users" was a paying customer.

The problem with generative AI is that its economics are more like steel. Metals used to be extremely valuable due to the amount of effort needed to extract them from ores, but eventually the steel industry matured and steel turned into a commodity with hardly any differentiation. You won't be able to back up your trillion dollar valuations if a competitor is going to undercut you.

You are comparing a toy that had no knowledge exchange, learning or improvement capability, or cult like enterprise adoption with LLM.... You might want to rethink your counter example

Thank you for proving my point. People waiting for a big, sudden crash must insist that the growth is driven solely by hype and FOMO. This is absurd. We’re talking about professionals with decades of experience using these things for hours a day in their area of expertise.

Have you seen the "average" users of LLM? They mostly don't care about hallucinations. It's like that joke[1] "Computer says no", it doesn't matter what is true or real, only that the computer said it, so now that's true in their mind.

Personal anecdote: I work with beginner IT students, and a new, fun (<- sarcasm, not fun) thing for me is the amount of energy they spend arguing with me about basic, easily proven Linux functionality. It's infuriating, the LLM is more believable than the paid professional who's been doing it for 30 years...

I find it highly doubtful that hallucinations, if unsolved, will have any real negative effect on LLM adaptation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_says_no

I think it's possible that people will learn not to trust LLMs.

I think it's possible but highly unlikely, given all the previous iterations of technology we've seen people come to trust despite its limitations.

Like what? Every new form of media has a wild-west phase where people are credulous; eventually people end up jaded.

It won't happen due to Gell-Mann amnesia. It "helps" that LLMs never admit to not knowing something. So from average user point of view it looks like the agents know everything and are only under-educated in the one domain the user is actually the specialist.

> It's infuriating, the LLM is more believable than the paid professional who's been doing it for 30 years...

Swallow your fury, and accept the teachable moments; AI isn’t going away and beginners will continue to trust it when they lack the skills to validate its information on their own.

LLMs are less of a miraculous new world than the hype machine says they are, but they are not nothing. They have some actual uses. It will fulfill those uses. There will be some people who still buy.

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