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Comment by jama211 | Hacker News Reader

You’re attacking one or two examples mentioned in their comment, when we could step back and see that in reality you’re pushing against the general scientific consensus. Which you’re free to do, but I suspect an ideological motivation behind it.

To me, the arguments sound like “there’s no proof typewriters provide any economic value to the world, as writers are fast enough with a pen to match them and the bottleneck of good writing output for a novel or a newspaper is the research and compilation parts, not the writing parts. Not to mention the best writers swear by writing and editing with a pen and they make amazing work”.

All arguments that are not incorrect and that sound totally reasonable in the moment, but in 10 years everyone is using typewriters and there are known efficiency gains for doing so.

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I'm not saying LLMs are useless. But the value they have provided so far does not justify covering the country in datacenters and the scale of investment overall (not even close!).

The only justification for that would be "superintelligence," but we don't know if this is even the right way of achieve that.

(Also I suspect the only reason why they are as cheap as they are is because of all the insane amount of money they've been given. They're going to have to increase their prices.)

Well, obviously there’s a bubble of overinvestment. That point is fair.

Quite a large bubble. The burden of proof for demonstrating the enormous economic value LLMs are providing really is yours. Sure, there are anecdotal benefits to using LLMs, but we haven't seen any evidence that in aggregate businesses across America are benefitting. Other than AI companies, the stock market isn't even doing well. You would think that with massive expected efficiency gains companies would be doing better across the board. Are businesses that use AI generating significantly higher profits? I haven't seen any evidence of it yet (and I'm really looking for it, and would love to see it!). It's pure speculation so far.

Careful not to assume I’m more bullish than I am. I said there’s value, I didn’t say there’s enormous value equal to the investment bubble. I see this as similar to the dot com boom. Websites were and are valuable things, even if people got too excited in 2002 about it.

The scale and stakes of the investment now are much, much higher now than in dot com. Likewise, don't assume I'm more bearish than I am. But enormous investment requires more benefit than has been realized.

You think I don’t know that?

Uh, I must have missed the “consensus” here, especially when many studies are showing a productivity decrease from AI use. I think you’ve just conjured the idea of this “scientific consensus” out of thin air to deflect criticism.

I used exactly as many sources as everyone above me, you included.

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