Comment by maxnevermind | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maxnevermind | Hacker News Reader

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> I feel like this is incredibly simplistic, and if you changed "LLM" to "computer" or "internet" and went back decades, it's highly likely you'd read the exact same takes in the newspaper back then about those things.

We are not people who write newspapers we are people who are directly involved in application of the technology, we posses a higher level of insight.

> I feel like this is incredibly simplistic, and if you changed "LLM" to "computer" or "internet" and went back decades, it's highly likely you'd read the exact same takes in the newspaper back then about those things.

Computers, the Internet, Steam engine, Rail roads are much more reliable. If you were a problem solver and entrepreneur you could go and apply those on small scale, get profits, reinvest, set up a flywheel, build a fortune on the top of those, there were a lot of low hanging fruit due to the fact that the foundation was laid out, a break-even period of James Watt steam engine was like 2-3 years I believe until everyone saw it and margins flattened. Can you do that with LLMs? It doesn't look that way.

>Computers, the Internet, Steam engine, Rail roads are much more reliable.

Because mostly they are doing a limit number of tasks in a non-generic manner.

Railroads had all kinds of problems at first, from iron rails bending and skewering the riders to engines exploding like high pressure bombs cutting down swaths of people like grain. People still used them with those risks because taking a wagon was worse.

The internet itself is a pretty simple concept. It's "just" packet routing. Now, to make that reliable at scale we've added an enormous amount of complexity to it. If you talk an old TCP stack and dump it on todays internet it you'd find yourself hacked pretty quickly. The internet is a generic packet router, but not a generic anything router.

Computers is where the reliability starts to fall apart. Once you go from specialized purpose to general purpose the size of the problem space explodes. You wouldn't get companies called things like Micro$lop (and these things were from before the AI days).

Then when you get to AI/LLMs and especially when you push into AGI you're creating a do anything now machine. And when you can do anything it takes a lot of training to eliminate the choices that end badly. You are the endpoint of 500 million years of training, for example.

>Can you do that with LLMs? It doesn't look that way.

Can anyone do it now? You're talking about low hanging fruit 200 years ago, but how much of that is left? How much harder are we going to have to fight for the next apple up?

> We are not people who write newspapers we are people who are directly involved in application of the technology, we posses a higher level of insight.

Cool, you're still a person who share their thoughts, just like the people who had similar reactions to when computers and the internet first came around. So many people were railing against the internet with "You'll never make payments over the internet", "it's too slow" and whatever. To the surprise of none of us nerds, the internet eventually ate the whole world and now large swaths of the population can't imagine life without it, for better or worse.

> Computers, the Internet, Steam engine, Rail roads are much more reliable.

You're comparing the reliability of huge ecosystems after they've gone mainstream, after decades, with something that is a couple of years old, hardly a fair comparison. Instead, compare where LLMs are today with the first years of computers, the internet and all that, and maybe you'll gain a new perspective on where LLMs are? None of those things were reliable initially and in many cases, involved actual human deaths before safety actually caught up.

Even when I got started with using the internet, which isn't that long time ago but around the modem-era, things were not so reliable or simple as they are today.

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