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Comment by pavinjoseph | Hacker News Reader

So far the impact of LLMs have been very much overstated. Like most (all?) tools, they require a human in the loop to work as intended. This fear of being replaced by an LLM is unfounded and irrational.

The alternatives that may cause such mass displacement like World Models and such are yet to be proven.

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LLM's went from generating incoherent garbage, to weird text that seems coherent but isn't (gpt-2), to what we have no with agents passing some of the hardest benchmarks, necessitating benchmark development just to be able to keep up with the rate of progress. They did this in about 5 years.

The sheer rate of progress is what is meaningful. If LLM's agents were frozen now without any further improvement, your position would be must more defensible. But that's not what's happening, we are getting breakthroughs almost on a weekly basis.

It feels to me like the advancements are not accelerating, though, like we're nearer the top of the S-curve than enthusiasts think we are. A lot of the recent advances seem as much a harness improvement as an actual model improvement. We've made exceptional progress in the last couple years, but spent an exceptional amount of money to do it. A moon shot, basically.

Honestly, my gut feeling (worth every bit of what you are paying for it...) is that until we get actual intelligence instead of a good facsimile, we're not looking at an existential problem or a UBI-level problem, even, just a big change in tooling.

Hey I hope you are right. I, like so many of my fellow engineers, am not exactly thrilled at the prospect of my role changing from underneath my feet and the uncertainty that comes with it.

We are making steady progress. It’s not exponential per se like we used to see but in my experience models are steadily getting better. Also breakthroughs can be sudden.

"So far" is a statement about the present and past. "This fear" is primarily about the future, though a few jobs already have been affected. So it's not like there is zero evidence.

You’ve been living under a rock dude, have you even tried using it for maths or coding. No human in loop needed.

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