On: Anti-AI Hype LLM Reading List

[hannasanarion]

I think the fact that the hype cycle was so short is evidence in LLM's favor as a revolutionary technology.

Hype-bubble technologies live off their hype forever, and need to accelerate the hype to get more investment in a technology that doesn't actually have that many applications. The hype cycles are long, escalatory, and recurrent. Think blockchain, NFTs, IoT, AR, etc.

When a technology is really revolutionary, there's a big surge of interest at the hype level, and then it quickly becomes mundane as people stop talking about it because they're too busy actually using it. Think the internet, smartphones, social media, wikipedia, youtube, etc

[qsort → hannasanarion]

I don't think we can get much useful signal out of these observations.

By the same logic one could argue that AI is the quintessential recurring hype cycle that always turns out to be a nothing-burger.

It's a particularly hard nut to crack because whether or not LLMs will turn out to be useful depends on future developments, particularly on whether there is a way to get them to behave consistently and predictably. Computers are useful because they are stupid pieces of junk that do always the same thing when given the same input.

If it turns out there isn't a viable solution to this, we are forever doomed to use LLMs pseudo-interactively, which is something, but a far cry from even the low end of what LLM proponents are promising. (e.g. all the current LLM "integrations" are very thin layers on top of the raw model).

It's fundamentally impossibile to tell, imho.

[hannasanarion → qsort]

> whether or not LLMs will turn out to be useful depends on future developments

But LLMs are already useful. All kinds of people are using them to improve their writing, they now ship with grammar-check tools like Grammarly. All the big tech firms are working on integrating them into their virtual assistants. Every developer is using github copilot now. StackOverflow is in crisis because chatgpt is the perfect rubber duck. There are tons of applications in marketing, from drafting ad copy to keeping tabs on consumer buzz.

If the question you're trying to interrogate is "will LLMs become AGI", then yeah, that's a big open question, but also that's a bar that's much higher than "whether or not it'll be useful" or even "whether or not it'll be game-changing", and it already is undeniably both of those things.

[CaptainFever → hannasanarion]

I agree with the sibling comment that this is probably too little evidence to make such a grand claim, however, I can concur that I do notice people around me using LLMs in their daily life, sometimes as chatting buddies or for research. For my circle, it seems to be rather widespread.