I just happen to be reading "The Box", about the early history of containerization... and boy am I enjoying it. I really really recommend it to anyone seeking a good enjoyable read that mixes engineering, design, business and history.
I totally believe you. I was trained as a merchant marine deck officer at a time when many of my instructors were still at sea as containers were beginning to become popular.
My Dry Cargo instructor in particular told of going in to SE Asia ports and expecting to be there for 3 weeks unloading & loading break-bulk cargo and getting drunk every night. After the switch to containers, they were lucky to be in port for 20 hours and had no time to go ashore.
That is a hard claim to verify. One might say impossible. It is because it makes a statement about the future without defining a time interval. The “are likely to ever achieve” part.
Before you start arguing about how little you think LLMs are worth and how great container ships are, that is not the problem. The problem is that to “verify” something with an “ever achieve” you either have to prove hard limits or wait forever. Proving hard limits rigorously is very hard. Waiting forever is impossible.
> statement about the future without defining a time interval
> The problem is that to “verify” something with an “ever achieve”
> That is a hard claim to verify
Sure, if we are going to litigate this on precision of the language use, then this would fail. Since it isn't a legal document but a short sentence on Hacker News.
Given an infinite timeline, LLMs can conceivably be more useful than containers.
However, this warning is relatively empty, especially since you have precluded any calculations between LLMs and containers
> Before you start arguing about how little you think LLMs are worth and how great container ships are.
We conclude that the original claim cannot be verified and we reformulate it in a more useful form.
Sometimes the correct answer is "we do not know", and we all should get more comfortable with that. Here it is even worse than that. It is a "we do not know and we will never know".
Or you can say "I think that statement is true." That is entirely up to you. It tells us about your mind state and you are the primary source of information on that.
Saying it is "easy to verify" is not the same kind of thing. It is about the statement itself.
The most substantial claims for LLMs today come from 2 general areas - code copilots (github published, google published), and reduction in time to proficiency for new hires. That said, it may unlock additional capabilities.
Additionally, language processing has a massive gap when it comes to languages that most of humanity speaks. (Gabriel Nichols, CDT paper)
Furthermore, having seen GenAI deployments in workplaces, they also suffer from those issues that plague all ML and AI projects.
As initially stated, Cargo containers work across cultures, are standardized across humanity, and underpin all our goods transport.
Given an infinite timeline, it is well likely that cargo containers will outperform LLMs, because the market for pure information will always be at the mercy of physical goods required to generate that information.
So even if LLMs magically improve and become all pervasive gods, they will still need to transfer goods using cargo containers.
Given that this is a HN comment, and not a dissertation, within that social context, I submit that the original postulate, was correct and sufficient.
It also ridiculizes my little coding problems x)