> LLM has a lot of use cases where it can be enormously productive
The great chance of LLMs is of course assistive technology, where human actors and LLMs collaborate to do tasks. I am afraid however that what will shape the impact of LLMs on humanity much more is a different thing: Throught history there was always a certain number of people a dictator had to be at good terms with in order to stay in power. My fear is, that this number will become smaller, because it will be much easier to give the realistic impression that you have the support.
Existing concepts of reality and truth will definitly be completely and utterly destroyed by LLMs, and even actual, real information will be tainted by the fact that it could be fake – we are already seeing today on a smaller scale what living in such a world feels like if we look how societies in a post-truth environment operate.
My prediction (and I'd love to be wrong on that) is that the negative use of LLMs will outweigh positive use significantly, because it favours use cases where you don't have to care about correctness.
Existing concepts of reality and truth will definitly be completely and utterly destroyed by LLMs, and even actual, real information will be tainted by the fact that it could be fake – we are already seeing today on a smaller scale what living in such a world feels like if we look how societies in a post-truth environment operate.
<2050>
Did Donald Trump supporters dye their hair orange in support?
Yes they did... (news article supporting the idea, complete with photos and video (with audio))
I almost fear for any history that has been digitized.
History is written by the victors, and AI is looking like a victor at this point.
While that is true, LLMs are (like blockchains) difficult to understand for laypeople, and this is (as it was with blockchains) used to compel gullible investors with FOMO to invest in some highly questionable enterprises that make no goddamn sense.
My extremely technically-challenged mom called me out of the blue to tell me about how she was using ChatGPT at work, which was my “holy shit” moment with LLMs.
Has anyone actually hired a real hitman with Bitcoin? In pretty much all cases that I've heard of, the hitman turned out to be either a cop or a scammer.
You make a good point that, blockchain or not, ultimately the problem is not technological in nature. Bitcoin facilitates drugs and hitmen as much as ability to mail someone a letter with bank account details attached (account with money). As usual, the solution is to make the activity not worth the risk by posing as either party.
buying stadiums in Florida, gambling imaginary money, moving money to your dad to pay for your inevitable legal bills, buying league skins, the list is endless.
The only thing that really worried me was effective altruism. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of a changing world for the better binge
I think anyone familiar with effective altruism's roots in utilitarianism was rightly immediately concerned about it, especially how it currently seems to be manifested.
Never forget Jeremy Bentham proposed the Panopticon.
I literally never had any conversation about using blockchain at work or in our personal lives and I don't know anybody that did. This hype is nothing like blockchain.
The difference is the answer to "can we use it with blockchain" was: "uhhh, maybe? somehow?", whereas for LLMs it's "yeah sure, I can think of these 10 use cases, half of which we can probably implement today if we use an API".
Haha yes. But at the time, experts' opinions of where it would go ranged from not much to a big expansion in the size of the banked population and the space of contracts that can be written, with a lot of probability mass at nothing. AI experts themselves today estimate a range from we destroy ourselves to nearly infinite wealth, with a lot* probability mass at we destroy ourselves.
* It might be on the order of 1%, but it would be insane for a rational actor to ignore a 1% probability of self-destruction.
I'm just imagining conversations where you suggest something like "We could add a checkbox so the user can toggle off this feature if they find it problematic." and someone responds with "Could we use Chat GPT for that?"
A more interesting question is should we use an LLM here.
There's undeniably a lot of work being done in this area, but so much of it is just ill conceived shovelware in an attempt to make it big in the gold rush.
We get like a dozen "Show HN" posts a day where there's a service that basically prefixes an input with a prompt and bounces it off ChatGPT and returns the response.
There's also no doubt interesting products to be built using this new technology. But I don't think it's going to be made by just gluing 2-3 APIs together. If you can do that, someone else can do it too. That's not a business model. Being the first to do something means very little.
"Can you do this without an LLM, using just regular coding?"
LLM to solve math problems, implement API requests, etc. = hard no
LLM to solve challenging constraint problems or statistical problems where we already have a good solution (A*, heuristics, really clever algorithms) = no
LLM to solve challenging problems where we don't have a good solution (medical diagnostics, legalese, manual translation of badly-formatted data) = yes... (people will disagree but if the LLM does these better than a human, it does these better than a human - and if not, the humans will almost definitely benefit from using an LLM)
LLM to do something with natural language, like implement a chatbot, explain something, cheap therapy = hard yes
The problem, however, is that your third point is where the vast majority of the potential usefulness of LLM lies, but simultaneously where integration with other systems is highly non-trivial, hence my "calm your proverbial tits" position on the issue.
The vast majority of market value maybe, mass adoptability perhaps. But the biggest value is in the fourth point because it doesn't improve a product, these things were basically unavailable until now!
Will be fun time if all mind of software integrates this black boxes.
Every update will have a risk of breaking things without the possibility to test like with unit tests.