Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by galaxytachyon 1132 days ago
As the hype phase has passed (probably), now we will see a bit of overcorrection with these dismissive articles. Sure, LLMs as they are now aren't anywhere close to true AGI and even Microsoft admitted it. But its potential is not something anyone can ignore. The capabilities of LLMs has already been successfully used by millions of people and startups. It is a groundbreaking improvement that makes at least one field of study nearly obsolete (NLP). It captured attentions of both corporations and government who are pouring billions into it. All of this in the span of one year or less.

With the multimodal models coming next and still exabytes of videos, games, sound, musics, etc. data to train them, we aren't peaking yet. Sure, it isn't the holy grail. But it is a really valuable treasure that only a few exist, to use the same analogy. To view it so dismissively because of some drawbacks, which are entirely obvious and can be accounted for, is just arrogance.

1 comments

> It captured attentions of both corporations and government who are pouring billions into it. All of this in the span of one year or less.

Corporations and governments have thrown tons of money into technologies that ended up going nowhere. We're only a few years out from everyone dumping their money into "blockchain solutions", which turned out to go nowhere.

Investors and government stakeholders are easily swayed by hype. Sometimes this hype is well placed, but often the hype results in throwing money at projects that don't produce anything of value. Hype just isn't a good measure of a technology's long term viability.

When only a few of them followed the hype, yes, it can possibly go nowhere.

But when the entire industry, experts and non-experts included, are fascinated and obsessed with the same thing, it is more likely to be something real. An easy example is the first iPhone.

Another more negative example is bitcoin which even though it is probably a scam, its values and influence on society has massively grown more than what it was 1 year after released. Even though it has been a disappointment technologically.

> But when the entire industry, experts and non-experts included, are fascinated and obsessed with the same thing, it is more likely to be something real.

This is a perfect description of cryptocoins and similar technologies. I've witnessed literally illiterate people buying coins and selling the idea to others.

I know. I mentioned that crypto is a disappointment technologically. But it doesn't change the fact that it still brought massive profits and significantly impacted society. For worse but still... The point is with this much momentum behind a single tech, it will surge forward regardless of whether it has true merits that can live up to its hype or not.