[voidhorse]

This post is a good piece of evidence that the value of LLMs is driven far more by the circumstances surrounding them than by positive value they bring.

All I see is a society in which people are stretched insanely thin (even the software engineers work on monetized side projects, for god's sake), where basic needs like proper education and time to focus are degrading or too expensive, where information gathering has been totally co-opted by advertisers and grifter—LLMs are a suboptimal solution to what are inherently structural social problems that arise from a distribution of wealth and organization of labor. LLMs do not address this. Give it five more years and they'll be totally integrated into advertising and extracting capital from users too, and they'll be just as useless as search has become today.

[lucaslazarus]

Reminds me of Kranzberg’s First Law:

> “Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.”

[packetlost]

Search is far from useless. The demise of search is, IMO greatly overstated. Sure, Google is bad these days, but there are more options these days

[dylan604]

Does anyone do pure search and not SEO ads driven search results?

[MyOutfitIsVague]

Kagi, if you're willing to pay for search.

[mstkllah]

Kagi?

[elliotto]

I think almost all N are a suboptimal solution to what are inherently structural social problems that arise from a distribution of wealth and organization of labor where N is any technological invention of the past 20 years. Open source insulin lol the empire is collapsing.

[makeitdouble]

You are right that technology isn't a cure for solving societal problems. Now some societies getting worse and worse in the last decades doesn't invalidate the better uses of technical advances, at least they have tremendous impact in countries that care more about their citizens.

[infecto]

You have a few holes in your argument.

First, I would argue that LLM provide incredibly value today. From language learning, asking about how to a specific manufacturing machine works, to simply grabbing the time zone of a city I list. They had value and are only getting better. Search still exists but I wonder in a few years if it still exists like we see today.

Second, your framing is truly of the doom and gloom of humanity. I dont think we are stretched any more than we have been in the past. Things are different for sure, both the success and problems, but what a time to be alive, I can watch media from all around the world and have a LLM speak with me through any query I have.

Lastly, I just don’t think search is that bad. I pay for Kagi but the vanilla google experience is not the end of the world. You still can generally find what you want.