[acdha]

Exactly: the technology is useful but because the executive class is hyping it as close to AGI because their buddies are slavering for layoffs. If that “when do you get fired?” tone wasn’t behind the conversation, I think a lot of people would be interested in applying LLMs to the smaller subset of things they actually perform well at.

[wolvoleo]

For me it's mostly about the subset of things that LLMs suck at but still rammed in everywhere because someone wants to make a quick buck.

I know it's good tech for some stuff, just not for everything. It's the same with previous bubbles. VR is really great for some things but we were never going to work with a headset on 8 hours a day. Bitcoin is pretty cool but we were never going to do our shopping list on Blockchain. I'm just so sick of hypes.

But I do think it's good tech, just like I enjoy VR daily I do have my local LLM servers (I'm pretty anti cloud so I avoid it unless I really need the power)

It's not really about the societal impacts for me, at least not yet, it's just not good enough for that yet. I do worry about that longer-term but not with the current generation of AI. At my work we've done extensive benchmarking (especially among enthusiastic early adopters) and while it can save a couple hours a week we're nowhere near the point where it can displace FTEs.

[acdha]

Yeah, I think those are coming from the same place: so many companies are trying to wedge LLMs into everything, especially contexts where you really need actual reasoning to accomplish a task, and it’s just such a “magic VC money fairy, pick us!” play that it distracts from the underlying tech opening up some text processing capabilities we would’ve thought were amazing a few years ago.

[tombert]

Maybe CEOs should face consequences for going on the stage and outwardly lying. Instead they're rewarded by a bump in stock price because people appear to have amnesia.