[hansmayer]

Very funny, this. Did we need forward deployed engineers to convince people that they absolutely need to use the trains in order to "not be left behind"? Or otherwise hype? Or was it sort of obvious and did not need to explained so much - like a bad joke called LLMs ?

[9dev]

Actually- absolutely! Initially, people were really afraid of trains, fearing they wouldn’t be able to breathe at those speeds. It took a lot of convincing to establish trust in the technology.

[uuyy]

Ever heard of subsidising? :’)

[hansmayer]

> Initially, people were really afraid of trains, fearing they wouldn’t be able to breathe at those speeds

That was one doctor raising that as an issue, which was dispelled very quickly. It was not a wide-spread belief at any one point. Let's not bullshit ourselves and insult our own intelligence - the chatbots != intelligence.

[9dev]

That isn't accurate either. The Victorians definitely had a fear of train travel for a few reasons. The point I was making though is that most technologies humans ever introduced triggered both enthusiasm and scepticism, especially if they disrupted established practice or industries.

Looking back and considering a technology or specific decision obvious is pretty dismissive of people at the time, who didn't have the benefit of hindsight. Some things that worked could really have turned out disastrous, and things that didn't were real possibilities with no way to assess the outcome without doing it.

And concerning the introduction of AI happening right now, which absolutely is disruptive, that judgement will be made by future historians. Whether it's actual intelligence or just nice math (or both of our opinions on that question) doesn't really matter if it causes big changes.

[hansmayer]

Could be, would be, should be is not the discourse we should have about this tech.

Not after Dario's and Sam's "authoritative" statements on what is definitely going to happen "in the next 6 months, 12 months" etc. I am just holding these guys to their own words. I don't want to invest time and energy to make their effing "PocketPhds" finally work as advertised. And I don't want to compare it to technologies which just worked as advertised. Whether you had fear of trains or not, they effing worked exactly as advertised. No one disputed that they would get you somewhere faster than the horse. Perhaps there was fear of using them "for a few reasons", as you succinctly and hand-wavingly put, but no one disputed that they were faster than the horses. LLMs on the other hand are worth less than those horses excrement, i.e. horseshit. What the fuck is their value proposition? No one knows.

Also LLMs are not disruptive, they are destructive - not to the technology, but to the people's lives.

[9dev]

You seem to have an axe to grind, but certainly not with me. Being a disruptive technology doesn't say anything about whether it's a constructive or destructive one, but you're going to have a hard time arguing LLMs did not have a disruptive effect on the world, in one way or another.

For the rest, I am not here to stand in for AI, and am not interested in having that particular discussion.

[hansmayer]

> You seem to have an axe to grind

Unless you are vested in the highly unlikely commercial success of LLM companies, you should have one to grind too. I have been running my own business for quite some time, with quite some success. However if we lied to our customers the way the AI companies outright lie, if we just once promised with definitive authority to deliver something major within a specific timeframe - and then did not deliver - we'd have been out of business a long time ago. We'd also be out of business a long time ago if we had miniscule revenues compared to our expenses, i.e. if we we had a relation of expense to income of 20:1, like LLM vendors mostly do. So yes, I do have an axe to grind when it comes to liars and manipulators to which these classic rules of capitalism apparently do not apply any more, because something something "China"/AI race/bullshit .

> you're going to have a hard time arguing LLMs did not have a disruptive effect on the world

"Disruptive" as we commonly came to understand the word as popularised in the 2010s or so, means something with impact, perhaps removing an entire industry, but replacing it with something that has a positive end-effect for the end customers. Uber was disruptive to the taxi industry, but delivered some kind of improvement for the end-user (the ethics of on whose expense aside). But it's hard to argue it did deliver some kind of value. Or low-cost airlines, etc.

LLMs are nothing like that. For whom do they deliver a palpable improvement in value? Why the fuck does everyone who is pushing them always coming up with some bullshit creative explanations about the benefits, always very theoretical and never in the present. Give me one fucking sensible use case, beyond the typical office worker using it as a life boat to navigate their meaningless job by producing more powerpoint slides.