[d0liver]

What makes you say that AI is not going anywhere? I hear this overwhelmingly, "AI is here to stay", as if y'all are so caught up in the movement that you've started taking that conclusion as being the axiom. TBH, it feels like a religion.

[packetlost]

Short of societal collapse, there's no way the technology is going to go away or fade out of existence (unless it's replaced by something even better), that's just not how technological progress works. It's useful, probably in ways we haven't even thought of yet.

[zozbot234]

Building those datacenters and keeping them operational involves massive amounts of highly skilled blue-collar labor.

[sateesh]

I don't get it, why would operating a datacenter needs massive amount of high skilled blue-collar labor. Datacenters are resource hungry. With so much automation in place I don't think there would be a need for large pool of labor.

[squidbeak]

You seem to suppose the building of those datacenters - even the power plants behind them - won't soon be automated. Almost as if robotics isn't happening.

[dmantis]

Why would it?

It's a technology, not an artifical belief system to just disappear because people got tired of it.

Hype might go away, along with some of today's usages, but the fact that we know about the technology means it will stay in one fo or another.

[sifar]

Swords, bows and arrows, castles were all here to stay.

Technologies fade away when they are no longer useful, cost/benefit ratio is too high or something better comes along.

It is question of when.

[KptMarchewa]

They stopped being used as primary weapons because better ones were found - mostly firearms - not because people got bored of it; or reverted to some earlier methods of warfare.

[sifar]

Yes, there is the general class of technologies (warfare, computing ...) and there are particular instances of those for a given time and space and evolve as the landscape changes.

The technology of warfare evolved to better mechanisms, perhaps same with computing.

[chaps]

Bows and arrows are still widely used for hunting all over the world. I was able do freelance work on a relatively low income because of access to ~150lbs of deer meat that came from multiple bow-hunted deer.

[charcircuit]

No one is claiming that ChatGPT 5.5 is here to stay and be popular forever. More advance AI models will replace what exists today.

[u_fucking_dork]

So you’re saying today’s models are sticks and stones and you’re looking forward to the nuclear submarine equivalent models?

[lucketone]

Building on that futurism.

We might design organic brain extensions, so people just become smarter, making LLMs obsolete. (Brain-Bluetooth interface for additional cost)

[squidbeak]

What tech can you imagine that would make the conversion of electricity into thought 'no longer useful'?

[sifar]

This is an interesting question that I haven't thought about, thanks.

What we currently have is a simulacrum of thought - albeit a good one.

Any technology is useful only in the sense that it helps us with solving the problems we are dealing with in that time. When we face issues that a pseudo-thought is not useful in tackling or worse is one of the causes - this will recede in the background.

Beyond that, the implicit assumption in the question is that thinking is the highest form of activity that is useful to us.

I don't know how my thoughts arise but thinking happens when I engage with them. I think what we look for is meaning in our lives and thinking helps us generate/achieve one, whether real or illusory.

[ang_cire]

I don't know about you, but I can buy bows and arrows at hundreds of sporting goods stores in my local area alone, and I even know of 2 local blacksmith shops that sell swords.

Castles still exist as well, you just aren't invited to them (which was true for us peasants back in the day, too). Trump is still trying to get one built under the ruins of the East Wing, in fact.

[sifar]

The point is not that these cease to exist. The point is that their significance decreases greatly.

[ang_cire]

But are these actually completely different technologies, and if so, where is the dividing line? Firearms certainly have not decreased in significance, and they're the modern version of a bow, which is simply 2 iterations later in propulsion methods: tensioned string -> high-tension cable -> high-pressure gas.

Are LLMs really going to fall off in significance, or will it just be the nth newest incarnation of LLMs?

The function of what an LLM does (generative language) is what people seem to take issue with, but the function is here to stay, even if the next iteration has a different name or method.

[sifar]

The difference is in what other enabling technologies do you need to achieve it. Advanced technologies sit on a pyramid. One can build a bow and an arrow from sticks, string and rock. For reliable firearm we need chemistry and advanced metallurgy.

My view wasn't whether generative language is here to stay or not but rather will it continue to be a significant thing or not.

[the_gastropod]

In other words, it’s a thought terminating cliche. Why say it?

The Juicero is here to stay! There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle.

[KptMarchewa]

Comparing it to Juicero is also thought terminating.

[AnimalMuppet]

No. You're not thinking it through well enough.

The technology involved in Juicero (or Pets.com, or many others) didn't go away. We could rebuild them any time we wanted to. Those things went away because they weren't able to make enough money to be an ongoing business.

Will AI? That is at least an open question at this point. (I mean, in fairness, Amazon's was an open question for many years too.)

The tech isn't going anywhere. Is there a path to a sustainable business model that uses that tech?

You may have an answer to that question. Can you prove it to someone who doesn't already agree with your answer?

[satvikpendem]

Juicero wasn't useful therefore it went away. Generative AI is useful therefore it won't go away, just like how fire is kMy old yet it's still here to stay.

[WorldMaker]

Juicero had customers that thought it was useful. Both "smoothie juicers" and "smoothie subscriptions" were big product categories equally before and after Juicero tried to unite them with a technological middleman. Kuerig, the Juicero of coffee, remains quite active and profitable (and wasteful).

[jononor]

There are likely _many_ paths to sustainable business models based on AI tech, that will come to fruition over the next decades. However whether they might not be as profitable as OpenAI and Anthropic are gambling on, is more uncertain.

[ang_cire]

In the same way that any technology could just magically disappear, sure.

But I hear everyday, non-IT-sector people talking constantly about how they're using it, and that means there's a demand for it, and someone is going to supply it. I think a lot of anti-AI people think it's still equivalent to the PDA, and don't realize it's a smartphone already.

The other side is that "AI" is of course very very broad and isn't new, and e.g. medical vision models are making advancements that are having huge impacts on patient care already, especially around early cancer detection. Those aren't going away (and shouldn't), so there's still going to be a demand for the underlying technology and infrastructure to support it, even if LLMs stop being spammed everywhere.

The other thing which people seem not to understand is that you don't need a whole datacenter to RUN individual LLMs, you need it to train them, or to run them at scale for thousands of customers. A lot of the upper-mid-tier models that exist now can be run on a single (beefy) 4U server in your closet if you've got the GPUs to put in it. And people are running e.g. Deepseek V4 Pro FP4 locally. If you've got an actual server room, like at a university, you can run the full, un-quantized versions with ~2-4 servers.

Technology that is living in peoples' homes and businesses already is not going to just disappear. It's a lot less centralized than the market prevalence of OpenAI and Anthropic would lead you to believe.

[gensym]

I think this disconnect is based on the ambiguity in the term "AI".

"AI" as tech - the models, how to train them, etc. Isn't going to go anywhere short of a Library-of-Alexandria-type catastrophe. We know how to do it and it's useful, so why would we forget?

However, "AI" as the thing that is enveloping our culture - the slop everywhere, the mandates to use it at work regardless of its usefulness, the constant talk about it being the future, the machine-dominated future that's been promised/threatened by the heads of the labs - we do still have a chance to put that onto the scrapheap.

[TimTheTinker]

All a functional religion needs is on-demand answers to arbitrary life questions... which is what chatbots do, unfortunately.

Ancient Greek/Roman polytheism lost its social power around the time the oracles stopped speaking.

[TrnsltLife]

The old gods lost their power because they had been conquered by the Spirit of Christ.

It's a danger to beware of, that people might start to listen to LLMs like they have the gospel truth on morality and spiritual matters. But they're just an image of a man given breath and speech, without true wisdom. Man took sand and copper and formed the simulation of a mind. If we then bow down to it and obey it, we're fools.

[goosejuice]

I'm sorry but this makes very little sense. Society isn't going to unlearn the methods.

[squidbeak]

It makes tremendous sense - when understand as reflexive straw-clutching and wish-thinking aimed at reducing the frequency of the poster's nightmares and reducing their diaper expense.