Comment by dheatov

I don't think your analogy works for the tailwind situation, and there is no whole idea to give up on anyway. People will still be researching this hyper-complicated matrix multiplication thing, i.e. LLM, for a very long time.

Personally, the tailwind example is an argument against one specific use case: LLM-assisted/driven coding, which I also believe is the best shot of LLM being actually productive in a non-academic setting.

If I have a super-nice RL-ed (or even RLHF-ed) coding model & weights that's working for me (in whatever sense the word "working" means), and changing some function names will actually f* it up badly, then it is very not good. I hope I will never ever have to work with "programmer" that is super-reluctant to reorganize the code just to protect their pet LLM.