Comment by heresie-dabord

Thanks for a thoughtful post.

The fantastically intoxicating valuations of many current stocks is due to breathing the fumes of LLMs as artificial intelligence.

TFA puts it this way:

    "The real reason companies are doing this is because Wall Street wants them to. Investors have been salivating for an Apple “super cycle” — a tech upgrade so enticing that consumers will rush to get their hands on the new model. "

Now to consider your two points...

> The first ... natural language querying.

Natural-language inputs are structured: they are language. But in any case, we must not minimise the significant effort to collect [0] and label trustworthy data for training. Given untrustworthy, absurd, and/or outright ignorant and wrong training data, an LLM would spew nonsense. If we train an LLM on tribalistic fictions, Reddit codswallop, or politicians' partisan ravings, what do you think the result of any rational natural-language query would be? (Rhetorical question.)

In short, building and labelling the corpus of knowledge is the essential technical advancement. We already have been doing natural-language processing with computers for a long time.

> The second ... new media recaptiulates the old.

LLMs are a new application. There are some effective uses of the new application. But there are many unsuitable applications, particularly where correctness is critical. (TFA mentions this.) There are illegal uses too.

TFA itself says,

    "What problems is it solving? Well, so far that’s not clear! Are customers demanding it? LOL, no."

I agree that finding the profit models beyond stock hyperbole is the current endeavour. Some attempts are already proven: better Web search (with a trusted corpus), image scoring/categorisation, suggesting/drafting approximate solutions to coding or writing tasks.

How to monetise these and future implementations will determine whether LLMs devour anything serviceable the way Radio ate Theatre, the way TV ate Theatre, Radio and Print Journalism, the way the Internet ate TV, Radio, the Music Industry, and Print Journalism, and the way Social Media ate social discourse.

<edit: Note that the above devourings were mostly related to funding via advertising.>

If LLMs devour and replace the Village Idiot, we will have optimised and scaled the worst of humanity.

= = =

[0] _ major legal concerns to be unresolved

[1] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_(1976_film) , https://www.npr.org/2020/09/29/917747123/you-literally-cant-...