Comment by moomin
5 days ago
Who are these friends? Are they in the room with us right now? Look, maybe my experience is atypical but I’m an AI skeptic and I know plenty of others. I’ve never heard people claim that LLMs are a fad or going to go away.
I’ve seen lots of people:
* think that conflating LLMs and “AI” produces a lot of poorly reasoned arguments
* doubt the economic narratives being built around LLM technology
* think the current rate of progress in the technology is basically flat
* think most “AI companies” resemble most crypto companies
An addendum to the last point: very few crypto skeptics deny that BitCoin is a thing or think it’s going away, either. It’s just strawmanning.
These are 4 arguments that have literally nothing to do with what I wrote.
* I don't care what "AI" is. There's a section in the post about this. Nobody needs to update their religious beliefs because of LLMs.
* I don't care about the economic futures of Nvidia or the frontier model companies. I'm not recommending you invest in their stock.
* The article opens with "all progress in LLMs could halt and this would still apply".
* The article doesn't care about "AI companies".
I'm a crypto skeptic and I do deny Bitcoin is a long-term thing, for what it's worth. I'm a hard skeptic of cryptofinance.
As I say, those are the arguments that I actually hear people make. And most of the arguments I'm hearing people make are from people who are using LLM tech on a daily basis (not the agent stuff so much, although it sounds promising). I remain surprised you're encountering so many people quite so skeptical.
The only real dispute about the usefulness of the current technology I hear is the concern that this will leave us without devs who understand the code at a deep level.
Maybe it would have been clearer without the dunktrope at the start of the comment.
[flagged]
Like you said, nobody reasonable is denying that something real is happening - the question is more about how useful, how soon, and for whom
Not all hype is just hot air.
Case in point: WWW and the “dot com” bubble. Dot com was a bubble, but the WWW (and Internet) was a big thing that transformed all major societies. It survived the bust that followed after the boom.
Are LLMs here to stay? We can guess, but as usual, time will tell.