Comment by dasil003

Two things are very clearly true: 1) LLMs can do a lot of things that previous computing techniques could not do and we need time to figure out how best to harness and utilize those capabilities; but also 2) there is a wide range of powerful people who have tons of incentive to ride the hype wave regardless of where things will actually land.

To the article's point—I don't think it's useful to accept the tech CEO framing and engage on their terms at all. They are mostly talking to the markets anyway. We are the ones who understand how technology works, so we're best positioned to evaluate LLMs more objectively, and we should decide our own framing.

My framing is that LLMs are just another tool in a long line of software tooling improvements. Sure, it feels sort of miraculous and perhaps threatening that LLMs can write working code so easily. But when you think of all the repetitive CRUD and business logic that has been written over the decades to address myriad permutations and subtly varying contexts of the many human organizations that are willing to pay for software to be written, it's not surprising that we could figure out how to make a giant stochastic generator that can do an adequate job generating new permutations based on the right context and prompts.

As a technologist I want to understand what LLMs can do and how they can serve my personal goals. If I don't want to use them I won't, but I also owe it to myself to understand how their capabilities evolve so I can make an informed decision. I am not going to start a crusade against them out of nostalgia or wishful thinking as I can think of nothing so futile as positioning myself in direct opposition to a massive hype tsunami.