Comment by AndyKelley
6 months ago
You speak with a passive voice, as if the future is something that happens to you, rather than something that you participate in.
6 months ago
You speak with a passive voice, as if the future is something that happens to you, rather than something that you participate in.
They are not wrong.
The market, meant in a general sense, is stronger than any individual or groups of people. LLMs are here, and already demonstrate enough productive value to make them in high demand for objective reasons (vs. just as a speculation vehicle). They're not going away, nor is larger GenAI. It would take a collapse of technological civilization to turn the tide back now.
The market is a group of people.
And you are a collection of cells, but individual cells (mostly) don’t have the ability to dictate your actions
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Indeed. Here, a very large one. Now, focus on the dynamics of that group to see my point.
Or much more elaborately, but also exhaustively and to the point: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/.
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I have a parallel to suggest; I know it's the rhetorical tool of analogous reasoning, but it deeply matches the psychology of the way most people think. Just like getting to a "certain" number of activated parameters in a model (for some "simple" tasks like summarisation) can be as low as 1.8 billion, once that threshold is breached the "emergent" behaviour of "reasonable", "contextual", or "lucid" text is achieved; or to put this in layman's terms, once your model is "large enough" (and this is quite small compared to the largest models currently in daily use by millions) the generated text goes from jibberish to uncanny valley to lucid text quite quickly.
In the same way once a certain threshold is reached in the utility of AI (in a similar vein to the "once I saw the Internet for the first time I knew I would just keep using it") it becomes "inevitable"; it becomes a cheaper option than "the way we've always done it", a better option, or some combination of the two.
So, as is very common in technological innovation / revolution, the question isn't will it change the way things are done so much as where will it shift the cost curve? How deeply will it displace "the way we've always done it"? How many hand weaved shirts do you own? Joseph-Marie Jacquard wants to know (and King Cnut has metaphorical clogs to sell to the Luddites).
There is an old cliché about stopping the tide coming in. I mean, yeah you can get out there and participate in trying to stop it.
This isn't about fatalism or even pessimism. The tide coming in isn't good or bad. It's more like the refrain from Game of Thrones: Winter is coming. You prepare for it. Your time might be better served finding shelter and warm clothing rather than engaging in a futile attempt to prevent it.
If you believe that there is nobody there inside all this LLM stuff, that it's ultimately hollow and yet that it'll still get used by the sort of people who'll look at most humans and call 'em non-player characters and meme at them, if you believe that you're looking at a collapse of civilization because of this hollowness and what it evokes in people… then you'll be doing that, but I can't blame anybody for engaging in attempts to prevent it.
You are stating a contradictory position: A person who doesn't believe AI can possibly emerge but is actively working to prevent it from emerging. I suggest that such a person is confused beyond help.
edit As an aside, you might want to read Don Quixote [1]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Quixote
The last tide being the blockchain (hype), which was supposed to solve all and everyone's problems about a decade ago already.
How come there even is anything left to solve for LLMs?
The difference between hype and reality is productivity—LLMs are productively used by hundreds of millions of people. Block chain is useful primarily in the imagination.
It’s just really not comparable.
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Reminder that the Dutch exist.
"Stopping the tide coming in" is usually a reference to the English king Cnut (or 'Canute') who legendarily made his courtiers carry him to the sea:
> When he was at the height of his ascendancy, he ordered his chair to be placed on the sea-shore as the tide was coming in. Then he said to the rising tide, "You are subject to me, as the land on which I am sitting is mine, and no one has resisted my overlordship with impunity. I command you, therefore, not to rise on to my land, nor to presume to wet the clothing or limbs of your master." But the sea came up as usual, and disrespectfully drenched the king's feet and shins. So jumping back, the king cried, "Let all the world know that the power of kings is empty and worthless, and there is no king worthy of the name save Him by whose will heaven, earth and the sea obey eternal laws."
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cnut#The_story_of_Cnut_and_the...
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They're not stopping the tide, they are preparing for it - as I suggested. The tide is still happening, it just isn't causing the flooding.
So in that sense we agree. Let's be like he Dutch. Let's realize the coming tide and build defenses against it.
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The year is 1985. Internet is coming. You don't want it to.
Can you stop it?
You can shape it.
[dead]
Isn't it kind of both?
Did luddites ever have a chance of stopping the industrial revolution?
Luddites weren't stopping industrial revolution. They were fighting against mass layoffs, against dramatic lowering of wages and against replacement of skilled workers with unskilled ones. Now this reminds me of something, hmmm...
Did the Dutch ever have a chance to stop the massive run up in tulip prices?
It's easy to say what was inevitable when you are looking into the past. Much harder to predict what inevitable future awaits us.
It's interesting that the Dutch actually had more success at stopping the actual tide coming in than controlling a market tide (which was more like a tidal wave I suppose).
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No, but software engineers for example have more power, even in an employer's market, than Luddites.
You can simply spend so much time on meticulously documenting that "AI" (unfortunately!) does not work that it will be quietly abandoned.
Software engineers have less power than we'd like to think; we may be paid a lot relative to the baseline, but for vast majority that's not even in the "rich" range anymore, and more importantly, we're not ones calling the shots - not anymore.
But even if, that presupposes a kind of unity of opinion, committing the exact same sin the article we're discussing is complaining about. Many engineers believe that AI does, in fact, work, and will keep getting better - and will work towards the future you'd like to work against.
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The luddites or at least some of them threatened employers, factories and/or machinery with physical aggression. They lived in the locations where these industries for a long time remained tho automation certainly made the industry more mobile. Like unions they used collective bargaining power in part derived from their geographic location and presence among each other.
A Guatemalan or Indian can write code for my boss today...instead of me. Software engineers despite the cliff in employment and the like are still rather well paid and there's plenty of room to undercut and for people to disregard principles. If this is perceived to be an issue to them at all. If you talk to many irl... Well it is not in the slightest.
No one will read that documentation. And by the time you finish writing it, the frontier AI models will have improved.
The Luddites were among the precursors to Marx et al.; even a revolution wasn't enough to hold back industrialisation, and even that revolution had a famous example of the exact kind of resource-distribution failure that Marx would have had in mind when writing (Great Famine in Ireland was contemporaneous with the Manifesto, compare with Holodomor).
What? Can you elaborate?
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You can fight against the current of society or you can swim in the direction it's pulling you. If you want to fight against it, you can, but you shouldn't expect others to. For some, they can see that it's inevitable because the strength of the movement is greater than the resistance.
It's fair enough to say "you can change the future", but sometimes you can't. You don't have the resources, and often, the will.
The internet was the future, we saw it, some didn't. Cryptocurrencies are the future, some see it, some don't. And using AI is the future too.
Are LLMs the endpoint? Obviously not. But they'll keep getting better, marginally, until there's a breakthrough, or a change, and they'll advance further.
But they won't be going away.
I think it's important not to be too sure abot what of the future one is "seeing". It's easy to be confidently wrong and one may find countless examples and quotes where people made this mistake.
Even if you don't think you can change something, you shouldn't be sure about that. If you care about the outcome, you try things also against the odds and also try to organize such efforts with others.
(I'm puzzled by poeple who don't see it that way but at the same time don't find VC and start-ups insanely weird...).
The reality for most people is that at a macro level the future is something that happens to them. They try to participate e.g. through voting, but see no change even on issues a significant majority of 'voters' agree on, regardless of who 'wins' the elections.
What are issues that a significant majority of voters agree on? Polls indicate that everyone wants lower taxes, cleaner environment, higher quality schools, lower crime, etc. But when you dig into the specifics of how to make progress on those issues, suddenly the consensus evaporates.