Comment by shafyy
3 hours ago
> The promise of LLMs is not that they solve the single most difficult tasks for you instantly, but that they do the easy stuff well enough that they replace offshore teams.
But that's exactly the *promise* of LLMs by the hypepeople behind it.
>But that's exactly the promise of LLMs by the hypepeople behind it.
I do not know and do not care what the "hypepeople" say. I can tell you that, by pure logic alone, LLMs will be superior at simple and routine tasks sooner, which means they will compete with outsourced labor first.
LLMs need to be measured against their competition and their competition right now is outsourced labor. If an LLM can outperform an offshore team at a fraction of the cost, why would any company choose the offshore team? Especially when the LLM eliminates some of the biggest problems with offshore teams (communication barriers, round trip times).
If LLMs take any programmer jobs they will at the very beginning make those outsourced jobs obsolete, so the only relevant question is whether they have done that or are in the process of doing so. If they don't, then their impact will be minimal, if they do, then their impact will be massive. I think that this line of thinking is a far better benchmark then asking whether an LLM gets X or Y question wrong Z% of the time.
> If an LLM can outperform an offshore team at a fraction of the cost,..
And "a few moments later" happens the same as with those "cost effective" clouds.
[1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/IDC-Many-companies-want-partly-...
[2] https://www.idc.com/resource-center/blog/storm-clouds-ahead-... (original)