Comment by woah
2 days ago
The anti-LLM side seems much more insecure. Pro-LLM influencers are sometimes corny, but it's sort of like any other influencer, they are incentivized to make everything sound exciting to get clicks. Nobody was complaining about 3d printer influencers raving about how printing replacement dishwasher parts was going to change everything.
LLMs have also become kind of a political issue, except only the "anti" side even really cares about it. Given that using and prompting them is very much a garbage in/garbage out scenario, people let their social and political biases cloud their usage, and instead of helping it succeed, they try to collect "gotcha" moments, which doesn't reflect the workflow of someone using an LLM productively.
re: 3d printer hype: nah, there were people out there saying "umm, yeah so FDM is great for rapid prototyping and some small parts, but kinda terrible for lots of application. Being isotropic and lacking creep is way more important than you guys printing little boats that don't even float yet understand."
You just couldn't hear them over all the hype.
On the otherhand, that hype did help bring a lot of investment which begat things like desktop resin printers and prosumer-level SLS and such advanced tech that actually can replace much existing manufacturing tech.
Current "AI"/LLM situation sure seems like a bubble, but in the end transformer-based ML is obviously insanely powerful for many domains and it's going to change and create industries. But just like there isn't a 3d printer in every house, and it doesn't seem like that will be a thing anytime soon, it doesn't seem likely that we're all going to just be prompt engineers.
> The anti-LLM side seems much more insecure.
I can't agree with that.
The pro-LLM side is relentlessly pushing everyone into using it, even when very few people want it (e.g. WhatsApp not even allowing people to turn it off). That smacks of insecurity to me.
Anti-LLM people are happy to continue coding/writing/drawing without the new digital tools - that sounds like someone who knows what they're doing and feels secure about their abilities.
> LLMs have also become kind of a political issue, except only the "anti" side even really cares about it
The stock market would disagree to the tune of a large sum of money. What the "anti" side care most about is being forced to pay for (typically hidden costs such as a percentage of your pension investments) and often forced to use "AI" despite knowing that the service is substantially worse than getting people to do the same job (e.g. "AI" support service agents)
You cannot post anything positive about your experience with LLMs without being dogpiled by the anti-ai zealots. They are as predictable as the "But What About China!" crowd any time US emissions come up in a discussion. They are the "Nothing will work but nuclear!" folks who crop up in every single conversation about renewable energy. Their comments are exactly the same every single time regardless of the context and add nothing at all to the conversation.
I think you've got the zealotry back to front. The "anti-ai"s are basically just the status quo from a few years ago, but the zeal is from the "pro-ai"s as the technology is continuously forced onto people who may not want it. The thing is that there are a lot of people inflating claims about how it's going to change the workforce, change society etc. and we're just not seeing how you can rely on systems that are basically a condensed version of mediocrity pulled from the internet.
If the tech is really all that it is hyped up to be, then let's see the actual results rather than a hundred and one blog posts that are often AI-slop themselves. (Not accusing you of posting AI-slop, just to be clear)