Comment by SamuelAdams

5 hours ago

Something often left out is the dependence on LLM’s. Students today assume LLM’s will always be available, at a price they (or their companies) can afford.

What happens if LLM’s suddenly change their cost to be 1000 USD per user per month? What if it is 1000 USD per request? Will new students and new professionals still be able to complete their jobs?

4 comments

SamuelAdams

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FloorEgg  3 hours ago

I swear teachers said something extremely similar about calculators when I was in grade school. "What are you going to do when you don't have access to a calculator? You won't ways have one with you!"

Calculators have never been more accessible/available. (And yet I personally still do most basic calculations in my head)

So I agree students should learn to do this stuff without LLMs, but not because the LLMs are going to get less accessible. There's another better reason I'm just not sure how to articulate it yet. Something to do with integrated information and how thinking works.

  • SamuelAdams  3 hours ago

    Calculators are widely available for a low cost. The logic behind most calculators is able to be consistently duplicated across a variety of manufacturers, thereby lowering the cost to produce these to the masses.

    LLM’s are not consistent. For example, having a new company make a functional duplicate of ChatGPT is nearly impossible.

    Furthermore, the cost of LLM’s can change at any time for any reason. Access can be changed by new government regulations, and private organizations can chose to suspend or revoke access to their LLM due to changes in local laws.

    All of this makes dependence on an LLM a risk for any professionals. The only way these would be mitigated is by an open source, freely available LLM that creates consistent results that students can learn how to use.

    • FloorEgg  22 minutes ago

      My intuition is that the costs involved to train and run LLMs will keep dropping. They will become more and more accessible, so long as our economies keep chugging along.

      I could be wrong, time will tell. I just wouldn't base my argument for why students should learn to think for themselves on accessibility of LLMs. I think there's something far more fundamental and important, I just don't know how to say it yet.