Comment by simonw
4 hours ago
I've been calling LLMs "electric bicycles for the mind", inspired by that Jobs quote.
- some bicycle purists consider electric bicycles to be "cheating"
- you get less exercise from an electric bicycle
- they can get you places really effectively!
- if you don't know how to ride a bicycle an electric bicycle is going to quickly lead you to an accident
To keep torturing the metaphor, LLMs might be more like those electric unicycles (Onewheel, Inmotion, etc) – quite speedy, can get you places, less exercise, and also sometimes suddenly choke and send you flying facefirst into gravel.
And some people see you whizzing by and think "oh cool", and others see you whizzing by and think "what a tool."
More like the Segway... really cool at first then not really then totally overpriced and failed to revolutionize the industry. And it killed the founder
Is there a modern segway? I mean, I find ebikes are probably a better option in general, but it seems like all the pieces to recreate the segway for a much lower price are there already.
Looks like the closest thing is the self balancing stuff that segway makes. Otherwise it's just the scooters.
Just a small correction, the founder of Segway is Dean Kamen who is still alive. It was the then-owner of the company who died.
Most people I see on their electric bikes aren't even pedaling. They're electric motorcycles, and they're a plague to everyone using pedestrian trails. Some of them are going nearly highway speeds, it's ridiculous.
Not sure how this fits in the analogy, but as a cyclist I would add some people get more exercise by having an electric bicycle. It makes exercise available to more people.
I think that fits it really well.
Motorcycle might be more apt
I like this analogy. I'll add that, while electric bicycles are great for your daily commute, they're not suited for the extremes of biking (at least not yet).
- You're not going to take an electric bike mountain biking
- You're not going to use an electric bike to do BMX
- You're not going to use an electric bike to go bikepacking across the country
Whistlerite here. My Strava stats for last year suggest half and half eMTB and road riding. Tiny bit of fully self-powered MTB work.
As a 56-year old, eBikes are what make mountain biking possible and fun for me.
Actually, electric mountain bikes are popular (where they're allowed), mostly because they make ascents so easy.
They’re great when the trails aren’t too technical. No so much when they are (as I’ve learned from personal experience )
People have definitely used ebikes for bikepacking as well. Not sure about BMX.
I think you're kind of missing the point discussing which vehicle compares better to LLMs. The point is not the vehicle: it's the birth of the engine. Before engines, humans didn't have the means to produce those amounts of power- at all. No matter how many people, horses or oxen they had at their disposal.
> You're not going to use an electric bike to do BMX
while there are companies that have made electric BMX bikes, i'd argue that if you're doing actual "BMX" on a motorized bike, it's just "MX" at that point :)
Moped for the mind has a nice ring to it
I feel like both moped and electric bike misses the mark of the initial analogy, so does tractor too. Because they're not able to get good results without someone putting in the work ("energy") at some higher part of the process. It's not "at the push of a button/twist of the wrist" like with electric bikes or mopeds, but being able to know where/how to push actually gets you reliable results. Like a bicycle.
You probably can’t repair it yourself either.
- they still fall over if nobody's holding the bars
Slamming the brakes and going teeth first into the handlebars.
Not convinced with any of three analogies tbh they don’t quite capture what is going on like Steve jobs’ did.
And frankly all of this is really missing the point - instead of wasting time on analogies we should look at where this stuff works and then reason from there - a general way to make sense of it that is closer to reality.