Comment by somenameforme

I don't think anybody is saying there won't be downsides to LLMs. Tech always comes with downsides, often quite extreme. Cars are a vivid example where even after a century of safety improvements, around a million people are still killed by them every year, to say nothing of climate stuff and other secondary or indirect issues. And that price is all just so we can get between places a bit more quickly and conveniently, yet we collectively deem that as an acceptable cost to pay for what we get.

By contrast LLMs have a long-term potential to provide vastly greater benefit to society by gradually automating most of all basic cognitive work. And what price are we paying for such? Some sites are getting hacked, some people are getting scammed, governments will improve self targeting abilities of weapons, and so on.

In reality the biggest downside will probably come in the form of the transition window as such automation creates a new economic equilibrium, akin to what happened after the industrial revolution. But none of these problems are anything like existential in nature. And when contrasted against what we stand to gain, they are basically negligible in the longrun. Hyperbolizing the negatives was unnecessary and self destructive.