The point of the article is to paint LLMs as a confidence trick, the keyword being trick. If LLMs do actually deliver very real, tangible benefits then can you say there is really a trick? If a street performer was doing the cup and ball scam, but I actually won and left with more money than I started with then I'd say that's a pretty bad trick!
Of course it is a little more nuanced than this and I would agree that some of the marketing hype around AI is overblown, but I think it is inarguable that AI can provide concrete benefits for many people.
A huge amount of tech is a confidence trick. Not one aimed at <50 year old crowd but aimed at innumerate and STEM ignorant political leaders.
It's not LLMs they care about, it's datacenter ownership. US political norms empower owners. If you think of a DC as a mega church and remote users the disciple, it makes the desired network effect obvious. That is leveraged to sway Congress and states.
These tech projects are not intended for users. They're designed to gain confidence of politicians, preferential political support.
Gen pop is not the market. DC is.
Most peoples individual data crunching problems can be resolved with a TI graphing calculator.
Big Tech convinced Congress that culture of helpless consumers of their data center outputs is simpler and will lead humanity to a forever growth future!... nevermind they will all be dead, unable to verify.
A con trick that worked great on older, more religious leaning Americans. One that's not working so well on the younger generation who know how these systems work.
> If LLMs do actually deliver very real, tangible benefits then can you say there is really a trick?
Yes, yes you can. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this thread:
> When a con man sells you a cheap watch for an high price, what you get is still useful—a watch that tells the time—but you were also still conned, because what you paid for is not what was advertised. You overpaid because you were tricked about what you were buying.
LLMs are being sold as miracle technology that does way more than it actually can.
And at a cost im not sure most fully understand. We've allowed these companies to externalise all the negative outcomes. Now were seeing consumer electronics stock dry up, huge swaths of raw resources used, massive invasions of privacy, all so this one guy can do his corpo job 10x faster? Nah im good.
The marketing hype is economy defining at this point, so calling it overblown is an understatement.
Simplifying the hype into 2 threads, the first is that AI is an existential risk and the second is the promise of “reliable intelligence”.
The second is the bugbear, and the analogy I use is factories and assembly lines vs power tools.
LLMs are power tools. They are being hyped as factories of thoughts.
String the right tool calls, agents, and code together and you have an assembly line that manufactures research reports, gives advice, or whatever white collar work you need. No Holidays, HR, work hours, overhead etc.
I personally want everyone who can see why this second analogy does not work, to do their part in disabusing people of this notion.
LLMs are power tools, and impressive ones at that. In the right hands, they can do much. Power tools are wildly useful.
But Power tools do not make automatically make someone a carpenter. They don’t ensure you’ve built a house to spec. Nor is a planar saw going to evolve into a robot.
The hype needs to be taken to task, preferably clinically, so that we know what we are working with, and can use them effectively.
The nuclear share dropping is a very clear signal about a lack of investment. Shows that nuclear energy is no longer cost competitive, even in a "low regulation" environment.
It shows that strategic investment matters and people are looking at more than a single cost metric. Nuclear is behind today, but that doesn't hold a promise it will remain true into the future unless you stop investing now.
One armed bandit says explore as well as exploit. This delta you cited indicates the pendulum currently is more exploit than explore, but its not a static equation.
chinese nuclear is extremely cost competitive at 2.5bn/unit. They have other reasons, one being the ban on inland expansion fearing of messing up with 2 major rivers that feed the country. Current chinese units are basically borrowed and improved western designs, cap is basically vogtle's ap1000, hualong is a frankenstein of several western designs.
TBH this part seems key, even PRC couldn't operate full western designs reliant on western industrial capacity economically, part of it was simple incompetence of western supply chains (business closures / regulatory drama / sanctions). Nuclear seems viable once you strip out a lot of the politics that makes them uneconomical, hence PRC had to indigenize the designs since once western supply chains enter picture, the schedule goes out the window.
Everyone knows there's big money in AI right now, what people are skeptical on is how based in reality that is. Personally, I think there's little plans for profitability and this is all going to come crashing down sooner or later. Same reason I don't care much for MAU.
while you and bunch of other people
are waiting for this “reality” and “crash” to come the rest of us are building amazing shit in the present (actual) reality :)
Amazing shit that is currently making negative money, but might someday not.
That's the thing - taking a risky investment isn't free. If you choose wrong, then you're worse than if you did nothing at all. Think about that. Depending on what it is, there's lazy people sitting with their thumb up their ass who will outpace you.
Now, I'm not saying that AI is worthless and everyone building their business on AI is stupid. But I am saying it's a speculative investment, so treat it like that. Diversify, lower the blast radius. You don't want to be one of those suckers who bet it all on red.
In a similar vein, I really struggle to understand why copilot is so crap when writing SQL and I'm connected to the database. The database has so much context (schema names, column names, constraints etc.) yet copilot regularly hallucinates the most basic stuff like table and column names, which standard auto complete has managed fine for the last 20+ years.
No one is interested to solve hard problems. The broad industry got lucky with LLMs and everyone is now blindly burning capital at this. If you think they can't be that stupid remember the covid super hiring frenzy.
Heh, read The Big Short. A large point of the book is that a lot of rich people are both greedy (which we already assumed) and also stupid (which we didn't assume).
Been playing daily since you last posted it on hn, great fun! For me Im a bit of an amatuer so the level is pretty nice, usually getting sub 5 mins or so.
A little feedback: clues which are cultural references can be pretty frustrating if you don't knw the reference. There have been some where even after piecing it together I've still got no idea how the answer matches the clue.
In the EU 'golden visa' schemes are typically about investing a particular amount in the economy of the country. Exact amounts vary, but it's usually along the lines of x00,000 euro in property in the country (mortgage free value) or x00,000 euro in government bonds or x00,000 euro in a business within the country
Usually this gets you residency for some years conditional on the investment staying within the country, and potentially a path to citizenship after some years of living in the country.
> I'm sure there are gray areas in such contracts but something being down or not is pretty black and white.
Is it? Say you've got some big geographically distributed service doing some billions of requests per day with a background error rate of 0.0001%, what's your threshold for saying whether the service is up or down? Your error rate might go to 0.0002% because a particular customer has an issue so that customer would say it's down for them, but for all your other customers it would be working as normal.
Of course it is a little more nuanced than this and I would agree that some of the marketing hype around AI is overblown, but I think it is inarguable that AI can provide concrete benefits for many people.
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