The people claiming that AI in the 80s or VR or robotaxis or self-driving cars in the 2010s were inevitable weren't doing it on the basis of the tech available at that point, but on the assumed future developments. Just a little more work and they'd be useful, we promise. You just need to believe hard enough.

With the smartphone in 2009, the web in the late 90s or LLMs now, there's no element of "trust me, bro" needed. You can try them yourself and see how useful they are. You didn't need to be a tech visionary to predict the future when you're buying stuff from Amazon in the 90s, or using YouTube or Uber on your phone in 2009, or using Claude Code today. I'm certainly no visionary, but both the web and the smartphone felt different from everything else at the time, and AI feels like that now.

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hammyhavoc 19 hours ago | parent [-]

LLM inevitablists definitely assume future developments will improve their current state.

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ascorbic 17 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yes, but the difference from the others, and the thing it has in common with early smartphones and the web, is that it's already useful (and massively popular) today.

	▲	rafaelmn 16 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		And self driving is a great lane assist. There's a huge leap from that to driving a taxi while you are at work is same as LLMs saving me mental effort with instructions on what to do and solving the task for me completely.
	▲	hammyhavoc 11 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		What uses are you finding for it in the real world? I've found them nothing but unreliable at best, and quite dangerous at worst in terms of MCP and autonomous agents. Definitely not ready for production, IMO. I don't think they ever will be for most of what people are trying to use them for. "Novelty" comes to mind.

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durumu 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes, LLMs are currently useful and are improving rapidly so they are likely to become even more useful in the future. I think inevitable is a pretty strong word but barring government intervention or geopolitical turmoil I don't see signs of LLM progress stopping.

	▲	hammyhavoc 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Why would they progress significantly than where they are now? An LLM is an LLM. More tokens doesn't mean better capabilities, in fact, quite the opposite seems to be the case, and suggests smaller models aimed at specific tasks are the "future" of it.