I think this is both right and wrong. There was a good book that came out probably 15 years ago about how technology never stops in aggregate, but individual technologies tend to grow quickly and then stall. Airplane jets were one example in the book. The reason why I partially note this as wrong is that even in the 70s people recognized that supersonic travel had real concrete issues with no solution in sight. I don't think LLMs share that characteristic today.

A better example, also in the book, are skyscrapers. Each year they grew and new ones were taller than the ones last year. The ability to build them and traverse them increased each year with new technologies to support it. There wasn't a general consensus around issues that would stop growth (except at more extremes like air pressure). But the growth did stop. No one even has expectations of taller skyscrapers any more.

LLMs may fail to advance, but not because of any consensus reason that exists today. And it maybe that they serve their purpose to build something on top of them which ends up being far more revolutionary than LLMs. This is more like the path of electricity -- electricity in itself isn't that exciting nowadays, but almost every piece of technology built uses it.

I fundamentally find it odd that people seem so against AI. I get the potential dystopian future, which I also don't want. But the more mundane annoyance seems odd to me.

> even in the 70s people recognized that supersonic travel had real concrete issues with no solution in sight. I don't think LLMs share that characteristic today

I think they pretty strongly do

The solution seems to be "just lower your standards for acceptable margin of error to whatever the LLM is capable of producing" which should be concerning and absolutely unacceptable to anyone calling themselves an Engineer

> The reason why I partially note this as wrong is that even in the 70s people recognized that supersonic travel had real concrete issues with no solution in sight. I don't think LLMs share that characteristic today.

The fundamental problem has already been mentioned: Nobody can figure out how to SELL it. Because few people are buying it.

It's useful for aggregation and summarization of large amounts of text, but it's not trustworthy. A good summary decreases noise and amplifies signal. LLMs don't do that. Without the capability to validate the output, it's not really generating output of lasting value. It's just a slightly better search engine.

It feels like, fundamentally, the primary invention here is teaching computers that it's okay to be wrong as long as you're convincing. That's very useful for propaganda or less savory aspects of business, but it's less useful for actual communication.

There are sound math reasons for skyscrapers topping out, mostly due to elevator capacity and the inability to effectively get people in and out of the floorspace as you go past a few hundred ft. There's no construction engineering reason you can't go taller - the Burj Khalifa, for example, is three times taller than a typical Western major city skyscraper - it just doesn't make economic sense unless you're a newly rich nation looking to prove a point.

> even in the 70s people recognized that supersonic travel had real concrete issues with no solution in sight. I don't think LLMs share that characteristic today

I hate to dogpile on this statement but I can think of two major issues right now:

* Small context windows, and serious degradation when pushing the limits of existing context windows. A human can add large amounts of state to their "context window" every day.

* Realtime learning. My humans get smarter every day, especially in the context of working with a specific codebase.

Maybe the AI companies will figure this out, but they are not "same technique more processor power" kinds of problems.

>I think this is both right and wrong. There was a good book that came out probably 15 years ago about how technology never stops in aggregate, but individual technologies tend to grow quickly and then stall. Airplane jets were one example in the book. The reason why I partially note this as wrong is that even in the 70s people recognized that supersonic travel had real concrete issues with no solution in sight. I don't think LLMs share that characteristic today.

I don't see any solution to hallucinations, nor do I see any solution in sight. I think that could count as a concrete issue that would stop them.

Yeah, and with LLMs the thing I can't shake, however, is that this time it's pretty strongly (maybe parasitically) latched onto the aggregate progress of Moore's law. Few other technologies have enjoyed such relatively unfettered exponential improvement. It's like if skyscraper materials double in strength every n years, and their elevators approach teleportation speed, the water pumps get twice as powerful, etc., which would change the economics vs the reality that most of the physical world doesn't improve that fast.

Was the problem that supersonic flight was expensive and the amount of customers willing to pay the price was even lower than the number of customers that could even if they wanted to?