zlacker

>>simonw+(OP)
Indeed. I don't understand why Hacker News is so dismissive about the coming of LLMs, maybe HN readers are going through 5 stages of grief?

But LLM is certainly a game changer, I can see it delivering impact bigger than the internet itself. Both require a lot of investments.

>>didip+Th
> I don't understand why Hacker News is so dismissive about the coming of LLMs

I find LLMs incredibly useful, but if you were following along the last few years the promise was for “exponential progress” with a teaser world destroying super intelligence.

We objectively are not on that path. There is no “coming of LLMs”. We might get some incremental improvement, but we’re very clearly seeing sigmoid progress.

I can’t speak for everyone, but I’m tired of hyperbolic rants that are unquestionably not justified (the nice thing about exponential progress is you don’t need to argue about it)

>>crysta+fn
We're very clearly seeing exponential progress - even above trend, on METR, whose slope keeps getting revised to a higher and higher estimate each time. Explain your perspective on the objective evidence against exponential progress?

>>aoeusn+Io
Pretty neat how this exponential progress hasn't resulted in exponential productivity. Perhaps you could explain your perspective on that?

>>llmsla+Ar
How long before introduction of computers lead to increases in average productivity? How long for the internet? Business is just slow to figure out how to use anything for its benefit, but it eventually gets there.

>>scotty+tD
The best example is that even ATM machines didn't reduce bank teller jobs.

Why? Because even the bank teller is doing more than taking and depositing money.

IMO there is an ontological bias that pervades our modern society that confuses the map for the territory and has a highly distorted view of human existence through the lens of engineering.

We don't see anything in this time series, because this time series itself is meaningless nonsense that reflects exactly this special kind of ontological stupidity:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PRS85006092

As if the sum of human interaction in an economy is some kind of machine that we just need to engineer better parts for and then sum the outputs.

Any non-careerist, thinking person that studies economics would conclude we don't and will probably not have the tools to properly study this subject in our lifetimes. The high dimensional interaction of biology, entropy and time. We have nothing. The career economist is essentially forced to sing for their supper in a type of time series theater. Then there is the method acting of pretending to be surprised when some meaningless reductionist aspect of human interaction isn't reflected in the fake time series.