Hacker News Reader

Comment by yupitsme123 | Hacker News Reader

Do you really feel that skipping LLMs would be like skipping the industrial revolution, electricity, or the internet? Twenty years from now where do you see societies that "embrace" this technology vs. ones that don't?

It's obvious what electricity and mass production can do to improve the prosperity and happiness of a given society. It's not so obvious to me what benefits we'd be missing out on if we just canceled LLMs at this point.

View on HN

LLMs aren’t the end all be all of anything. But they’re clearly a step towards augmenting human cognition and in giving machines the ability to perform cognitive tasks. And when Google says a quarter of its code is being written by LLMs, and DeepMind is making tremendous progress on protein folding and DNA understanding with fundamentally the same technology, it seems pretty clear that we’d miss out on a lot without this.

Full disclosure: I think protein folding and DNA prediction could quite possibly the biggest advancements in medicine, ever. And still, all the critiques of LLMs being janky and not nearly sufficient to be generally intelligent are true.

So yes, I think it’s absolutely on the scale of electrification.

When I look at the problems in my life, in my country, or in the world around me, not once has it occurred to me that they were due to a lack of advanced pattern recognition or DNA prediction.

When people were dying of hunger then being able to create more food was obviously a huge win. Likewise for creating light where people used to live in darkness.

But contemporary technologies solve non-problems and take us closer to a future no one asked for, when all we want is cheaper rent, cheaper healthcare, and less corruption.

You don’t think protein folding and dna prediction will yield better healthcare?

I said cheaper. Not better. What difference does it make if it's better if only a few people can afford it. I also don't accept longer lifespans as something that is always worth pursuing.

You also didn't address my point that those technologies do nothing to solve the real problems that real people want solved. There's a strong possibility that they'll just exacerbate them.

I guess your argument could be leveled against any transformational technology, from the industrial age through to the internet (which many doubted would have any meaningful economic impact, and clearly didn't solve many of the most pressing problems of the day for humanity).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com