LLM Inevitabilism

The day I can put on a pair of AR glasses as lightweight as my current glasses and gain better vision, I'd pay a huge amount for that.

I hate my varifocals because of how constrained they make my vision feel...

And my vision is good enough that the only thing I struggle with without glasses is reading.

To me, that'd be a no-brainer killer app where all of the extra AR possibilities would be just icing.

Once you get something like enough and high resolution enough, you open up entirely different types of applications like that which will widen the appeal massively, and I think that is what will then sell other AR/VR capability. I'm not interested enough to buy AR glasses for the sake of AR alone, but if I could ditch my regular glasses (without looking like an idiot), then I'm pretty sure I'd gradually explore what other possibilities it'd add.

Every single HN post on AI or crypto I see this argument and it’s exhausting.

When Eliza was first built it was seen a toy. It took many more decades for LLMs to appear.

My favourite example is prime numbers: a bunch of ancient nerds messing around with numbers that today, thousands of years later, allow us to securely buy anything and everything without leaving our homes or opening our mouths.

You can’t dismiss a technology or discovery just because it’s not useful on an arbitrary timescale. You can dismiss it for other reasons, just not this reason.

Blockchain and related technologies have advanced the state of the art in various areas of computer science and mathematics research (zero knowledge proofs, consensus, smart contracts, etc.). To allege this work will bear no fruit is quite a claim.

> With the “metaverse”, you clear out a space around you, strap a heavy thing on your head, and shut yourself into an artificial environment. After the first oohs and aahs, you enter a VR chat room… And realize the thing on your head adds absolutely nothing to the interaction.

It doesn't if you use it as just a chat room. For some people it does add a lot, though.

The "metaverse" as in Active Worlds, Second Life, VR Chat, our own Overte, etc has been around for a long time and does have an user base that likes using it.

What I'm not too sure about is it having mass appeal, at least just yet. To me it's a bit of a specialized area, like chess. It's of great interest to some and very little to most of the population. That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with places like chess.com existing.

> And realize the thing on your head adds absolutely nothing to the interaction.

There are some nice effects - simulating sword fighting, shooting, etc.

It's just benefits still outweigh the cost. Getting to "good enough" for most people is just not possible in short and midterm.

> With crypto, it’s still the case that you create a wallet and then… there’s nothing to do on the platform. You’re expected to send real money to someone so they’ll give you some of the funny money that lets you play the game.

This became a problem later due to governments cracking down on cryptos and some terrible technical choices made transactions expensive just as adoption was ramping. (Pat yourselves on the back, small blockers.)

My first experience with crypto was buying $5 in bitcoin from a friend. If I didn't do it that way I could go on a number of websites and buy crypto without opening an account, via credit card, or via SMS. Today, most of the $5 would be eaten by fees, and buying for cash from an institution requires slow and intrusive KYC.

Bitcoin seems to be working as a kind of digital gold if you look at price development. It's not that much about technology though.

The question I have for your observation (which I think is correct btw) is:

Do you think it's inherent to the technology that the use cases are not useful or is it our lack of imagination so far that we haven't come up with something useful yet?

Give it some time - just like LLMs the first VR headsets were created in the 90s (for example by Nintendo). But it took another 30 years for the hardware to achieve levels of functionality and comfortableness that make it a viable consumer product. Apple Vision is starting to get there. And crypto is even younger - it started in early 2009. For people living in countries without a proper banking infrastructure the stablecoins are already very helpful. Billions of people live in countries that don't have a well audited financial sector, that respects the rule of law or an independent central bank that makes sound monetary decisions irrespective of the government. For them stablecoins and their cheap transactions are huge.

Did you build the house you live in? Did you weave your own clothes or grow your own food?

We all depend on systems others built. Determining when that trade-off is worthwhile and recognizing when convenience turns into dependence are crucial.

> and you learned nothing in the process.

why do you presume the person wanted to learn something, rather than to get the work done asap? May be they're not interested in learning, or may be they have something more important to do, and saving this time is a life saver?

> You are losing autonomy and depending more and more on external companies

do you also autonomously produce your own clean water, electricity, gas and food? Or do you rely on external companies to provision all of those things?

> Hours of time saved, and you learned nothing in the process

Point and click "engineer" 2.0

We all know this.

Eventually someone has to fix the mess and it won't be him. He will be management by then.

these 3090s are mine. hands off!

I don't know about VBA, but spreadsheets actually delivered (to a large extent) on the promise that 'everyone can write simple programs'. So much so that people don't see creating a spreadsheet as coding.

Before spreadsheets you had to beg for months for the IT department to pick your request, and then you'd have to wait a quarter or two for them to implement a buggy version of your idea. After spreadsheets, you can hack together a buggy version of your idea yourself over a weekend.

> everyone can code!

I work directly with marketers and even if you give them something like n8n, they find it hard to be precise. Programming teaches you a "precise mindset" that one doesn't have when they aren't really thinking about tech professionally.

I wonder if seasoned UX designers can code now. They do think professionally about software. I wonder if it's at a deep enough granularity such that they can simply use natural language to get something to work.

> It doesn't mean “AI is the new electricity.” (actual quote from Andrew Ng in the post).

I personally agree with Andrew Ng here (and I've literally arrived at the exact same formulation before becoming aware of Ng's words).

I take "new electricity" to mean, it'll touch everything people do, become part of every endeavor in some shape of form. Much like electricity. That doesn't mean taking over literally everything; there's plenty of things we don't use electricity for, because alternatives - usually much older alternatives - are still better.

There's still plenty of internal combustion engines on the ground, in the seas and in the skies, and many of them (mostly on extremely light and extremely heavy ends of the spectrum) are not going to be replaced by electric engines any time soon. Plenty of manufacturing and construction is still done by means of hydraulic and pneumatic power. We also sometimes sidestep electricity for heating purposes by going straight from sunlight to heat. Etc.

But even there, electricity-based technology is present in some form. The engine may be this humongous diesel-burning colossus, built from heat, metal, and a lot of pneumatics, positioned and held in place by hydraulics - but all the sensors on it are electric, where in the past some would be hydraulic and rest wouldn't even exist; it's controlled and operated by electricity-based computing network; it's been designed on computers, and so on.

In this sense, I think "AI is a new electricity" is believable. It's a qualitatively new approach to computing, that's directly or indirectly applicable everywhere, and that people already try to apply to literally everything[0]. And, much like with electricity, time and economics will tell which of those applications make sense, which were dead ends, and which were plain dumb in retrospect.

--

[0] - And they really did try to stuff electricity everywhere back when it was the new hot thing. Same with nuclear energy few decades later. We still laugh at how people 100 years ago imagined the future will look like... in between crying that we got short-changed by reality.

While I'd agree with your first line:

> The problem with LLM is when they're used for creativity or for thinking.

And while I also agree that it's currently closer to "AI is the new VBA" because of the current domain in which consumer AI* is most useful.

Despite that, I'd also aver that being useful in simply "many" contexts will make AI "the new electricity”. Electricity itself is (or recently was) only about 15% of global primary power, about 3 TW out of about 20 TW: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consum...

Are LLMs 15% of all labour? Not just coding, but overall? No. The economic impact would be directly noticeable if it was that much.

Currently though, I agree. New VBA. Or new smartphone, in that we ~all have and use them, while society as a whole simultaneously cringes a bit at this.

* Narrower AI such as AlphaFold etc. would, in this analogy, be more like a Steam Age factory which had a massive custom steam engine in the middle distributing motive power to the equipment directly: it's fine at what it does, but you have to make it specifically for your goal and can't easily adapt it for something else later.

LLM is helpful for creativity and thinking When you run out of your ideas

The year is 1985. Internet is coming. You don't want it to.

Can you stop it?

They are not wrong.

The market, meant in a general sense, is stronger than any individual or groups of people. LLMs are here, and already demonstrate enough productive value to make them in high demand for objective reasons (vs. just as a speculation vehicle). They're not going away, nor is larger GenAI. It would take a collapse of technological civilization to turn the tide back now.

I have a parallel to suggest; I know it's the rhetorical tool of analogous reasoning, but it deeply matches the psychology of the way most people think. Just like getting to a "certain" number of activated parameters in a model (for some "simple" tasks like summarisation) can be as low as 1.8 billion, once that threshold is breached the "emergent" behaviour of "reasonable", "contextual", or "lucid" text is achieved; or to put this in layman's terms, once your model is "large enough" (and this is quite small compared to the largest models currently in daily use by millions) the generated text goes from jibberish to uncanny valley to lucid text quite quickly.

In the same way once a certain threshold is reached in the utility of AI (in a similar vein to the "once I saw the Internet for the first time I knew I would just keep using it") it becomes "inevitable"; it becomes a cheaper option than "the way we've always done it", a better option, or some combination of the two.

So, as is very common in technological innovation / revolution, the question isn't will it change the way things are done so much as where will it shift the cost curve? How deeply will it displace "the way we've always done it"? How many hand weaved shirts do you own? Joseph-Marie Jacquard wants to know (and King Cnut has metaphorical clogs to sell to the Luddites).

There is an old cliché about stopping the tide coming in. I mean, yeah you can get out there and participate in trying to stop it.

This isn't about fatalism or even pessimism. The tide coming in isn't good or bad. It's more like the refrain from Game of Thrones: Winter is coming. You prepare for it. Your time might be better served finding shelter and warm clothing rather than engaging in a futile attempt to prevent it.

You can fight against the current of society or you can swim in the direction it's pulling you. If you want to fight against it, you can, but you shouldn't expect others to. For some, they can see that it's inevitable because the strength of the movement is greater than the resistance.

It's fair enough to say "you can change the future", but sometimes you can't. You don't have the resources, and often, the will.

The internet was the future, we saw it, some didn't. Cryptocurrencies are the future, some see it, some don't. And using AI is the future too.

Are LLMs the endpoint? Obviously not. But they'll keep getting better, marginally, until there's a breakthrough, or a change, and they'll advance further.

But they won't be going away.

The reality for most people is that at a macro level the future is something that happens to them. They try to participate e.g. through voting, but see no change even on issues a significant majority of 'voters' agree on, regardless of who 'wins' the elections.

Isn't it kind of both?

Did luddites ever have a chance of stopping the industrial revolution?

Regarding your plane story, I can't help but notice that the fact this plane was in operation, and they were willing to fly on it, implies the problem wasn't that big of an issue.

Are you sure code from another developer (junior or not) works correctly? Or that it is secure? You have the same need to review the code regardless of the source.

I'm uncertain if MY code works correctly lol. I know many code-illiterate folk; some of them I call "boss" or "client." They get along fine dining on my spaghetti. I do likewise never touching the wheel/pedals on my car's 45-minute commute to work.

Will someone eventually be scraping me off of the highway? Will my bosses stop printing money with my code? Possibly! But that's life -- our world is built upon trust, not correctness.

Thanks for the link. The comparison to electricity is a good one, and this is a nice reflection on why it took time for electricity’s usefulness to show up in productivity stats:

> What eventually allowed gains to be realized was redesigning the entire layout of factories around the logic of production lines. In addition to changes to factory architecture, diffusion also required changes to workplace organization and process control, which could only be developed through experimentation across industries.

> Developers haven't even started extracting the value of LLMs with agent architectures yet

There are thousands of startups doing exactly that right now, why do you think this will work when all evidence points towards it not working? Or why else would it not already have revolutionized everything a year or two ago when everyone started doing this?

Every 6 months someone tells me that the latest AI model has revolutionised everything. Every time I try them, they're still terrible

The issue is that AI fundamentally can never work well for what I could want it to do, which is code. Its a fundamental mismatch between what AI is good at, and the problem trying to be solved. For anything else, i dgaf because my existing tools are far better - except in niche areas - which isn't enough to sustain the current LLM craze. I've got 0 desire to subscribe to proprietary tooling that will be dead within 5 years

Every booster argument is like this one. $trite_analogy triumphant smile

3 years into automating all white collar labor in 6 months.

Theyre doing it so much it's practically a cliche.

There are underserved areas of the economy but agentic startups is not one.

>evelopers haven't even started extracting the value of LLMs with agent architectures yet.

Which is basically what? The infinite monkey theorem? Brute forcing solutions for problems at huge costs? Somehow people have been tricked to actually embrace and accept that now they have to pay subscriptions from 20$ to 300$ to freaking code? How insane is that, something that was a very low entry point and something that anyone could do, is now being turned into some sort of classist system where the future of code is subscriptions you pay for companies ran by sociopaths who don't care that the world burns around them, as long as their pockets are full.

>> Developers haven't even started extracting the value of LLMs with agent architectures yet.

What does this EVEN mean? Do words have any value still, or are we all just starting to treat them as the byproduct of probabilistic tokens?

"Agent architectures". Last time I checked an architecture needs predictability and constraints. Even in software engineering, a field for which the word "engineering" is already quite a stretch in comparison to construction, electronics, mechanics.

Yet we just spew the non-speak "Agentic architectures" as if the innate inability of LLMs in managing predictable quantitative operations is not an unsolved issue. As if putting more and more of these things together automagically will solves their fundamental and existential issue (hallucinations) and suddenly makes them viable for unchecked and automated integration.

Most prominent example was this one: https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-pulls-back-more...

LLM can give you thousands of lines of perfectly working code for less than 1 dollar. How is that trivial or expensive?

Imagine telling a person from five years ago that the programs that would basically solve NLP, perform better than experts at many tasks and are hard not to anthropomorphize accidentally are actually "trivial". Good luck with that.

Calling LLMs trivial is a new one. Yea just consume all of the information on the internet and encode it into a statistical model, trivial, child could do it /s

Nah, if TSMC got exploded and there was a world war, in 20 years all the LLMs would bit rot.

It's inevitable not because of any inherent quality of the tech, but because investors are demanding it be so and creating the incentives for 'inevitability'.

I also think EV vehicles are an 'inevitability' but I am much less offended by the EV future, as they still have to outcompete IC's, there are transitional options (hybrids), there are public transport alternatives, and at least local regulations appear to be keeping pace with the technical change.

AI inevitabilty so far seems to be only inevitable because I can't actually opt out of it when it gets pushed on me.

Yes, nobody is claiming it's inevitable based on nothing, it's based on first principles thinking: economics, incentives, game theory, human psychology. Trying to recast this in terms of "predestination" gives me strong wordcel vibes.

That isn’t the argument of the book, so I don’t think you actually read it, or even the Wikipedia page?

The rest of your comment doesn’t really seem related to my argument at all. I didn’t say technological process stops or slows down, I pointed out how the thought patterns are often the same across time, and the inability and unwillingness to recognize this is psychologically lazy, to over simplify. And there are indeed examples of technological acceleration or dispersal which was deliberately curtailed – especially with weapons.

This entire conversation is a masterpiece!

Just picture this convo somewhere in nature, at night, by a fire.

None of the "failed" innovations you cited were even near the adoption rate of current LLMs.

As much as I don't like it, this is the actual difference. LLMs are already good enough to be a very useful and widely spread technology. They can become even better, but even if they don't there are plenty of use cases for them.

VR/AR, AI in the 80s and Tesla at the beginning were technology that someone believe could become widespread, but still weren't at all.

That's a big difference

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhr6fHmCJ6k (1min video, 'Elon Musk's broken promises')

Musk's 2014/2015 promises are arguably delivered, here in 2025 (took a little more than '1 month' tho), but the promises starting in 2016 are somewhere between 'undelivered' and 'blatant bullshit'.

> Remember ...

No, I don't remember it like that. Do you have any serious sources from history showing that Segway hype is even remotely comparable to today's AI hype and the half a trillion a year the world is spending on it?

You don't. I love the argument ad absurdum more than most but you've taken it a teensy bit too far.

1. The Segway had very low market penetration but a lot of PR. LLMs and diffusion models have had massive organic growth.

2. Segways were just ahead of their time: portable lithium-ion powered urban personal transportation is getting pretty big now.

I think about the Segway a lot. It's a good example. Man, what a wild time. Everyone was so excited and it was held in mystery for so long. People had tried it in secret and raved about it on television. Then... they showed it... and... well...

I got to try one once. It was very underwhelming...

> Remember the revolutionary, seemingly inevitable tech that was poised to rewrite how humans thought about transportation? The incredible amounts of hype, the secretive meetings disclosing the device, etc.? That turned out to be the self-balancing scooter known as a Segway?

Counterpoint: That's how I feel about ebikes and escooters right now.

Over the weekend, I needed to go to my parent's place for brunch. I put on my motorcycle gear, grabbed my motorcycle keys, went to my garage, and as I was about to pull out my BMW motorcycle (MSRP ~$17k), looked at my Ariel ebike (MSRP ~$2k) and decided to ride it instead. For short trips they're a game changing mode of transport.

ChatGPT has something 300 million monthly users after less than three years and I don't think has Segway sold a million scooters, even though their new product lines are sick.

I can totally go about my life pretending Segway doesn't exist, but I just can't do that with ChatGPT, hence why the author felt compelled to write the post in the first place. They're not writing about Segway, after all.

I remember the Segway hype well. And I think AI is to Segway as nuke is to wet firecracker.

That was marketing done before the nature of the device was known. The situation with LLMs is very different, really not at all comparable.

Trend vs single initiative. One company failed but overall personal electric transportation is booming is cities. AI is the future, but along the way many individual companies doing AI will fail. Cars are here to stay, but many individual car companies have and will fail, same for phones, everyone has a mobile phone, but nokia still failed…

We haven't even barely extracted the value from the current generation of SOTA models. I would estimate less then 0.1% of the possible economic benefit is currently extracted, even if the tech effectively stood still.

That is what I find so wild about the current conversation and debate. I have claude code toiling away building my personal organization software right now that uses LLMs to take unstructured input and create my personal plans/project/tasks/etc.

the idea that we could have a stilted and awkward conversation with an overconfident robot would not have surprised a typical mid-century science fiction consumer

> Some would think it would be great, some would see it as dystopian, but neither would be right.

No, the people saying it’s dystopian would be correct by objective measure. Bombs are nothing next to Facebook and TikTok.

> But if you told them about social media, I think the story would be different.

It would be utopian, like how people thought of social media in the oughts. It's a common pattern through human history. People lack the imagination to think of unintended side effects. Nuclear physics leading to nuclear weapons. Trains leading to more efficient genocide. Media distribution and printing press leading to new types of propaganda and autocracies. Oil leading to global warming. IT leading to easy surveillance. Communism leading to famine.

Some of that utopianism is wilful, created by the people with a self-interested motive in seeing that narrative become dominant. But most of it is just a lack of imagination. Policymakers taking the path of local least resistance, seeking to locally (in a temporal sense) appease, avoiding high-risk high-reward policy gambits that do not advance their local political ambitions. People being satisfied with easy just-so stories rather than humility and a recognition of the complexity and inherent uncertainty of reality.

AI, and especially ASI, will probably be the same. The material upsides are obvious. The downsides harder to imagine and more speculative. Most likely, society will be presented with a fait accompli at a future date, where once the downsides are crystallized and real, it's already too late.

Well there are like 500 nuclear powerplants online today supplying 10% of the world's power, so it wasn't too far off. Granted it's not the Mr. Fusion in every car as they imagined it back then. We probably also won't have ASI taking over the world like some kind of vengeful comic book villain as people imagine it today.

Chatgpt Has 800 million weekly active users. That's roughly 10% of the planet.

I get that it's not the panacea some people want us to believe it is, but you don't have to deny reality just because you don't like it.

> Most people except for the gamers and plagiarists don't want it.

As someone who doesn't actually want or use AI, I think you are extremely wrong here. While people don't necessarily care about the forced integrations of AI into everything, people by and large want AI massively.

Just look at how much it is used to do your homework, or replaces Wikipedia & Google in day to day discussions. How much it is used to "polish" emails (spew better sounding BS). How much it is used to generate meme images instead of trawling the web for them. AI is very much a regular part of day to day life for huge swaths of the population. Not necessarily in economically productive ways, but still very much embedded and unlikely to be removed - especially since it's current capabilities today are already good enough for these purposes, they don't need smarter AI, just keep it cheap enough.

A couple of typical comments about LLMs would be:

"This LLM is able to capably output useful snippets of code for Python. That's useful."

and

"I tried to get an LLM to perform a niche task with a niche language, it performed terribly."

I think the right synthesis is that there are some tasks the LLMs are useful at, some which they're not useful at; practically, it's useful to be able to know what they're useful for.

Or, if we trust that LLMs are useful for all tasks, then it's practically useful to know what they're not good at.

> Or it might just be astroturfing, it's hard to tell.

Compare the hype for commercial SaaS models to say Deepseek. I think there is an insane amount of astroturfing.

Unless you have automated fine-tuning pipelines that self-optimize optimize models for your tasks and domains, you are not even close to utilizing LLMs to their potential. But stating that you don’t need extensive, specialized skills is enough of a signal for most of us to know that offering you feedback would be fruitless. If you don’t have the capacity by now to recognize the barrier to entry, experts are not going to take the time to share their solutions with someone unwilling to understand.

The more I learn about prompt engineering the more complex it seems to be, but perhaps I'm an idiot.

The sad thing is that it seems to work. Lots of people are falling for the "you're holding it wrong" narrative.

> People can't be trusted to do anything either, which is why we have guardrails and checks and balances and audits. That is why in software, for instance, we have code reviews and tests and monitoring and other best practices. That is probably also why LLMs have made the most headway in software development; we already know how to deal with unreliable workers that are humans and we can simply transfer that knowledge over.

The difference is that humans eventually learn. We accept that someone who joins a team will be net-negative for the first few days, weeks, or even months. If they keep making the same mistakes that were picked out in their first code review, as LLMs do, eventually we fire them.

It's a good thing in a world where the pot of money is so small it doesn't influence what it's betting on, it's a bad thing when you're talking about Zuckerberg or Lehman Brothers, because when they decide to put their money on strange financial investments they just make reality and regardless how stupid in the long run we're going down with the ship for at least a decade or so

"Talking your book" is seen as a bad thing, especially when not properly disclosed.

Except "the money" in this case is just part of funds distributed around by the super rich. The saying works better when it's about regular people actually taking risks and making sacrifices.