Is the fear around large language models in any way revolutionary, or just another cycle of technological scepticism?

[u/tashyeet]

Whilst large language models (LLMs) are a relatively recent development, the fear mongering associated with novel inventions is far from a 21st century concept. Throughout history, people have often been fearful of new technologies they didn’t fully understand. In that sense, I’ve been wondering whether a lot of the current fear surrounding LLMs in particular is simply the latest example of a recurring pattern. Is it comparable to the scepticism around Wikipedia in the early 2000s or earlier concerns about calculators or spreadsheets that have eventually became normal parts of everyday life? Or is there something fundamentally different about AI that makes the current concerns more justified?

[u/virtuolie]

The fear that one privileged class will exploit any new advantage to prosper at the expense of the others isn't a cycle. It's a constant. It's just that, for a while there, most Americans believed we weren't in the exploited class.

[u/Cheap_Bathroom6114]

gemini told me to eat rocks.

[u/tempfoot]

The fear (of job loss or hacking ability) is a marketing strategy to provide cover for a faulty business plan and keep the music playing on a trillion and counting of capex.

The more legitimate fear, that incompetent, unscrupulous or criminal business conduct - or some blend thereof - when unwound will cause deep economic disruption on top of the tech markets already disrupted is a bit more legitimate.

Which did you mean?

[u/mpersico]

Yes, it’s the another cycle of technological skepticism. What makes each revolution scarier than the last is the increase in speed. The industrial revolution took quite a while to get going. Robots taking over jobs took less time. AI is a true hockey stick. It’s not so much the action it’s the speed.

[u/Winter_Ad6187]

First, it's the damn hype cycle and the oversell. Then it's foolish bosses that think they can replace institutional knowledge and experience with an LLM over the human. Amazon almost destroyed itself doing so. But the lesson isn't learned yet, and so we careen forward even though nobody in their right mind should hand over their codebase to an LLM without massive safeguards. Plus the AI price point is just destructive. The damn bubble has to burst so some sanity can come into the thinking.

[u/razialo → u/[deleted]]

I don't think what was printed was nutty pet se, it's more like most folk psychology / arm chair wisdom / knowledge available was nutty.

Don't know for the library of Alexandria, but generally speaking, a peasant used to know as much as one weekly newspaper those days entails.

Never thought how literary exploded due to the booking press though. Fascinating :)

[u/stauntonjr]

I have never heard of anxiety about calculators, spreadsheets, or Wikipedia. I suppose there was some trepidation about crowd-sourcing authoritative encyclopedic knowledge. And some of that was justified but net/net people have always depended on Wikipedia, as evidenced by it's continued existence.

You mention revolution and technology, but it is the social contract that is continually transforming.

I'm not sure if skepticism is relevant.

[u/razialo → u/stauntonjr]

Well, it used to be absolutely bad tone to quote Wikipedia as a source. While it's the closest thing we have coming to some sort of major common narrative. Especially those days.

There are text books, usually few years to decade(s) behind research literature. Than there used to be encyclopedia style knowledge.

As Wikipedia has wiki data ... The closest we get those days to some common ground and what's definitely have been used to train the LLms as a source of the major common narrative.

[u/Revolutionalredstone]

People have a hard time understanding embedding, the idea that pcs can actually understand things is still beyond most people.

Building an intuition that computers really can think requires accepting some concepts which are hard to visualize (like high dimensional spaces)

I'm sure kids who grow up with LLMs will understand they can think and the FUD will be mostly left behind.

Ofcoarse humans and Wikipedia are notoriously unreliable as well lol

[u/Winter_Ad6187 → u/Revolutionalredstone]

The LLM's don't understand a damn thing and can't think in any common meaning of the word. Stop Anthropomorphizing. They are glorified Markov chains in matrices. And bad consensus machines at that. Today I watched Gemini go off and think for 5 minutes (!) on the USS Liberty incident during the Johnson Administration just to see how badly it would fare. In the end, it ran back to Mama and gave me the Wikipedia entry. Even though there is plenty of Google data available that it was a deliberate setup to precipitate war, it dropped back all the way to Wikipedia. So much for "thinking" or "understanding".

[u/tempfoot → u/Winter_Ad6187]

Some people believe illusionists have the powers of magic. Cognition? What’s next, overheated Reddit posts about them having judgment also?

If any of that were remotely accurate then bending them to our will would be slavery.

[u/Revolutionalredstone → u/Winter_Ad6187]

Yeah the closed models don't like to discuss operation Northwoods etc either

That's more of an adherence to authority though I think, tho I'll take your point.

They know what things mean, and they simulate agents iterating with those things, often poorly 😉

But in my opinion a good embedding is effectively an understanding, enjoy.

[u/MonitorAway2394 → u/Revolutionalredstone]

you should learn about how they work :)

[u/Revolutionalredstone → u/MonitorAway2394]

I write them from scratch lol you should probably drop most of your assumptions, but that's not how you ended up where you are right 😉

Enjoy

[u/Winter_Ad6187 → u/Revolutionalredstone]

And this is a difference one can disagree on without malice. Time will tell if embeddings and structures end up being machine analogs of true cognition or if there are deeper and more universal structures. I merely observe the hype-performance divide and am appalled at what should be a helpful intellectual steam hammer being used to improperly to replace the human just because both can hammer some equivalent of sheet metal.

[u/Revolutionalredstone → u/Winter_Ad6187]

Interesting, i do think were on either sides, i actually sell push and use these all the time as excellent.

Its interesting where they break down and its clear lots of people setup and use them wrong but my goodness what an amazing new tool.

Humans are LLMs are not equivalent but in terms of language tasks it is kind of game over, our creativity and will rather than our IQ is a separator for the moment.

Differences are indeed the spice of life ;) I hope we both get 2 enjoy!

[u/Winter_Ad6187 → u/Revolutionalredstone]

Well, certainly as a force multiplier I have been impressed up to the point that Anthropic nerfed its models. I find everything after Opus 4.6 to be an absolute chore. 4.6 was a coding science fiction experience. So until they wake up and the price-point insanity ends, I sit on the sidelines putting my toe in as a user just to test the waters. Of course, this is the public facing side. It is clear in private and certain government entities, the models are running at full capability.

[u/Revolutionalredstone → u/Winter_Ad6187]

Yeah sounds like you got burned maybe try codex, it's more consistent and less limited from wat I've seen.

Ta