undefined

points

[-]

I'm always surprised at how many people in the tech sector assume overcoming fundamental LLM weaknesses is always “just a matter of time,” and that time will arrive quickly enough to be relevant. If you haven’t seen any of the videos of people trying to get frontier LLMs to count consistently, you might think we’re further from LLM accountant than you realize. It’s not a data problem— I’m pretty sure they’ve encountered numeric progressions between 1 ABs l and 100 before.

And there is no necessity. We have accountants.

by RealStupidity8 hours ago|

parent|

[-]

I'm not just talking about LLMs though. People thought the internet and email were just a fad that would never catch on. People thought that the idea of home computing was absurd. All because they only saw what was in front of them at the time.

Also, how many accountants do you know that are truly happy with their work? I'd like to think many of them would love to do something other than crunch numbers all day.

by oblio7 hours ago|

parent|

[-]

> People thought the internet and email were just a fad that would never catch on. People thought that the idea of home computing was absurd.

We're far removed from "we've sold all the computers the world can buy" (back from when computers were the size of a building).

This is a disingenuous argument. The web and email were basically instant hits and people realized it. Similar story for home computing once the computing power caught up.

by oblio7 hours ago|

parent|

prev|

[-]

> I'm always surprised at how many people in the tech sector assume overcoming fundamental LLM weaknesses is always “just a matter of time,” and that time will arrive quickly enough to be relevant.

Lots of techies are tech-optimists ("tech always improves quickly").

Lots of people also have dollar signs in their eyes (or related, such as increased visibility and scope).

Hard to tell which is which.

by seanclayton9 hours ago|

prev|

[-]

Things can easily change for the worse, such as a stock market crash. Who knows? Will we get AGI or will we see more homeless? History says... AGI for sure!

by wat100008 hours ago|

parent|

[-]

It's very difficult for this sort of thing to change for the worse. It's basically impossible on the software side. If next year's model is worse then keep using this year's model. Hardware technology can potentially go backwards, but things have to get really bad for that to happen.

by oblio8 hours ago|

parent|

[-]

LLMs are inherently unreliable. We do already work with unreliable technologies for many things but there's this engineering principle called "use the right tool for the job".

And it's a lot more likely that LLMs can't be changed to become unreliable, it's just how they work. So we would need more basic research, that doesn't grow on trees and for which the timelines are basically open ended. Maybe tomorrow, maybe right after cold fusion hits mass adoption.