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.
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.
Ok, let’s cherry pick some more societal tech revolutions. People also thought Segways were not the revolution in transportation despite fans and industry proponents saying we’d need to redesign cities to accommodate them. People also thought blockchain ledgers were a niche, even if useful, technique despite fans and industry proponents saying they were going to change literally everything.(remember Web 3.0?) People thought NFTs were a fundamentally flawed solution in search of a problem despite fans and industry proponents asserting they’d revolutionize IP. People thought that the metaverse was kind of ridiculous despite fans and industry proponents saying we’d all live a significant portion of our lives there, and some were practically running victory laps at the beginning of the pandemic when everybody was forced online (but then still didn’t use the metaverse. Some thought immersive VR headsets were a niche technology with limited consumer appeal despite fans and industry proponents claiming they’d essentially be the default display for computing by now.
> 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.
Email was a hit well before the internet existed. The utility was immediately apparent. And while people had lots of concerns about the internet, like misinformation and consumer-level utility, it was never broadly considered to be as dubiously useful or ethically fraught as LLMs and diffusion models. You can definitely find articles criticizing the bubble-forming finances, and one or two written by dedicated serial naysayers, but it was not a common perspective. Anybody who lived through that era will remember a hell of a lot more pushback against mobile phone adoption than Internet adoption, and even that was culturally marginal.
> 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).
I think those are more like two facets in the crowd rather than two distinct crowds. Almost all idealist tech industry workers in column A that believe this is the future of the tech business would also fit into column B. Column B folks believing this business isn’t a fantastically expensive mass delusion event (with regard to the financial impact predictions) would essentially fit into column a. Most that wouldn’t would probably be Wall Street types that told Leopold Aschenbrenner to get bent rather than handing him billions of dollars on blind faith.
And there is no necessity. We have accountants.