Any new technology given this much attention and money will disrupt, that's not really a question.

The question is whether we're going to be better off for it, and if people want all that change in the first place.

It could be argued that the adoption of the automobile was a bad move.

You and I debating either its efficacy or social good though is irrelevant if it marches on regardless.

I didn't explain my point there, let me try with the automobile example.

There's a key difference in the how the impact of the automobile happened - consumers got to choose to buy them and the impact was driven in large part by market demand.

The fact that LLMs are going to have a big impact seems obvious because a comparatively few number of people are making a huge deal out of them, both with attention and money. LLMs will be big but that says nothing of their usefulness or even consumer demand, it says more about how the industry is being financed.

I'm not too worried about Big Corporation trying to push a rope. In the end it really is only going to succeed if "we" want it — find value in it.

> only going to succeed if "we" want it — find value in it.

I'll be pleasantly surprised if that's how it turns out.

At least so far market dynamics haven't really been much of a driver for LLMs. Those with the money think its the next big thing and are pouring cash both into the LLMs themselves and any product that slaps a "powered by AI" sticker on the box.

That's not to say people aren't also actively choosing to use LLMs, but in my opinion the market demand doesn't account for the massive amount of hype and funding, or the pervasiveness of LLMs being added to so many products.

I see it too — but I'll remind both of us that these are still very, very early days.

For sure. And I definitely have a bias showing here towards not trusting the person in charge to be benevolent or to actually know what the "right" thing to do is in the long run.

It’s totally possible that the net result is good (which is still quite early to really know), but it present new problems. For example, the creation of the car is probably good in general, but it has important issues that requires to be taken into account (accidents, pollution, city planning challenges, etc)

I’ve lived enough hype cycles to know that we are always very close to use VR every day or have autonomous cars… It took around 25 years to move from “we will pay with our mobile phones” to that becoming a reality.

In a unpredictable, hallucinating way. Who cares about human expertise when you can have a machine that acts like it has expertise in the same area? We deserve what is coming.

People also didn't anticipate how social media and surveillance capitalism would shit up our lives.