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iLoveOncall parent
He lives in a GenAI bubble where everyone is self-congratulating about the usage of LLMs.

The reality is that there's not a single critical component anywhere that is built on LLMs. There's absolutely no reliance on models, and ChatGPT being down has absolutely no impact on anything beside teenagers not being able to cheat on their homeworks and LLM wrappers not being able to wrap.


nlawalker
Adults everywhere are using it to "cheat" at work, except there it's not cheating, it's celebrated and welcomed as a performance enhancement because results are the only thing that matter, and over time that will result in new expectations for productivity.

It's going to take a while for those new expectations to develop, and they won't develop evenly, just like how even today there's plenty of low-hanging fruit in the form of roles or businesses that aren't using what anyone here would identify as simple opportunities for automation, and the main benefit that accrues to the one guy in the office who knows how to cheat with Excel and VBA is that he gets to slack off most of the time. But there certainly are places where the people in charge expect more, and are quick to perceive when and how much that bar can be raised. They don't care if you're cheating, but you'll need to keep up with the people who are.

bwfan123
> The reality is that there's not a single critical component anywhere that is built on LLMs.

Remember that there are billion dollar usecases where being correct is not important. For example, shopping recommendations, advertizing, search results, image captioning, etc. All of these usecases have humans consuming the output, and LLMs can play a useful role as productivity boosters.

iLoveOncall OP
And none of those are crucial.

His point is that the world is RELIANT on GenAI. This isn't true.

manyaoman
The full quote from 7:40 in the video: "I think it's kind of fascinating to me that when the state-of-the-art LLMs go down, it's actually kind of like an intelligence brownout in the world. It's kind of like when the voltage is unreliable in the grid, and the planet just gets dumber. The more reliance we have on these models, which already is really dramatic and I think will continue to grow."

I don't think his point was that LLMs are as crucial as the power grid, or even close. He's just saying that he finds the comparison interesting, for whatever reason. If you find it stupid instead, that's okay.

iLoveOncall OP
I'm just saying that the statement "when the state-of-the-art LLMs go down, it's actually kind of like an intelligence brownout in the world" is entirely false.
manyaoman
All analogies are false, but some are useful.
ukprogrammer
Even an LLM could tell you that that's an unknowable thing, perhaps you should rely on them more.
iLoveOncall OP
Has a critical service that you used meaningfully changed to seemingly integrate non-deterministic "intelligence" in the past 3 years in one of its critical paths? I'd bet good money that the answer to literally everyone is no.

My company uses GenAI a lot in a lot of projects. Would it have some impact if all models suddenly stopped working? Sure. But the oncalls wouldn't even get paged.

jeffnappi
Tesla FSD, Waymo are good examples.

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