Underrated comment, this should be at the top.

Kind of splitting hairs, but a company that can let go of “scores” of employees and still exist is not a small business.

Yes, you’re anthropomorphizing far too much. An LLM can’t understand, or recall (in the common sense of the word, i.e. have a memory), and is not aware.

Those are all things that intelligent, thinking things do. LLMs are none of that. They are a giant black box of math that predicts text. It doesn’t even understand what a word is, orthe meaning of anything it vomits out. All it knows is what is the statistically most likely text to come next, with a little randomization to add “creativity”.

You’re completely right, if the goal is good customer support and decent working conditions for the operators.

It’s not. The goal is like 1rre said - make people get fed up and stop trying to get their stuff fixed, just buy a new one. Oh, and they could fire half the operators too, since less people would be willing to wade through the pile of shit to talk to them.

Money and profit, screw the rest.

And an excuse to fire half of the support staff.

This article and discussion is specifically about massively upscaling LLMs. Go follow the links and read OpenAI’s CEO literally proposing data centers which require multiple, dedicated grid-scale nuclear reactors.

I’m not sure what your definition of optimization and efficiency is, but that sure as heck does not fit mine.

Don’t look for statistical precision in analogies. That’s why it’s called an analogy, not a calculation.

No, this is the equivalent of writing off calculators if they required as much power as a city block. There are some applications for LLMs, but if they cost this much power, they’re doing far more harm than good.

https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/11/ai-with-90-error-rate-forces-elderly-out-of-rehab-nursing-homes-suit-claims/

Exactly this, and rightly so. The school’s administration has a moral and legal obligation to do what it can for the safety of its students, and allowing this to continue unchecked violates both of those obligations.

I agree that LIDAR or radar are better solutions than image recognition. I mean, that’s literally what those technologies are for.

But even then, that’s not enough. LIDAR/radar can’t help it identify its lane in inclement weather, drive well on gravel, and so on. These are the kinds of problems where automakers severely downplay the difficulty of the problem and just how much a human driver does.

You are making it far simpler than it actually is. Recognizing what a thing is is the essential first problem. Is that a child, a ball, a goose, a pothole, or a shadow that the cameras see? It would be absurd and an absolute show stopper if the car stopped for dark shadows.

We take for granted the vast amount that the human brain does in this problem space. The system has to identify and categorize what it’s seeing, otherwise it’s useless.

That leads to my actual opinion on the technology, which is that it’s going to be nearly impossible to have fully autonomous cars on roads as we know them. It’s fine if everything is normal, which is most of the time. But software can’t recognize and correctly react to the thousands of novel situations that can happen.

They should be automating trains instead. (Oh wait, we pretty much did that already.)

That may be part of it, but Saudi Arabia also has a long track record of being incredibly abusive and generally just not giving a shit about worker’s rights.

Even talking about it this way is misleading. An LLM doesn’t “guess” or “catch” anything, because it is not capable of comprehending the meaning of words. It’s a statistical sentence generator; no more, no less.

He can give himself whatever titles he likes, that doesn’t mean he makes any positive technical contribution.

“Strategy” implies he actually thinks about it. I think it’s just a reflex; fault belongs elsewhere, always. The man is incapable of critical thought, especially inward.

Very nice writeup. My only critique is the need to “lay off workers to stop inflation.” I have no doubt that some (many?) managers etc… believed that to be the case, but there’s rampant evidence that the spike of inflation we’ve seen over this period was largely due to corporate greed hiking prices, not due to increased costs from hiring too many workers.

You can very safely remove the “probably” from your first sentence.

I mean, there is a hard limit on how much info your brain can take in. It’s time. Every hour spent learning one thing is an hour not spent learning everything else.

Agreed. The solution to this is to stop using LLMs to present info authoritatively, especially when facing directly at the general public. The average person has no idea how an LLM works, and therefore no idea why they shouldn’t trust it.