I Forgot to Get Excited

8 points by bkaae 9 days ago | 5 comments

I feel like from day one, LLMs was talked about in relation to how it will change the world, how it's good or bad for business and the environment. But then yesterday, I was out walking with the dog, and it hit me how freaking cool this technology is.

I don't want to talk about where I am on the spectrum between booster and denier. I'm so sick and tired of hearing about it, and it doesn't matter in this context.

I spent the first 8 years of my career trying to make the computer understand reality through images - scanning receipts, finding defects on wind turbine blades, and other niche-but-important things. The amount of work it took to just read a receipt and get the text somewhat right.. It was insane. It was really fun work, but it was so hard to make the real world fit into boxes.

I feel like I completely missed being excited about LLMs - instead I got dragged into discussions about what it means. And it's not because I've lost the ability to care; I can get excited about a new hashing algorithm and other weird tech, but LLMs? it didn't even register as a technology. Maybe it's an uncanny valley kind of thing - where it doesn't look like a classic computer science thing, so my brain didn't register it as such?

During my walk I started thinking of the possibilities. And I know your mind might immediately jump to fully-fledged big-scope solutions, but just try to give it space in that other part of the mind - the part where it's cool and not a tool to change our society. We have no idea what's gonna happen - and that's fine - we've never known that. But what we do know is that we have this really cool technology that you can run on your own computer now.

You can actually literally IRL for real, make a python program yourself that you can talk to and it understands you and do things. All on your own machine. No nothing! IT'S LIKE A TOTALLY NORMAL TECHNOLOGY! It's so cool, I can't really believe it. It can even view images and explain it you, and I just.. I'm so excited now.

Don't let them take the fun out of this technology, and spend a few seconds thinking about that cool little trick that made it possible for us to talk to sand.

hash0 8 days ago |

Part of the answer to this conundrum might be the "lightswitch effect": Lightswitches are ubiquitous and easy to use, so you stop thinking about them, take them completely for granted and miss the bigger picture that even 150 years ago, this would have been considered not a small technical miracle!

LLMs seem to fall squarely into that category - the threshold to using them is incredibly low because you can "just talk to them" and they give back meaningful answers loaded with the sum total of human knowledge from the interwebs.

bkaae 8 days ago | |

I don't think I take LLMs for granted - but I've misclassified them as something else.

The reason why it's so cool now, is because we can run good models on our own machines now. That's really what makes it a hackable technology in my head. Calling an API is just another product.. Does that make sense to you?

hash0 6 days ago | | |

It does, thank you for your view on this!

blinkbat 9 days ago |

Using them daily for tasks they used to suck at (writing features, generating 3d models, generating game engines, code review) helps keep me excited.

fullstick 9 days ago |

Yeah they're pretty sweet and a little scary.