Software defies economics. It can be replicated almost infinitely at almost no cost. When software companies sold software one package at a time in the 90s anti-piracy was a big deal because it was very simple for any given person to “copy a floppy” and receive the full package of software from another individual without the company knowing or being involved. It was like borrowing a rake from a neighbor, but the neighbor got to keep his rake as well.

Because of this, software companies decided instead to treat software as a service rather than as a product. In the 2010s many software companies shifted to the subscription model where instead of selling software one package at a time, the service of the software would be available to rent while the company guarded the propriety aspects of their software. This was like the company owning the rake and both you and your neighbor needed to pay the company to borrow the rake.

Now software can be reverse-engineered without the source-code. Now if you rent the rake from the company, you can keep a copy of it and freely distribute it without the company being involved or aware. I’m not sure how software companies will reckon with this advancement.

There isn’t any individual, institution, or system which could manage the interaction between AGI and every human who has access to it. LLMs are already manipulating people to do extreme things. There’s no telling what AGI and a few million idiots might do.

At some point in my life new technology started adding problems to life instead of managing them.

A windmill can pulverize more grain per hour than thousands of humans crushing the grains with their bare hands. Ancient humans make modern humans look like amateurs.

Having read the compared stories now, I have to say I’m deeply offended at the results. The AI stories are quicker to read because they are chains of cliches which state and restate the theme of the story (as stated in the prompt) outright instead of demonstrating it through the charged and personal perspectives of the characters. The LLM generated text is meaningless word sausage formatted to be easier to read for people who don’t read much. I have never read something more cynical, and I have read plenty of trash by authors who hate their audience and consider them all to be idiots.

This is like comparing landscape paintings to photographs of the same landscape from the same perspective and asking random people to judge which one they think is better. This is an insane comparison.

My holy grail of FOSS is a version of creation kit where modders could create their own Elder Scrolls like games.

LLM companies may now freely commit corporate espionage because the news media is locked into reporting the claims that LLMs are capable of things like this as fact. This is like when the US bombed the girls school in Iran and blamed it on AI and the news reported it as fact until it was clear reasonable people weren’t willing to accept that excuse in that context. Corporate espionage is certainly not as bad as the mass murder of little girls, so people are willing to buy it since it doesn’t matter as much.

How?

I’m sure people who abuse their family members have plenty of good qualities as well. I’m not sure how that’s relevant to what I said.

I think a lot of world problems would be solved if these things were encouraged instead. If someone needs their romantic partner to be a mindless sycophant, I would rather them have that with a machine than try to abuse a human person into serving them as would be more traditional. More children being born in situations other than exploitation and manipulation could only be a good thing.

At some point having a hard drive will become illegal.

It’s weird that I’ve spent most of my time living in a post-economic world of abundance which I’m not allowed to acknowledge or encourage others to acknowledge because the pretend economy of valuation and confidence depends on exclusively on showmanship and nothing else. The LLM bubble may persist because the work being “saved” never needed to be done in the first place, so it not being done makes no difference to investors being told what got done as usual.

It’s marketing. Nintendo deliberately under stocks new hardware to make the value of the device explode on the secondary market. Scalpers know this and usually buy out most of the first run. When you can’t get the new Nintendo device because it’s unavailable and scalpers are selling it for 2-3x retail price, you are far more likely to buy is asap when it comes back in stock. They make less money initially but in a way that makes the value of the product extremely high, giving people extremely high motivation to buy while they can. Also, a sale to a scalper is worth as much to Nintendo as sale to a consumer. Nintendo is notorious for doing this every time.

I hope this wasn’t deliberate, but if it was Valve is going down the dark Nintendo path.

I can tell you are experienced with Rubberducking. Thanks for the detailed answer.

Thanks for specifying a legitimate use-case for this tool. I understand that google search has been the most valuable programming tool for a very long time so it makes sense LLMs would be more helpful in the same kind of way. Search engine technology is quite a bit different than blockchain or VR in terms of consumer and business demand.

For my purposes of news and history research, the unreliability of LLMs making me have to check all its claims every single time negates its usefulness as an assistant because I will have to examine its references anyway so it’s more time effective for me to skip the questionable output I would get and do the research myself in the first place. How have you been able to manage the issue of unreliability with the volumes of data you’re dealing with? Is the kind of data which you’re dealing with less likely to be unreliable since it is of a kind the LLM is more likely to process correctly?

The difference that I’ve seen is that the internet was a development of communication technology which has been in clear demand since at least the 1800s. Chatbots have been around for the last few decades and have been treated as novelties by consumers for brief periods intermittently throughout my life. LLMs are the most sophisticated chatbots ever designed and are better than ever at imitating Austin Powers, but is that something we can expect will ever revolutionize the economy? Can we replace the labor force with a technology which can’t do work but can convince the most credulous people that it can?

LLMs are more like vr goggles with the force of the entire plutocracy pumping up the bubble. What is the value proposition for “intelligence” which can’t reason nor possibly determine fact from falsehood? When consumers start to pay what it actually costs to run these things, is it possible to profit? What are they good at other than confidence schemes?

This is kind of unprecedented. Usually a government only considers nationalizing an industry after it’s established. LLMs are still in the speculative pre-adoption phase, and unlike many other technologies from the last century, LLMs are not very useful at anything other than obfuscating accountability. This is great for racketeers and infuriating for the vast majority of people who have been outspoken at refusing to accept the worthless garbage LLMs can print on demand.

This is a huge problem for LLMs as they cost more to run they they can possibly produce. The only value proposition is technically existing in industries which are totally speculative and require no productivity other than from their salespeople. LLMs can only last for as long as our economy remains fundamentally fraudulent. Making a public bet on LLMs to keep the fraud up is a massive risk that the people taking it have never had to worry about understanding.