> I don't understand why Hacker News is so dismissive about the coming of LLMs

I find LLMs incredibly useful, but if you were following along the last few years the promise was for “exponential progress” with a teaser world destroying super intelligence.

We objectively are not on that path. There is no “coming of LLMs”. We might get some incremental improvement, but we’re very clearly seeing sigmoid progress.

I can’t speak for everyone, but I’m tired of hyperbolic rants that are unquestionably not justified (the nice thing about exponential progress is you don’t need to argue about it)

Based on quite a few comments recently, it also looks like many have tried LLMs in the past, but haven't seriously revisited either the modern or more expensive models. And I get it. Not everyone wants to keep up to date every month, or burn cash on experiments. But at the same time, people seem to have opinions formed in 2024. (Especially if they talk about just hallucinations and broken code - tell the agent to search for docs and fix stuff) I'd really like to give them Opus 4.5 as an agent to refresh their views. There's lots to complain about, but the world has moved on significantly.

The idea of HN being dismissive of impactful technology is as old as HN. And indeed, the crowd often appears stuck in the past with hindsight. That said, HN discussions aren't homogeneous, and as demonstrated by Karpathy in his recent blogpost "Auto-grading decade-old Hacker News", at least some commenters have impressive foresight: https://karpathy.bearblog.dev/auto-grade-hn/

Many people feel threatened by the rapid advancements in LLMs, fearing that their skills may become obsolete, and in turn act irrationally. To navigate this change effectively, we must keep open minds, keep adaptable, and embrace continuous learning.

It’s not the technology I’m dismissive about. It’s the economics.

25 years ago I was optimistic about the internet, web sites, video streaming, online social systems. All of that. Look at what we have now. It was a fun ride until it all ended up “enshitified”. And it will happen to LLMs, too. Fool me once.

Some developer tools might survive in a useful state on subscriptions. But soon enough the whole A.I. economy will centralise into 2 or 3 major players extracting more and more revenue over time until everyone is sick of them. In fact, this process seems to be happening at a pretty high speed.

Once the users are captured, they’ll orient the ad-spend market around themselves. And then they’ll start taking advantage of the advertisers.

I really hope it doesn’t turn out this way. But it’s hard to be optimistic.

The negatives outweigh the positives, if only because the positives are so small. A bunch of coders making their lives easier doesn't really matter, but pupils and students skipping education does. As a meme said: you had better start eating healthy, because your future doctor vibed his way through med school.

It is an over correction because of all the empty promises of LLMs. I use Claude and chatgpt daily at work and am amazed at what they can do and how far they can come.

BUT when I hear my executive team talk and see demos of "Agentforce" and every saas company becoming an AI company promising the world, I have to roll my eyes.

The challenge I have with LLMs is they are great at creating first draft shiny objects and the LLMs themselves over promise. I am handed half baked work created by non technical people that now I have to clean up. And they don't realize how much work it is to take something from a 60% solution to a 100% solution because it was so easy for them to get to the 60%.

Amazing, game changing tools in the right hands but also give people false confidence.

Not that they are not also useful for non-technical people but I have had to spend a ton of time explaining to copywriters on the marketing team that they shouldn't paste their credentials into the chat even if it tells them to and their vibe coded app is a security nightmare.

Speaking for myself: because if the hype were to be believed we should have no relational databases when there's MongoDB, no need for dollars when there's cryptocoins, all virtual goods would be exclusively sold as NFTs, and we would be all driving self-driving cars by now.

LLMs are being driven mostly by grifters trying to achieve a monopoly before they run out of cash. Under those conditions I find their promises hard to believe. I'll wait until they either go broke or stop losing money left and right, and whatever is left is probably actually useful.

Maybe because the hype for an next gen search engine that can also just make things up when you query it is a bit much?

> I don't understand why Hacker News is so dismissive about the coming of LLMs.

Eh. I wouldn’t be so quick to speak for the entirety of HN. Several articles related to LLMs easily hit the front page every single day, so clearly there are plenty of HN users upvoting them.

I think you're just reading too much into what is more likely classic HN cynicism and/or fatigue.

LLMs hold some real utility. But that real utility is buried under a mountain of fake hype and over-promises to keep shareholder value high.

LLMs have real limitations that aren't going away any time soon - not until we move to a new technology fundamentally different and separate from them - sharing almost nothing in common. There's a lot of 'progress-washing' going on where people claim that these shortfalls will magically disappear if we throw enough data and compute at it when they clearly will not.

The internet and smartphones were immediately useful in a million different ways for almost every person. AI is not even close to that level. Very to somewhat useful in some fields (like programming) but the average person will easily be able to go through their day without using AI.

The most wide-appeal possibility is people loving 100%-AI-slop entertainment like that AI Instagram Reels product. Maybe I'm just too disconnected with normies but I don't see this taking off. Fun as a novelty like those Ring cam vids but I would never spend all day watching AI generated media.

Have you tried using it for anything actually complicated?

Lol. It's worse than nothing at all.