This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I'm firmly convinced it'll pop late 2026 (this year) or 2027. Could be wrong, could entirely be on point.
Suppose the current state of the industry sustains itself at equilibrium. I still think when you factor in all the costs AI entails, it can't license the claim that it's good for almost anything. AI makes so many mistakes that it actually reduces productivity because for every mistake it makes, it costs even more in time and resources to go back and fix; which is often greater than the associated costs of just doing it yourself. Humans are more productive than AI (incidentally this was proved by an analysis that was meant to refute that claim).
With LLM's it's error rate is always going to be the same no matter how much data it gets or at what scale. If you want AGI, you have to abandon LLM's because it's a straight up, dead end technology. It's use cases are small, narrow and mostly consist of merely baseline automation of tasks (hence, it's just a fancy autocomplete). They're unreliable and can be exploited. They don't think. They don't comprehend what they're doing. In fact, they're actually stupid. And worst of all, it can't be fixed. It just doesn't help things. Like, at all. Everyone is always saying forthcoming iterations will eventually solve all these issues but really, they won't. And there's no evidence of that.
The notion as well that AI is going to cut the labor market down is also false due to a basic rule in economics that's been understand since Keynes' heyday: if you double the productivity of your workers, the 'general' tendency isn't to fire half of your staff, it's to sell twice as much stuff. The fact that a lot of AI is also being sold way below the cost just to get market is an indication that it may not be cheaper even if and when they turn out to work. It isn't sustainable.
Shit's fucked up and it's going to be bad.
I’m not sure. Again the entire field is in its infancy. You’re probably right that LLMs are not by themselves going to be AGI. But creating a system with multiple systems run by an agent might be able to go farther in that direction than just LLM with agent.
More options
Context Copy link
A lot of those sources are written last summer, or last fall (in which case they'd likely be building on older observations). Anecdata: my company encouraged use of LLMs then. I found them totally useless in our not so easy codebase, shelved the thing and went on the manual way. At the time I'd probably have agreed with the vibe of your post. Then reading some hype about Gemini 3 in the winter I gave it another shot; models turned out to have got over some hump; and now they look like genuinely useful productivity tools.
I can believe LLMs will have a way harder time cracking law or medicine or mechanical engineering or whatever, but with coding you can come up with endless tasks that are sort of real-world difficult that you can beat the model against on giant server farms without zero interaction with the real world, the same formula that worked for AlphaGo, so stands to reason that they'd git gud there faster.
More options
Context Copy link
An entirely ai slop analysis.... proves nothing in my eyes
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link