Post

increasingly believing much of the communication gap between LLM Enthusiasts and LLM Skeptics on this website boils down to “are you someone who has largely experienced a *reasonable* amount of job security in tech, or are you someone who has not experienced job security and likely aren’t in tech”

I think this is super real, and I want the conversation to move here. The longer we stay in the "is it useful" debate, the longer we defer taking action to protect ourselves in a changed world.

I am pretty concerned about a world where there's only 2-3 companies that can run these models. I have been spending the last few days idly musing about a coop that sets up hardware and runs the open models.

My most optimistic take is that IT departments in non-software-oriented companies might be able to expand their scope to creating and maintaining inhouse software. Based on the level of expertise still required in the current generation of models, I think that's a reasonable idea

Somebody recently posted here about how people ai coding are able to solve their own needs but not make good software for other people. That tracks to me. That's where I think dedicated professionals could still be very necessary. Again, at the current model abilities.

This would essentially displace the saas industry and distribute the jobs outwards, and - you know, hopefully - lead to a better software industry, because shrinkwrapped software from megafirms sucks anyway

I'm definitely seeing the most utility with these things in "building myself bespoke and odd little software specifically for my little freak brain." Generalizing that to other people and explaining why I made those choices would be a LOT more complicated.

So I was thinking about this a little bit, and in particular about the opensource community and ecosystem. I'm starting to think that interfaces and governance are places where there's potential leverage for people to carve out their own economic space, or at least exert leverage.

It has made products for others and the barriers are not in the LLM but the human side of the equation. Strong systems thinkers can do it already and chainlink for example has many users

I mean, do we have to wait for capabilities to land somewhere? Seems like there is some monotonic increase wrt to compute scaling. So we can bet "capabilities will keep increasing." If we keep waiting for them to "land" we are going to be waiting till t -> inf. I just work backwards from: