Post #1613213

2025-12-23 17:33 UTC

I don't really think that's true, because, again, idk why people here think this is all a bad take. It's real simple. For decades, corporations and institutions have had the upper hand. They have vast resources to spend on computational power and enterprise software and algorithms to keep things asymmetrically efficient. Algorithms don't sleep, don't get tired, they follow one creed ABO, Always Be Optimizing. But that software costs a lot of money, and you have to know all this other stuff to know how to use it correctly. Then along comes the language model. Suddenly, you just talk to the computer the way you'd talk to another human, and you get what you ask for.

Replies (1)

@Telorand@reddthat.com 2025-12-23 17:49

>Then along comes the language model. Suddenly, you just talk to the computer the way you'd talk to another human, and you get what you ask for. That's not at all how LLMs work, and that's why people are saying this whole premise is a bad take. Not only do LLMs get things wrong, they do it in such a way that it completely fabricates answers at times; they do this, because they're pattern generation engines, not database parsers. Algorithms don't do that, because they digest a set of information and return a subset of that information. Also, so what if algorithms cost a lot of money? That's not really an argument for why LLMs level the playing field. They're not analogous to each other, and the LLMs being foisted on the unassuming public by the billionaires are certainly not some kind of power leveler. Furthermore, it takes a fuckton more processing resources to run an LLM than it does an algorithm, and I'm just talking about cycles. If we went beyond just cycles, the relative power needed to solve the same problem using an LLM versus an algorithm is not even close. There's an entire branch of mathematics dedicated to algorithm analysis and optimization, but you'll find no such thing for LLMs, because they're not remotely the same. No, all we have are fancy chatbots at the end of the day that hallucinate basic facts, not especially different from the annoying Virtual Assistants of a few years ago.

Open ##1613214