The author also talks about advances like smartphones as though they arrived without significant challenges or trade-offs. Every major technological shift has come with some cost, e.g environmental, shortages, investments.

I'd argue most things are difficult to scale in the beginning. Just because today's LLMs are expensive and resource intensive doesn't mean the technology is fundamentally flawed, it may simply mean the current approach isn't the one we'll end up with. But naturally, someone working on another approach would have something to criticise about others.

Finally, I'm not convinced by the claim that we're "stuck" with LLMs just because they're heavily marketed. They create value for many people, which is why they've been adopted so quickly. As the author points out, investors care about economics. I'm sure people would listen if someone developed a cheaper/more sustainable technology that delivered the same value.

Wrote about this recently (from a vibe coding perspective) [1]. This applies to corporations, too, as they're betting their futures on fewer engineers, more AI.

[1] https://graybearding.bearblog.dev/they-got-something-on-the-...

It’s worth remembering that during the industrial revolution in Britain, the fastest growing country the world had ever seen, most people were in abject poverty. This tech revolution might end up being worse.

yes, in traditional venture you want cost per marginal user to decrease and leverage your platform at scale

but improving llms shifts the frontier of their capability and unlocks entirely new use cases. so far, every mega training run has resulted in a model that has paid itself off profitably fully loaded. perhaps the TAM of intelligence has no ceiling?

not to say that we shouldnt be investing in efficient models, but the efficiency comes after we create another mega shoggoth that we can make more efficient

Ya'll are not ready for AI to just keep getting better and better. The slop-midwit-doomerism you are being fed as part of some last ditch copium that your SE identity matters and is going to be needed prevents you from seeing what is inevitable. You can't beat em. Try joining em.