from Hacker News

Ask HN: Is the acceptance of LLMs short-sighted?

by mrdependable on 8/21/24, 3:59 PM with 7 comments

I'm hoping someone can tell me how I'm wrong in my thinking, as this is something that has been bugging me about LLMs for a while.

If we're allowing these companies to freely take the work of others and extract all the value from it, what's going to happen when there is no more incentive to do that kind of work? The easiest example is programming. LLMs aren't coming up with any new ideas of their own. If they get to a spot where they are good enough to actually replace programmers, won't the underlying technology end up stagnating? Why would someone spend the time innovating in that space if an LLM can just ingest their work and then the owner of the LLM gets all the value out of it instead of the person who put in the work? Wouldn't we lose the critical mass of minds necessary to keep momentum with innovation?

  • by techostritch on 8/21/24, 4:14 PM

    I don’t think so. If an LLM is sufficient to write your code, then your code probably wasn’t unique enough to contribute to the shared knowledge anyways. You could make the same argument about coding frameworks,

    “If everyone uses react rather than vanilla JS; won’t we lose the critical mass of minds necessary to keep momentum with innovation?”

  • by mrkeen on 8/21/24, 4:22 PM

    Thought experiment:

    Why can't you start your own 500-person company, but hire 0 people and instead have LLMs make up the difference?