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Perhaps The LLM Juice Isn’t Worth The Electrical Squeeze (rwblog S6E23)

Last updated: Wed Jul 17 2024

This will be an unusually content-lite post. I’m moving, among other things, so it’s been a long week.

LLM LLM LLM

So this week noted cryptic skeptic Molly White has a new essay out titled “AI isn’t useless. But is it worth it?”. It’ s a great article and I highly recommend it. The crux of her argument is that AI is useful, but at such a high cost and primarily for such questionably-useful activities that perhaps the LLM juice isn’t worth the electrical squeeze.

I recently postulated to a friend that generative AI would have an economic impact on the order of, say, spreadsheets. Excel and its predecessors had, and continue to have, a massive impact on the industries it touch, but did it contribute whole percentage points to US GDP growth? Eeeeehhhhh probably not. So it stands to reason that most of these companies are going to vanish at some point.

Anyway, just to register a note of cynicism. LLMs are still neat, but outside very particular programming contexts, I haven’t really found a place for them in my workflow. I imagine some combination of Whisper + summarization could be useful if I worked with audio regularly? But working with them day-to-day at my day job, I do find myself a little skeptical that any LLM-powered product features are really that useful.

Anyway, I don’t really have a point; read that Molly White piece above for a very nuanced take.

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