Interesting piece. The author claims that LLMs like Claude and ChatGPT are mere interfaces for the same kind of algorithms that corporations have been using for decades and that the real “AI Revolution” is that regular people have access to them, where before we did not.
From the article:
Consider what it took to use business intelligence software in 2015. You needed to buy the software, which cost thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. You needed to clean and structure your data. You needed to learn SQL or tableau or whatever visualization tool you were using. You needed to know what questions to ask. The cognitive and financial overhead was high enough that only organizations bothered.
Language models collapsed that overhead to nearly zero. You don’t need to learn a query language. You don’t need to structure your data. You don’t need to know the right technical terms. You just describe what you want in plain English. The interface became conversation.
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.
It’s not just the money. It’s the knowledge and expertise needed to use the algorithms, at all. It’s knowing how to ask the algorithm for the information you want in a way that it can understand, in knowing how to visualize the data points it gives. As you said, there’s an entire field of mathematics dedicated to algorithm analysis and optimization. Not everyone has the time, energy, and attention to learn that stuff. I sure don’t, but damn if I am tired of having to rely on “Zillow and a prayer” if I want to get a house or apartment.
I agree. That does not mean that LLMs are leveling the playing field with people who can’t/won’t get an education regarding computer science (and let’s not forget that most algorithms don’t just appear; they’re crafted over time). LLMs are easy, but they are not better or even remotely equivalent. It’s like saying, “Finally, the masses can tell a robot to build them a table,” and saying that the expertise of those “elite” woodworkers is no longer needed.
And this isn’t a problem LLMs can solve. I feel for you, I do. We’re all feeling this shit, but this is a capitalism problem. Until the ultracapitalists who are making these LLMs (OpenAI, Google, Meta, xAI, Anthropic, Palantir, etc.) are no longer the drivers of machine learning, and until the ultracapitalist companies stop using AI or algorithms to decide who gets what prices/loans/rental rates/healthcare/etc., we will not see any kind of level playing field you or the author are wishing for.
You’re looking at AI, ascribing it features and achievements it doesn’t deserve, then wishing against all the evidence that it’s solving capitalism. It’s very much not, and if anything, it’s only exacerbating the problems caused by it.
I applaud your optimism—I was optimistic about it once, too—but it has shown, time and again, that it won’t lead to a society not governed by the endless chasing of profits at the expense of everyone else; it won’t lead to a society where the billionaires and the rest of us compete on equal footing. What we regular folk have gotten from them will not be their undoing.
If you want a better society where you don’t have to claw the most meager of scraps from the hand of the wealthy, it won’t be found here.
I’ll say one thing for this post and the resulting discussion, it’s caused me to fall down the rabbit hole that is AI price fixing. How else can it be that available residences increased but so did rent? And so did everything else?