The conversation around LLMs (I am not going to call it AI) and their future has turned into a toxic pit of hope, dreams, vibes, hype, gambling, and absolute delusion in some cases.
It has become so fundamentally broken that I simply don’t bother engaging in the topic when it comes up in a conversation, especially when at work.
Raising concerns, pointing out gaps in logic, or anything else that could be perceived as being negative about the new tech is met with more hyperbolic BS about how powerful LLMs are and how much better our lives will be because of them. No backing evidence provided of course.
This is a tech being pushed by the higher-ups in corporations and companies. Linked-In is full of grifters selling dreams to the masses and CEOs that are, hopefully, trying to understand what the tech is and where they should be heading yet at the same time making loud proclamations about the tech and how it will change everything.
And why would they stop? The Linked-In crowd is the biggest demonstration of FOMO. Most of those “thought leaders” are actually not one bit original. They don’t lead thoughts. They are simple cheerleaders instead for whatever is popular in {% Current_Year %}.
I hear CEOs talk about how LLMs will bring efficiency and improve their processes and help their companies move faster. It is all bullshit of course. Typical corporate speak to disguise their champing at the bit to start mass layoffs so they can show line-goes-up charts at their annual shareholder meetings.
Now, one might imagine that there are some grand plans on how they will achieve all of this. Nope. There are none. Their creativity ends at buying their employees OpenAI subscriptions and calling it a day after tying it all up to their KPIs in hopes that their employees will find some use for LLMs and then roll that out to everyone.
It’s not a horrible plan but certainly unimaginative and low effort.
There are no deep insights to be had anymore when speaking to the LLM proponents. They make no consideration of the future because they are so focused on the short-term gain. Employees of all skill levels are allowed full and unfettered access to LLM-powered tools under the claim that this will raise the quality of the output, rarely backed by meaningful evidence.
It is rare to see attempts in these companies to actually try and come up with a way to measure the impact of these tools. It is mostly based on vibes and FOMO. And to be fair, it is extremely hard to measure properly but, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try at the very least.
So, despite these companies being “data-driven”, they are certainly “vibes-driven” when it comes to this topic.
I don’t blame them.
Why would a CEO leading a 1000 employees company not follow in the footsteps of Microsoft’s CEO betting big on OpenAI? How would you, if you were a CEO, justify your position of not jumping on board the hype train when questioned by your board of directors and shareholders? It is much easier to simply not go against the grain here. After all, if things go south, you bail with a golden parachute and land somewhere else on your feet.
2 days ago, the Apollo Academy shared data showing that AI adoption rate is starting to flatten out across companies of all sizes. It is possible that the niches where LLMs could fill gaps and provide some value have already been found and things therefore are starting to slow down. It could also be a temporary lull in adoption and will pick up soon after. But if it doesn’t, then what? More sensationalism from the industry and the LLM era figureheads that’s for sure.
Windows Central published an article yesterday about the losses that OpenAI is incurring in its campaign to dominate the market. In the article, Jez Corden makes a very good point about the desperation of this industry:
All of this falls apart if humans don’t adopt the tech. This is why you’ve seen Meta cram its lame chatbots into WhatsApp and Instagram. This is why Notepad and Paint now have useless Copilot buttons on Windows. This is why Google Gemini wants to “help you” read and reply to your emails. They’re trying to change our habits, because all of the projections rely on people becoming truly dependent on the technology. Whether or not it’s actually a good thing for society isn’t considered to be a factor. They’re forcing it on us because if we don’t use it, if we don’t subscribe to it, buy products through it, or click on ads through it — the debt structure will inevitably implode. It will wipe out billions in unpaid loans
And he is so right about this. It is all about the financial sector’s projections for this industry. Their valuations depend on the perception of the public which affect the projections of these institutions. And with the rising costs of running data centers, model training, inference, and the reality of running a subscription service, I have a feeling we are about to enter the phase of extreme desperation and frantic moves.
And maybe we already have. The Notepad program in Windows is a clear example of that. The simple, plain text editor is now infested with LLM-based features. Why? Never have I seen or heard of someone wanting to do more advanced text editing in Notepad. Yet here we are. CoPilot is in there with the typical subscription BS like credits and asking you to sign into an account because they must increase adoption rate by any means necessary.
Meanwhile, important aspects of the Windows operating systems are left to rot in the pursuit of LLM nirvana.
Windows is slow. It gets in your way with not-so-helpful badgering about various things.
File Explorer which is the most basic thing an OS should be able to do is also slow and buggy.
Task Manager is another slow mess with a tendency to replicate itself somehow.
localhost loopback? They broke it too.
WinRE? You know, the thing you need to recover your machine in case of a disaster? Yup, they broke it too.
And please, for the love of god DO NOT get me started on all the Web Apps that Microsoft is producing.
Satya claimed last year that 30% of the code Microsoft is writing is now produced by LLMs. Today, the tech crowd’s perception of Windows, even amongst fans of the OS, is very bad. Is it because of LLM use in Microsoft? Probably not but now people make fun of them for it. Does he care? Of course not. His sole purpose and focus is to increase share price even when things are rotting inside.
At the core of a data-driven company or a corporation is measurement. Yet when LLMs enter the conversation, the adoption becomes driven by fear and FOMO with disregard for metrics and the quality, stability, and reliability of the product. This is why I started writing this post. It was a way to release some of the frustration that has built up recently with the current state of the industry and the toxicity of the topic of LLMs. Let’s see where the chips may fall. I certainly hope they fall on the side of overall societal good before many good products and good jobs are sacrificed to the dream being sold by Linked-In grifters.