GenAI Predictions

I’m going to take a big chance here and make predictions about GenAI’s future. Yeah, I know, you’re feeling overloaded on this stuff and me too, but it seems to have sucked the air out of all the other conversations. I would so like to return to arguing about Functional Programming or Free Trade. This is risky and there’s a pretty good chance that I’m completely wrong. But I’ll try to entertain while prognosticating.

Reverse Centaurs · That’s the title of a Cory Doctorow essay, which I think is spot on. I’m pretty sure anyone who’s read even this far would enjoy it and it’s not long, and it’d help understand this. Go have a look, I’ll wait.

Hallucinations won’t get fixed · I have one good and one excellent argument to support this prediction. Good first: While my understanding of LLMs is not that deep, it doesn’t have to be to understand that it’s really difficult (as in, we don’t know how) to connect the model’s machinations to our underlying reality, so as to fact-check.

The above is my non-expert intuition at work. But then there’s Why Language Models Hallucinate, three authors from OpenAI and one from Georgia Tech, which seems to show that