There's another issue surrounding developer skill atrophy or stunting that I find \
particularly concerning on an existential level.
If we allow people to use LLMs to write code for a given project/platform, experience \
in that platform will potentially atrophy or under develop as contributors \
increasingly rely on out sourcing their applicable skills and decisions to "AI".
Even if you believe out sourcing the minutia of coding is a net positive, the \
"enshitification" principal in general should give you pause; as soon as the net \
developer skill for a project has degraded to a point of reliance, even somewhat, I \
think we can be confident those AI tools will NOT get less expensive.
I'd rather be independently less productive, than dependent on some MegaCorp(TM)'s \
good will to rent us back access to our brains at a fair price.
I'm not sure why this would force him to retire as an OpenBSD developer ? Did this research bring him some backlash from other developers ? If not, maybe he can advocate for a better acknowledgment of the issue from the inside ? Just wondering.
Plus you can install them in a separate work profile (use app "shelter"), which isolates them more.
Personally I need them for my banking app (which is a shame but here we are), but I disallow network access for Google Play Services + disable Google Play app. The bank app works nice with that.
Now of course, the only input LLMs have is human text (for text only LLMs anyway). So their model is entirely dependent on how we see the world.
I wouldn't restrict LLMs to description of human understanding. They can articulate concepts in a rather sensible way, that wouldn't exist as is in the training corpus. Which exactly means that they have a model, however limited or imperfect.
What would a human say about what he/she is or how he/she works ? Even today, there's so much we don't know about biological life.
Same applies here I guess, the LLM happens to be there, nothing else to explain if you ask it.
Tbf banks are truly driving the coercion. My banks used to have functional apps on bare GrapheneOS, but nowadays they won't launch without Play Services (to wich I can deny network access, pretty neat of GrapheneOS).
Plus my main bank now requires the app even for web access. Nightmarish.
"How concepts relate" is called a model. That it uses language to be interacted with is irrelevant to the fact that it's a model of of a worldly concept.
What of multi modal models according to you ? Are they "models of eyesight", "models of sound", or pixels or wavelengths... C'mon.
When you ask an LLM a question about cars, it needs an inner representation of what a car is (how imperfect it may be) to answer your question. A model of "language" as you want to define it would output a grammatically correct wall of text that goes nowhere.