They think there’s some skill necessary to use LLMs for some reason

My experience of a decade in corporate US companies:

Quantity > Quality; no matter what the marketing line says. People who speak a lot in meetings and send a lot of emails are regarded as better at their job, substance is only somewhat relevant. And LLMs are great at producing lots and lots of well sounding slop.

im going to put it easy: You work doing some kind of research or whatever on daily basis. You used to do that task in maybe 5-6 hours, same as your colleagues. Now all your colleagues use AI and do the same task in about 20min (even if the result is crap it does have some good takes), so the CEO sees you are the only one who doesn’t perform equally because you choose not to, and you’re fired.

So yeah… it’s crap, it will make things worse, but for now you have to use it wheter you like it or not.

They (pretend to) believe, either due to experience or marketing or a combination, that AI* will be such a ubiquitous tool within their lifetime that “not using AI” would be like “not using electricity”. There are people that do not use electricity, even when it is available, today, but they are broadly considered “behind” the times and out of touch with broader (including global) society. AI advocates are unlikely to always have the same idea about exactly what the advantages are, though speed is often among them.

The actual scientific studies we have done are limited, but so far do not back up these claims. For example, AI assisted programmers self-report being faster, but are actually slower at the same tasks than a similar cohort without AI.

I have a fairly strong anti-AI bias, but my limited experiences with them have been quite poor. Maybe I’m just asking the “wrong” questions, but my experiences have had them either give an response that is internally inconsistent, contains easily refuted factual inaccuracies, or (for tasks with no reality/logic testing) absolutely the least creative, most middle-of-the-road text. I’m also aware of the human rights abuses that Amnesty International has reported around generative AI, the copyright “minefield” around models where you do not know all of the training data, and how we’ve lost at least a decade of sustainability goals because of the desire for “more compute”.

So, keep my bias in mind when considering my reply. I might already be “falling behind”.

I can think of some ways to use an LLM that are interesting to me, but for now I’m staying away from the tech until the bubble bursts and the hype disappears. It’ll be easier to make informed decisions about what, if any, to use then.

(If it really does improve society, I’m sure I can be retrained then, or at least I can be taken care of one AI-incompatibility is recognized as a disability. /s)

AI: They probably can’t define this term, but likely to have a specific product in mind.

I think a good alternative explanation is this: AI is here to stay, so knowing how to use it in whatever form it takes in your life as a tool is good knowledge to have.

Typewriters are close to extinction, but most everyone these days uses a computer to write documents. Those that refused to learn how to use a word processing application on a computer were “left behind” because now almost all documentation is written digitally.

People who say that don’t mean anything. They are either trying to sell something or repeating bullshit they heard somewhere.

It really is that simple.

And remember, the AI salesmen will never, ever, define “AI”. They can’t, because the minute they do, their product sales will evaporate. If all you have is vaporware, you desperately need to pass it off as something else.

It’s from the same people who tell you to “GET IN EARLY” for whatever hot trend is about to take off, usually involving markets and trade.

Remember NFTs? when people were buying pictures of cartoon monkeys and people were saying, if you don’t buy it now you will be left behind

Just a common phrase used by people trying to scam you. Basic Marketing really. Create the sense of a time crunch and people are more likely to buy in. People don’t like the concept of missing out on something. Same reason they have countdowns on when sales end on websites and even in certain stores.

I think when people talk about “falling behind” they’re actually talking about missing out on the initial gold rush of novel uses, quick cash grabs, and straight up scams that a lot of people are making short term money on.

AI is a tool. Learning to wield it effectively is a skill. What they’re saying is that if you don’t learn it now, you’ll have to learn it later when everyone is an expert and you’ll still be a beginner.

IMO it’s a bit like computers. I imagine at some point AI-resistant people will be like the “not computer people” that still do everything using paper and faxes.

I know every 2-3 years there’s a new hype in tech that eventually fizzes out: Web 2.0, social media, virtual reality, cryptocurrency, etc. All of them were supposed to revolutionize the world, but not all of them actually did. I think AI is a lot more like social media than crypto; it’s here to stay. I think the best possible outcome at this point is that the open-source models eventually get good enough and small enough to run on our local hardware, but things sadly don’t seem headed that way…

Those people see AI as a transformational technology that is going to be central to how everything is done 10 years from now for better or for worse, and trying to ignore that is just putting your head in the sand.

So realistically, it’s kinda BS pushed by FOMO farmers with hustle culture vibes.

The reality is that the acceleration of AI is reaching a speed where by the time you’d build your whole setup to work with AI there will be a new AI who can set the whole thing up in an afternoon.

There is a learning curve to things like how a model processes information and how to set them up for success. But it’s fairly easy to learn and likely to shift quickly.

The biggest gap that I see between people who have success with models and those who have a bad time is how you treat the model.

If you are a jerk, I hope you don’t like your production DB or home directory too much.

Things that seem crazy to people who aren’t following things, like giving the model breaks to avoid context burnout or encouragement vs yelling in all caps, go a long way.

TL;DR: The methodological best practices are likely to change so fast you won’t need to do much catching up, but the relational dynamics of working with AI will likely remain pertinent into the future.

Bullshit said by people who do not understand that LLMs are NOT AI

NOT AI, not even a little

They do it to protect their feelings. They’ve normalized the use of something most people hate, so they want everyone else to adopt it, too. That way, they won’t feel judged, when they 100% deserve to feel judged.