@StarkRG @condret @neil @lizzy

Accessibility and intellectual tools don’t become trivial just because they’re widely available.
The strangest part of your argument is that you praise transformers while dismissing LLMs when LLMs are literally built on transformer architecture. Saying transformers are valuable but LLMs are useless is like saying engines matter but cars don’t. It's ’s technically incoherent and shows your fundamental misunderstanding of how the technology actually works.

@StarkRG @condret @neil @lizzy

No one dismissed that technology as a “toy.” It was recognized for what it was, an interface that helped translate human thought into language.
Modern LLMs are simply a far more advanced evolution of that same idea, tools that assist with drafting, structuring, translating, and exploring language.
Calling them toys because the public can use them is like calling calculators toys because mathematicians use them too.

@StarkRG @condret @neil @lizzy

People have been using computational language tools for serious intellectual work for decades. Stephen Hawking didn’t manually type every word of his lectures or books. He relied on predictive text and speech-generation software to construct sentences and communicate complex scientific ideas. Especially during live interviews & lectures.

@neil @StarkRG @lizzy

At the very very least.

@StarkRG @condret @neil @lizzy

Keep this in mind. Every era produces people who reject the tools shaping the future. History records them the same way it records everyone else who failed to adapt. As fossils and footnotes.

@StarkRG @condret @neil @lizzy

AI isn’t some hypothetical future.
It’s quietly embedded in the infrastructure of modern life, power grids, hospitals, agriculture, logistics, finance, communications, and the global supply chains that make civilization function.
So dismissing it as “just word prediction” doesn’t make you insightful.
It just shows you’re critiquing a technology you clearly haven’t bothered to understand.

@StarkRG @condret @neil @lizzy

Even the books people love to romanticize as “pure human culture” pass through AI systems now, recommendation algorithms, editing software, marketing analytics, and distribution forecasting.
And the best part?
You’re delivering this critique through a phone or computer filled with machine learning, from camera processing and speech recognition to spam filters, navigation systems, and search ranking algorithms and this very platform alone.

@StarkRG @condret @neil @lizzy

Your job? There’s a good chance AI touches payroll processing, hiring filters, scheduling software, or supply-chain planning.
The clothes you’re wearing right now? Machine learning is used in textile manufacturing, inventory forecasting, shipping logistics, and retail pricing models.
Unless you personally spun the thread, wove the fabric, and traded for it at a medieval market… AI touched that supply chain too.