unless you’re talking about an open source product (which most commonly used LLMs are not) i’m not sure why you’d even attempt this analogy
Replies
Because people built all kinds of elaborate, complex, custom, creative things (and cultural signifiers) around those engines they couldn’t manufacture, just as people are building elaborate, complex, interesting, creative things (and processes and products) around engines they couldn’t manufacture.
aug 30, 2025, 5:53 pm • 0 0 • view
(And that’s setting aside both open models and fine-tuning.) I don’t want to belabor the imperfect metaphor! But bottom line is just because the large platform LLMs are very closed doesn’t mean they aren’t the site of a lot of generativity.
aug 30, 2025, 5:53 pm • 0 0 • view
If you prefer a computing metaphor, the obvious one is the proprietary Unices, in light of which the BSDs were usually considered toys, but which birthed a creative ferment that eventually exploded into GNU, gcc, and Linux and now the toys run the world.
aug 30, 2025, 5:53 pm • 0 0 • view
That might or might not happen here (lots of material and cultural conditions are different) but I’m much more interested in reading analysis of those differences and similarities than engaging with “it’s not creative” or “it’s just chat”.
aug 30, 2025, 5:53 pm • 0 0 • view
fundamentally based on an open source code base! you’re still doing it!
aug 30, 2025, 5:58 pm • 0 0 • view
how much tinkering could you do with a car if the only parts you were allowed to touch were the steering wheel, gearshift and pedals?
aug 30, 2025, 6:00 pm • 0 0 • view
this has literally not happened with LLMs
aug 30, 2025, 5:58 pm • 0 0 • view
It literally has. Langchain, eleutherai, various Allen Institute joints, Simon Willison’s `llm`, Harvard’s 1M public domain books. I could go on and on and on but it’s a beautiful weekend and I should stop arguing with people who have already made up their minds.
aug 30, 2025, 6:08 pm • 0 0 • view
the irony…
aug 30, 2025, 6:10 pm • 0 0 • view
these examples are a hodgepodge of different things, none of which support the point you’re trying to make, which is that a user and a tinkerer are the same thing wrt LLMs, and that’s just not true
aug 30, 2025, 6:11 pm • 0 0 • view
Yup yup, not true scotsmen, I get it. Have a great weekend!
aug 30, 2025, 6:17 pm • 0 0 • view
this is such a sad way to run away from a discussion. not only bad faith and disingenuous but hardly even clever
aug 30, 2025, 6:34 pm • 0 0 • view
not even a good example of the random fallacy you picked off the spinning wheel
aug 30, 2025, 6:34 pm • 0 0 • view
the idea that the end user experience of using a chatbot is like “tinkering” with anything you can actually take apart is part of the marketing scam being attempted. No, using a chatbot doesn’t make you a programmer.
aug 30, 2025, 5:51 pm • 0 0 • view