Since #ChatGPT came out in 2022, the whole of the #IT industry, and indeed #CS academia too, had gone topsy-turvy.
These days, people are trying to use the #LLM for every problem large and small, even ones that could be solved using well known, traditional mathematical methods. Worse, they are now tossing problems they have never heard of and, hence, do not grasp the true nature thereof, into the gaping mouth of LLM, hoping that this miracle machine could make head-or-tail out of something humans were too lazy, or too incompetent, to analyse and understand.
This is the classic case of the hammer seeing nails all around. It is a waste of resources—humans, machines, electricity, space, money, time. In my own career, I have seen this irrational exuberance several times: the LISP rule-based AI boom; the BP connectionist AI boom; the Web boom; the DotCom boom; the Cloud boom; and now the Transformer boom. Up next, the Quantum boom, maybe?
By all means, surf the Wall Street money wave, if that is one’s wont. But intellectuals must always strive to observe the patterns that repeat, analyse abstractly, synthesise concretely, not succumb to the hammer-nail myopia, and above all never abdicate the duty to #think.
“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”
— Ecclesiastes 1:9
