2026-02-06-are-llms-worth

Are large language models worth it? Nicholas Carlini

The “echo chambers” of social media makes it easy to connect people only to those who agree with them. It now becomes possible for people in a society to live in different isolated realities, believing that different facts are true, and only ever interacting with people who believe what they also believe. I see the potential for LLMs to amplify this situation one level further. Instead of large groups of people interacting with other people who agree with them, we could easily have a scenario where a single LLM could push a particular narrative to millions of unsuspecting people. The algorithm is no longer the middle-man that plays the role of choosing what content to amplify—it now generates the content itself.