Viewing profile — fergal_reid

Yes - but this will be the year of Linux on the desktop.

Well, you could conclude the world is now more dangerous for any kid let wander - even if fewer do, and even if the observed average risk to any kid is lower (given they are allowe…

My story of kids growing up in a post AI world: There's a gag in Star Trek 4 where Scotty goes back in time, and tries talk to a computer. The gag is funny because he is from the f…

I think the most direct answer is that at scale, inference can be batched, so that processing many queries together in a parallel batch is more efficient than interactively dedicat…

Yes we're familiar with the terminology and framing of gofai. Fwiw I read (most of) the 3rd edition of Russell and Norvig in my undergrad days. However, the point we're trying to m…

At Intercom we've also a lot of experience here. I disagree, basically. In our experience actual real world processes are not compactly defined, and don't have sharp edges. When yo…

You are correct that variable results could be a symptom of a failure to generalise well beyond the training set. Such failure could happen if the models were overfit, or for other…

Strongly agree. This seems to be very hard for people to accept, per the other comments here. Until recently I was willing to accept an argument that perhaps LLMs had mostly learne…

As an Irish person when I saw the article title, I was immediately sceptical. I personally believe most articles about the famine shy away from the horror of it, and also from a fr…

Similar arguments to LeCun. People are going to keep saying this about autoregressive models, how small errors accumulate and can't be corrected, while we literally watch reasoning…

I think the authors misunderstand what's actually going on. I think this is the crux: >They are vastly more powerful than what you get on an iPhone, but the principle is similar. T…

Yes, in parameter space. However, TobyTheCamel's point is valid in that there are some parameter spaces where the MLE is going to be much less useful than others. Even without havi…

Right - I think this is what's at the heart of the original question. I know they asked with a continuous example, but I don't interpret their question as limited to continuous cas…

I think most of the replies, here and on stack exchange, are answering slightly the wrong question. It is fair to ask why the likelihoods are useful if they are so small, and it's …

> Lizzie was joking Well, obviously we shouldn't get too hung up on what a fictional character thought - but I stand by my recollection. Just googling it, and finding this page: ht…

The Austin novels made a lot more sense to me when I started to think of them as closer to tales of corporate Mergers & Acquisitions, rather than love stories. The rich familes the…

There's a big gap between training an algorithm on a toy problem, vs building a useful product. Software engineers often are missing key skills. They can learn them, but won't auto…

>The retrieval part is way more important. I don't agree with this - at Intercom we've put a lot of work into our Fin chatbot, which uses a RAG architecture, and we're still using …

I used to play Total Annihilation online back when I was in secondary school in the late 90s We'd hang out on IRC, and people would host a game on their IP. Eventually I got into c…

>Today's AI models are missing the ability to reason abstractly, including asking and answering questions of "Why?" and "How?" This claim seems over general, because you can ask gp…

Spend some time around a three year old. Human, human intelligence, language skills. Then try explain quicksort to them. Obvious waste of time. They wouldn't be much threat in a ze…

LLMs like GPT-4 'natively' speak certain syntaxes very well - e.g. Python, JSON. I'd suggest you want to take advantage of that, if at all possible, rather than embark on training …

I personally received a letter to: "Fergal Reid, Longford, Ireland", in the late 90s. Ireland had no postcodes at the time. I lived in a small village on the edge of a county calle…

Is this actually true, or BS? If true, can someone explain? My mental model is that vsync will lock the framerate to the same as the monitor refresh. So if monitor is 60hz, my game…