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What it feels like to work in AI right now

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Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until we see otherwise, don't we have to assume there's some secret sauce? Bard doesn't match GPT4 and it isn't for a lack of trying. (though perhaps that will change, so far that's the case)

Maybe it is just time to train and also good training data for prompts which openai has gathered for so long already? E.g. there is a bottleneck on how fast you can train and also gather good data.

Possibly, but wouldn't Google and Meta have access to way more compute resources and data than OpenAI? Google has been touting their TPUs for several years now.

Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#62
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until we see otherwise, don't we have to assume there's some secret sauce? Bard doesn't match GPT4 and it isn't for a lack of trying. (though perhaps that will change, so far that's the case)

Bard would not trick anyone into thinking it was sentient, yet something they have supposedly did. I just think Google has far more to lose than Bing, so they are being more cautious.

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Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#63
post #42
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why LLM would make Facebook (ads), Apple (hardware), Amazon (hosting, retail), Netflix (tv) obsolete. It's definitely something Google needs to think about, but there's no reason to think they won't again be the leader soon.

I actually think Apple is in a unique position here again with the hardware/software integration. Once again, their ability to do computation on device and optimize silicon to do it, is unparalleled. A huge Achilles heel of current models like GPT-4 is that they can’t be run locally. And there are tons of use cases where we don’t necessarily want to share what we’re doing with OpenAI. That’s why if Apple wasn’t so be…

Google has some impressive on device AI software such as Google Translate (translation), Google Photos (object detection, removal, inpainting), and Recorder (multi-speaker speech to text). Most of this is possible without their Tensor chip, but is more efficient with it.

Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#64
post #33

I work on a research team in FAANG. What it really feels like is one company made everyone else obsolete. And we are going to work working on NLP models that underperform ChatGPT by a huge margin. Twiddling my thumbs and keeping quiet while no one wants to recognize the elephant in the room. Also, there is no "working in AI", a few thousand people are doing real AI at most. The rest of us are calling an API.

Not sure why LLM would make Facebook (ads), Apple (hardware), Amazon (hosting, retail), Netflix (tv) obsolete. It's definitely something Google needs to think about, but there's no reason to think they won't again be the leader soon.

Imagine Walmart launching a ChatGPT interfaced bot for shopping that customers take a liking to. Walmart starts acquiring both new customers as well as high quality data they can use for RLHF for shopping. Eventually Walmart's data moat becomes so big, that Amazon retail cannot catch up and customers start leaving Amazon.

For AWS, if MS starts giving discounts for OAI model usage to regular Azure customers, that's gonna be a strong incentive to switch

For Apple, A Windows integrated with GPT tech may become a tough beast to beat.

Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#65

Probably not the right place to post this, but I really want someone to build a ChatGPT service that reviews consumer EULAs and highlights the important stuff, and can tell me what changes with them each time I have to reaccept or get notified. It's a subset of making legalese digestible, but bringing more visibility into the density of them would be wondrous.

You don't need got for that https://tosdr.org/

Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#66

I feel like the whole ChatGPT bubble has really highlighted what feel like some fundamental shortcomings in the worldview that is represented in tech. That is, there seems to be a winner take all dynamic baked into the tech world. Maybe this arises from the simple fact that tech places a lot of power in the hands of individuals. But there's an emergent downside to this which is that it makes those who were already mu…

> That is, there seems to be a winner take all dynamic baked into the tech world.

In tech world the cost for R&D/design/code is generally much larger then continuous code. That means that it's extremely expensive to have 1 user, but really cheap to have 1M users.

Thus winner-takes-all makes sense, as company who is ahead can continue developing/designing at a cheaper price as opposed to company with no users.

Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#68

I work on a research team in FAANG. What it really feels like is one company made everyone else obsolete. And we are going to work working on NLP models that underperform ChatGPT by a huge margin. Twiddling my thumbs and keeping quiet while no one wants to recognize the elephant in the room. Also, there is no "working in AI", a few thousand people are doing real AI at most. The rest of us are calling an API.

Sounds like the same thing that happened with datacenters? No one has ops or hardware sysadmins, no one sets up large networks except a few in those centralized cloud companies and couple other niche uses. website ops job changed

Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#69
post #34
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious why you draw the parallel - did crypto ever have a ChatGPT/iPhone moment? As an observant outsider, my impression is that every "moment" of note in crypto has been about some price going way up or way down - there has never been a "this is the use case" moment.

Theoretically ethereum is that for crypto, if you believe the crypto bros.

Ethereum is the tech though, not the use case. It's the touch screen, not the "audience gasps when Steve Jobs scrolls to the bottom of the list of artists" moment.

Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#70
post #17

I think this depends a lot on where you are working. I've talked to academics who are getting discouraged that they don't see how their approach to AI is going to be possible any more, with so much funding going toward the largest models from industry. On the other hand I've talked to startup founders building AI products whose business is booming because ChatGPT brought so much attention to the entire space. We are…

A PhD student I recently talked to was complaining how in academia they will never have the resources it takes to train models like GPT. And how now some academics are only researching the input/outputs to these LLMs. Seems like it's pretty dire or at least uninspiring to all but very few at the moment.

why is that? don't like those academic particle researchers get tons of money to build wild experiments to measure waves or collide particles? unless i get the funding part wrong? are those not academic projects?
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