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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

#71
post #67

can someone show some actual product features where AI is being used productively? I dont wanna say it but I think this is a hype train headed for failure

This question is in poor faith.

Not really, I've been digging for a while and I didn't find any ground breaking projects

It's all nice and cool but most of the projects are toys and/or junior level generated boilerplate

It's good for summarizing, rephrasibing and other neat features but that's about it, a far cry from the oracle some people seem to worship

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

#72

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…

Pre-tech, the winner take all dynamic was prevented by physics:

- Customers were only willing to walk so far to go to a bakery

- A store could only stock so many varieties on it's shelves

Now, the cost of distributing goods across the globe, and the incremental cost of creating new goods has shrunk to virtually zero for digital goods, combined with people's general hesitance to the friction of switching providers, creates a the natural "winner take all" effect

The places where you'll see this NOT happening are areas where those costs are still significant for some reason.

Examples:

- Different ride sharing services are popular in different countries, many of them local ones, since foreign companies had a harder time getting distribution started.

- Legal regulations also have been hindering the spread of payment companies across country-level borders

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

#73
If there's anything I learned from reading articles from the Xiph.org people, it's that neural networks work a lot better when you pre-process their inputs with an algorithm. They need far less information, and can run in realtime when most of the work is being done by traditional computation instead of doing it in the neural network.

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

#74
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has helped me learn things more interactively because I can ask questions and get answers without having to read 10 blog posts or a book before understanding things. For my personality, it would be hard to recreate without having a living mentor available 24/7 that had knowledge of everything I wanted to ask of it. Does it get things wrong? Sure. But generally the subtle ways it might get stuff wrong would be the…

You must have missed the article posted this morning where ChatGPT complexity invented a sexual allegation against a law professor including citing a fictional news article that never existed. I wouldn’t call that a subtle misunderstanding.

I'm not asking for lists of sexual allegations, I'm asking about technical concepts. Very different.

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

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont work at Google, I think other FAANGS underinvested in this area as they didnt think it was promising. But I will admit, I am suspicious that Google is incompetent. Probably they can come back given how much money they will be forced to throw at it. But Bard is clearly behind and I dont believe their "abundance of caution" arguments for why Bard cant even code.

The impression I get is that they purposely limited Bard in certain ways. It does not seem to be willing to code and makes a lot of excuses when you ask it to (at least as of a couple of weeks ago when I last tried it). Did they put this limitation on it because it's not so good at coding or because they don't want it to be abused in some way? In my experience I had to trick it into coding by telling it to pretend th…

I am still wondering if Google is experiencing it Kodak moment.

They have the dominant product that makes them billions and billions of dollars at 'relatively' low cost.

The new dominant product is on its way, but it costs far more to operate and will net them far less money, so... um no one wants to kill the goose that is still laying golden eggs, even though its days are numbered already.

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

#76
post #60

Huge crypto vibes Every single person I know working in AI these days ... has been sparked by the ChatGPT moment.

Crypto had the disadvantage of being a natural conduit for MLM-ish pyramid schemes and a lot of nefarious activities. That gave it some wind, but it was bad wind. Notably, it turned out to be not very useful. AI will be useful, and it's just regular tech, so there's good reason to be optimistic this time.

If you think crypto is a natural conduit for scammers and frauds, then wait til you see what LLMs will cause in that area...

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

#77

can someone show some actual product features where AI is being used productively? I dont wanna say it but I think this is a hype train headed for failure

I use it as a Google search and text summarizer. So far seems to be the only truly useful thing to me. So I imagine services for that will appear. Maybe Google itself will incorporate it to stay relevant.

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

#78
post #76
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crypto had the disadvantage of being a natural conduit for MLM-ish pyramid schemes and a lot of nefarious activities. That gave it some wind, but it was bad wind. Notably, it turned out to be not very useful. AI will be useful, and it's just regular tech, so there's good reason to be optimistic this time.

If you think crypto is a natural conduit for scammers and frauds, then wait til you see what LLMs will cause in that area...

It will be a tool for fraudsters, like computers or anything else are tools, but the space itself is not inherently oriented towards MLM.

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

#79
post #71
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This question is in poor faith.

Not really, I've been digging for a while and I didn't find any ground breaking projects It's all nice and cool but most of the projects are toys and/or junior level generated boilerplate It's good for summarizing, rephrasibing and other neat features but that's about it, a far cry from the oracle some people seem to worship

They didn't say ChatGPT, they said "AI". In which case simply Googling will get you a seemingly never ending list of very real products:

AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/machine-learning/ml-use-cases/ Azure: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/cognitive-service... Google: https://cloud.google.com/products/ai

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

#80
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Until the government funding agencies are willing to do "big science" in computer science we're not going to get particle accelerator sized projects. It sort of happened in France, and bloom was the result.

https://huggingface.co/bigscience/bloom

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