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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

#131

Post by VirusNewbie »

fdgsdfogijq wrote: post #12

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.

I work at a FAANG and our unreleased models are fantastic. Now, there might be panic about how to productize it all, but tech wise i'm pretty surprised how good they are.

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

#132

Post by jordwest »

xyzzy4747 wrote: post #124
sj8822 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point, I became disenchanted with tech and working as a software engineer when I realized that tech doesn't ethically fit into our primitive economic organization right now. It's made me feel bad about myself and the career path I've chosen. Basically, with tech, you can build a product with a very limited amount of people and resources with a potentially infinite customer base. And this means that this produ…

I think ultimately tech will result in humans being like the rest of animals - completely unable to participate in the economy. This will only start to happen once AGI is reached though which might only be a decade away or less.

I think you're right, we're going to need to completely rethink our economy to decouple the idea of human effort (Unfortunately I can't see how that's going to happen without everything first falling apart).

A single barrel of oil is estimated to replace about 5-10 years of a human's effort in pure energy terms. Our human ability in physical terms was already significantly obsoleted by that.

AI feels like the discovery of cheap oil but for mental effort.

At the same time, oil is getting more and more expensive and energy intensive to drill (and costly to the environment to use).

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

#133

Post by [deleted] »

627467 wrote: post #113

> so for people focused on learning and doing good, some simple logic implies that there shouldn’t be an AI race. I think the author got the order wrong: acknowledging the race is what reinforces "safety". If there was no race whats the incentive to talk so much about safety? On the other hand I have a sense (although I won't bet on it) that just like Siri hype died out after a few months, so will chatGPT. the author…

[deleted]

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

#135

Post by UncleOxidant »

WanderPanda wrote: post #116
davesque wrote: post #28

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…

This is literally threatening the winner (Google) taking it all forever. Some of these innovations are winner take all until they aren't anymore. The cycle seems to be 1 to 2 decades. The profits during that cycle are probably fair on average given the risk necessary to make the tech ready for wide-spread usage

> This is literally threatening the winner (Google) taking it all forever

Sure, but look who is over there in the corner next to OpenAI: Microsoft with their $10B stake. The company that was the winner prior to Google being a winner.

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

#136

Post by Robotbeat »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #61
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

OpenAI has access to Microsoft and Azure. That’s bigger than Meta, roughly on par with Google in terms of capability and higher in terms of market cap.

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

#137

Post by agentultra »

fortissimohn wrote: post #129
boringuser2 wrote: post #123

The middle class was already flagging, destroying all knowledge work is like the coup de grace. Not sure how this isn't clear to people.

Surely this technology will be used for the benefit of humanity. By 2030 we will be working 15 hour weeks and all people will have homes!

The reward for increased productivity is more work!

The problem for the capitalist is having to pay all those pesky people to do the work. Eats into profits. Now we can burn out 2 people and do the work that used to take 10!

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

#138

Post by PeterisP »

theturtletalks wrote: post #104
redox99 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about GPT4, but GPT3.5 I'd bet is pretty traditional and boring. It's power comes from a really good, properly curated dataset (including the RLHF). GPT3.5 turbo is much more interesting probably, because they seem to have found out how to make it much more efficient (some kind of distillation?). GPT4 if I had to make a very rough guess, probably flash attention, 100% of the (useful) internet/books for i…

Is there a limit on how big the context size can be?

There is a soft limit due to the computation required; the currently used model architectures are quadratic with respect to context size, so if you want ten times larger context size, that's going to need a hundred times more effort.

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

#139

Post by PeterisP »

maxilevi wrote: post #130
sj8822 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point, I became disenchanted with tech and working as a software engineer when I realized that tech doesn't ethically fit into our primitive economic organization right now. It's made me feel bad about myself and the career path I've chosen. Basically, with tech, you can build a product with a very limited amount of people and resources with a potentially infinite customer base. And this means that this produ…

But if people are paying for the product then they value it more than the money right? Tech might bring more inequality, but what is the problem with it if it substantially increases everyones standard of living?

If something makes everything take half as much effort but removes your ability to earn an income (or slashes it more than twice) then it decreases your standard of living despite substantially increasing it for many others.

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

#140

Post by letitgo12345 »

twelve40 wrote: post #99
letitgo12345 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 go…

> Imagine Walmart launching a ChatGPT interfaced bot for shopping that customers take a liking to. I can't imagine that, because it doesn't seem to fit the use case. Especially not to the point of bankruptcy of Amazon, maybe as a small novelty? Can you list some killer features that the chat would bring that would make the existing shopping experience irrelevant? Maybe not everything is a nail to the hammer?

"I'm looking for X. Can you give me a few options with the benefits and drawbacks of each"

or

"I'm looking for X. Can you ask me a few questions and give me a choice of products based on that"

or

"I'm looking for a product that does X, Y, Z. Can you find such a product for me"

or

"Does this product do Y/is compatible with Z/is an appropriate give for person P"

I'm not saying this will happen. I'm saying it's a risk that Amazon should take seriously.

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