Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What it feels like to work in AI right now

robotic.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 768 posts

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

#151

Post by rqtwteye »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #25
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.

Why do you think OpenAPI is so far out in front? It's not like there's a lot of secret sauce here - most of this stuff (transformers,etc.) is all out there in papers. And places like Google & Meta must have a lot more computing resources to train on that OpenAI does thus they should be able to train faster. Do you think OpenAI has discovered something they haven't been open about?

I think it’s the way things go usually. The big players have a business to run so they can’t focus much on innovation. OpenAI has the only purpose right now to push AI and nothing else. Once they have a real business they will also slow down.

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

#152

Post by cgearhart »

From my perspective it’s just _confusing_ to work in AI right now. We have some massive models that are doing some really neat stuff, and apparently hundreds of millions of people are using them—but I keep wondering: to do _what_, exactly? I’m not asking what the models can do, I’m asking what people want the models to do every day, all the time.

I’ve been shown some neat pictures people made that they thought were cool. I don’t know that I need this every day.

I’ve seen examples of “write an email to my boss”. It would take me longer to explain to ChatGPT what I want than to write these myself.

I’ve seen “write a snippet of code” demos. But I hardly care about this compared to designing a good API; or designing software that is testable, extensible, maintainable, and follows reasonable design principles.

In fact, no one in my extended sphere of friends and family has asked me anything about chatGPT, midjourney, or any of these other models. The only people I hear about these models from are other tech people.

I can see that these models are significantly better than anything before, but I can’t see yet the “killer app”. (For comparison, I don’t remember anyone in my orbit predicting search or social networking being killer apps for the internet—but we all expected things like TV and retail sales to book online.)

What am I missing?

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

#153

Post by tester457 »

lm28469 wrote: post #71
voz_ wrote: 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

To be fair, quick and easy toy projects and boilerplate saves an incredible amount of time.

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

#154

Post by zone411 »

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'm quite surprised at how little progress FAANG companies have made in recent years, as I believe much of what's happening now with ChatGPT was predictable. Here's a slide from a deck for a product I was developing in 2017: https://twitter.com/LechMazur/status/1644093407357202434/pho.... Its main function was to serve as a writing assistant.

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

#155

Post by [deleted] »

lacker wrote: post #20
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.

This reminds me of back in the mid 2000's, there were a lot of smart people working on search algorithms at different companies. But eventually, you'd talk to someone smart working on Yahoo Search, and they would just be kind of beaten down by the frustration of working on a competing search engine when Google was considered to be by far the best. It got harder for them to recruit, and eventually they just gave up. S…

[deleted]

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

#156

Post by qqtt »

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.

ChatGPT is cool and novel, but FAANG's requirements for ML/AI go far beyond what ChatGPT provides as a product. ChatGPT is good at answering questions based on an older data set. FAANG typically requires up to date real time inference for huge rapidly changing data sets.

Working on the practical side of ML/AI at FAANG, you will probably be working with some combination of feature stores, training platforms, inference engines, and so on - all attempting to optimize inference and models for specific use cases - largely ranking - which ads to show which customers based on feature store attributes, which shows to show which customers - all these ranking problems exist orthogonal to ChatGPT, which is using relatively stale datasets to answer knowledge based questions.

The scaling problems for AI/ML for productionizing these ranking models from training to inference is a huge scaling problem. ChatGPT hasn't really come close to solving it in a general way (and also solves a different class of problems).

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

#157

Post by sebmellen »

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 nowhere near new: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect

"To those who have everything, more will be given, and from those who have nothing, everything will be taken."

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

#158

Post by nr2x »

cgearhart wrote: post #152

From my perspective it’s just _confusing_ to work in AI right now. We have some massive models that are doing some really neat stuff, and apparently hundreds of millions of people are using them—but I keep wondering: to do _what_, exactly? I’m not asking what the models can do, I’m asking what people want the models to do every day, all the time. I’ve been shown some neat pictures people made that they thought were c…

Natural language is now a fully functional user interface out of the box. This is bigger than the mouse.

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

#159

Post by verelo »

cgearhart wrote: post #152

From my perspective it’s just _confusing_ to work in AI right now. We have some massive models that are doing some really neat stuff, and apparently hundreds of millions of people are using them—but I keep wondering: to do _what_, exactly? I’m not asking what the models can do, I’m asking what people want the models to do every day, all the time. I’ve been shown some neat pictures people made that they thought were c…

> I’ve been shown some neat pictures people made that they thought were cool. I don’t know that I need this every day.

At least they’re less obsessed with apes than last summer…

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

#160

Post by nr2x »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #89
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do you think OpenAPI is so far out in front? There is a network effect forming around its models. The strengths of its kit speak for themselves. (It also cannot be understated how making ChatGPT public, something its competitors were too feeble, incompetent and behind the curve to do, dealt OpenAI a massive first-mover advantage.) But as others note, other models are in the ballpark. Where OpenAI is different i…

Doubtful "feeble and incompetent" are fitting considering much of the research behind OpenAI was pioneered and published by those predecessors. More like "unwilling", and perhaps for good reason. Time will tell.

Google is where ideas go to die.
Post reply on HN