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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

#211

Post by EricBurnett »

arthurcolle wrote: post #190
ruskyhacker wrote: post #188

I'm probably way too late for this thought to get any traction / discussion - but I have this weird feeling that openai screwed up and showed it's "cool new thing" too early, and publicly. As much as it pains me to say this, I don't think the real money is in making this a service, or "the product." I think the real money is in using AI internally as a puzzle piece of your backend - ie. the secret sauce behind xyz pr…

> I have zero proof, but I suspect Google for instance has models that would literally obliterate what openai has shown capability wise. They're probably not necessarily language models though. Again, nothing to stand on here but I doubt their search and analytics for example are driven by hard coded algorithms these days. Then why is Bard so bad? Bard feels like GPT-2 or LLaMA 7B with no finetuning most of the time…

Googler here, opinions my own, etc.

From my perspective, Bard went from "literally didn't exist" to "released" over the course of about a month. GP seems correct in that it very much felt like something picked up off the shelf, slightly dusted off, and released. Is it as good as chatGPT? From my testing, no. Is it the pinnacle of what Google can create, given motivation? I'm pretty sure also no. In comparison to the state of all the research papers Google and Deepmind release, it definitely feels rushed. So I'd suggest not judging Google on its initial fast -follow project: either Google will come out with something compelling in the next 6mo or so, or we can conclude it really was leapfrogged and has fallen behind. But judging it now seems a bit too conveniently pessimistic, IMO.

(There's a legit chance Google will flub this, don't get me wrong. It's just too early to properly conclude one way or the other.)

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

#212

Post by flir »

HyperSane wrote: post #182
alain94040 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see ads as a big problem with ChatGPT. You could put a side-bar on the right and on the fly recommend products relevant to the on-going conversation. The cost of computing these ads would be a lot more than today's keyword-based approach, that's certainly a problem. But think of hyper-relevant ads, based on the chat itself. There's a lot of information there, that beats tracking people's behavior online all d…

And you could even program the LLM to try to subtly manipulate people into using the advertised product.

You can inline the ads. Ask it to write you a poem about flowers that includes an ad for interflora.

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

#213

Post by joe_the_user »

cgearhart wrote: post #201
brookst wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re asking “what’s so big about GUIs? Literally nobody has asked to move a pointer around a screen”. It’s the use cases these thing enable that are important. Today, I wrote a draft product announcement. Only after I was done did I realize I had written it in a really impersonal third person (“users will be able to”). No big deal, but maybe 10-20 minutes of work to make it energetic and second person (“now you can…

Hmm…no, I’m not doubting the value of the interface. I’m asking what’s the “killer app”. Maybe I should just ask ChatGPT to explain it to me…

It seems like the use of ChatGPT is something like "microtasks". Little things a given person could do but would rather not and so is able to delegate to an automatic thing whose output they can verify.

It seems like it's potential as of today is increasing or seeming to increase the productivity of a segment of white collar workers in the fashion that email and the web did (or might not have). A lot of researchers might not have need for this and so not understand this appeal of this.

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

#214

Post by woeirua »

I think what’s really depressing here is just how effective scaling seems to be. It just means that any company that’s not willing to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into their AI programs isn’t serious at all and would probably be better off hiring engineers to figure out how to integrate GPTX into their systems than trying to roll their own. I really think we’re going to see a massive collapse of AI/data science jobs once it becomes clear that no in house model is ever going to be better than the zero shot performance of these mega models.

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

#215

Post by wuiheerfoj »

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 using ChatGPT to:

- write and explain me more optimised algorithms for certain cryptographic operations

- explain funny mathy bits of papers that I don’t understand

- plan me a few days of activities for a city holiday

So far it’s been great on all accounts!! I was able to get a faster turnaround time in understanding the papers than I would if I were probing a colleague

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

#216

Post by rvz »

nwienert wrote: post #204
brookst wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re asking “what’s so big about GUIs? Literally nobody has asked to move a pointer around a screen”. It’s the use cases these thing enable that are important. Today, I wrote a draft product announcement. Only after I was done did I realize I had written it in a really impersonal third person (“users will be able to”). No big deal, but maybe 10-20 minutes of work to make it energetic and second person (“now you can…

I mean Google revolutionized search. Apple revolutionized personal computing. OpenAI revolutionized… rewriting things with slightly different wording? I’ve seen so many breathless people posting “this would have taken me so long to search” and then I type 3 keywords from their massive prompt they crafted and find it instantly on Google. We’re talking 1000x or more faster. I feel like the same is happening in your com…

> Taking into account the downsides it looks like a hype bubble right now to me, and a draw in the long run. There’s just a whole lot of tech people trying to cash in on the hype.

Techies will realize that they are just giving ideas to O̶p̶e̶n̶AI.com, Microsoft Word, Google Docs and Notion. It is just the same AI bros re-selling their hallucinating snake oil chatbot that are under a new narrative for AI.

There is a reason why the only safe serious use-case of LLMs is summarization of existing text, since everything else it does is untrustworthy and is complete bullshit.

Their so-called 'revolution' is a grift.

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

#217

Post by Teever »

letitgo12345 wrote: post #149
sangnoir wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you think OpenAI has discovered something they haven't been open about? They have not, which makes me curious about which company gp works for because the "F" and "G" in FAANG are publicly known to already have LLMs. Not sure about Amazon, but I'm guessing they do too. As an outsider, the amazing thing about ML/AI research is that you get a revolutionary discovery of a technique or refinement that changes everyt…

Issue is the data moat OAI is building. They'll have hundreds of millions of high quality user interactions with ChatGPT they can use to finetune their models. What will anyone else including Google have?

As people make chat bots with openAI and tie them into existing chat services, organizations that offer these chat services will get their hands on that kind of data too.

Discord comes to mind.

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

#218

Post by alfor »

One of the most frustrating thing is that GPT-4 training was finished 6 months ago. It might as well be a decade in the current movement of things.

What that mean: - OpenAI has such a large head start that they are only worried about safety, world disruption and getting people used to AGI. - The ideas/project you have was tested by them months ago and is probably irrelevant already. - Insiders have a huge advantage.

One area where there is opportunity outside is making the models run on smaller HW (llama/alpaca) and to see what we can do with them.

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

#219

Post by sdenton4 »

bmitc wrote: post #207
nr2x wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Fully functional in what way? As far as I can tell, ChatGPT is a box that I put sentences into, and I get grammatically correct sentences that contains topics or words loosely statistically correlated to what were in my sentences, that may or may not be correct and often are not. The box has little to no memory. I honestly don't see what's so useful about this box.

The results are approximately as good as asking an intern, but the response is approximately instantaneous, where an intern takes a week to do anything. And similar to the intern, you can get better results with a bit of guidance and iteration.

In short, humans kinda suck. LLMs also kinda suck, but faster than humans.

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

#220

Post by nmfisher »

letitgo12345 wrote: post #149
sangnoir wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you think OpenAI has discovered something they haven't been open about? They have not, which makes me curious about which company gp works for because the "F" and "G" in FAANG are publicly known to already have LLMs. Not sure about Amazon, but I'm guessing they do too. As an outsider, the amazing thing about ML/AI research is that you get a revolutionary discovery of a technique or refinement that changes everyt…

Issue is the data moat OAI is building. They'll have hundreds of millions of high quality user interactions with ChatGPT they can use to finetune their models. What will anyone else including Google have?

I'm not sure how deep that moat is. As soon as you open up the API, anyone can distil ChatGPT (or at least, some smaller part of it) by fine-tuning another model on its outputs[0].

I'm guessing that this is the #1 fear for people inside OpenAI have right now.

[0] For the record, I have zero problem with this.

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