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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

#221
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this interview [1] with Ilya Sutskever, he indicates that they aren't even close to tapping out of data. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yf1o0TQzry8&t=656s

That interview is mind blowing stuff.

Yeah great interview style. It's non stop content.

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

#222

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 don’t think you’re missing anything. I like the “calculator for words” analogy that was posted on HN a few days ago. It doesn’t seem like a revolutionary product, but it does seem like a fundamental innovation which will then unlock many more complex things in subtle ways. Calculators were arguably the predecessor to computers, which are kind of a big deal :)

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

#223

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…

Ask college kids. They’re all using it for everything.

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

#224
post #205

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…

You are not missing anything. It's a bubble. This is tech 101 and all over again. You gotta hype some new thing whether it's Web 2.0, Crypto or AI. LLM have proven to be great as a gimmick or making rather okay localized approximations. You can create a good enough image without any designing skills, or have auto-completion on steroids. However, there is no proof that this same tech can extrapolate to the next level.…

I believe that you are half right. AI is going to radically change the world, but not now, maybe in 10 years. The pace of research is slower than the expectations of investors. This will lead to the perception of a boom and bust and AI winter, but in reality there will be slow steady improvements. It’s just been commercialized too soon.

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

#225

This sub and blog post are all talking about ChatGPT which is no doubt amazing and far ahead of the curve. However I would also point to Metas new vision model: SAM (Segment Anything): it is so far beyond any other vision model, I actually believe vision will be solved in a few years now. People don’t realize that there was an industry of publishing paper with incremental improvements in small datasets in CVPR that h…

Yep. We came a long way from bounding boxes, not sure if community here is ready for vision + 3d + video models to have the “chatgpt” moment this year

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

#226
post #156

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…

ChatGPT is human level intelligence, it’s not just novel and cool, it’s the thing. Remember, GPT-4 training was finished 6 months ago. Listen to people at OpenAI, their concern is: disruption to the world, UBI, getting people used to superintelligence as part of our world. I think they have quite a few things in the pipeline.

So yes ads optimisation/recommendations still need to be reliable for the time being, but for how long?

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

#227

This sub and blog post are all talking about ChatGPT which is no doubt amazing and far ahead of the curve. However I would also point to Metas new vision model: SAM (Segment Anything): it is so far beyond any other vision model, I actually believe vision will be solved in a few years now. People don’t realize that there was an industry of publishing paper with incremental improvements in small datasets in CVPR that h…

There seem to be a lot of breakthroughs being announced right now. My guess is that after ChatGPT, companies like Meta pushed their teams to get their own projects out the door which they'd already been working on for some time. SAM and Zero-1-to-3 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35242193) are incredibly impressive new projects in the image comprehension side. Then of course there's all the stuff happening with Midjourney/Stable Diffusion. And DeepMind's AlphaCode.

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

#228

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…

The difference between your search query and theirs is clearly the level of expertise. Chatgpt has a great use case when you get started on a new subject; even with a very cluncky description it can point you into the core concepts of any field. Instead of reading 10 papers with are somewhat related but not what you are looking for, you can spend 3 minutes writing clumsy prompts and that's about it :)

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

#229
post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

Notion going all-in on the "AI" stuff is annoying/concerning to me. Mostly just that I live and die by a personal Notion wiki to keep my life organized, and if they eventually tank their service by investing too many resources into features that don't take off and I have to find a new tool to offload my brain into, I'm gonna be pissed...

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

#230

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…

> other models are in the ballpark How true is this? From playing around with Bard and Claude, GPT-4 seems to be significantly better, especially around code generation / understanding.

> How true is this? From playing around with Bard and Claude, GPT-4 seems to be significantly better

I have at most moderate confidence in this hypothesis.

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