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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

#241

Post by spaceman_2020 »

csomar wrote: post #205
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…

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.…

You couldn’t be further from the truth.

This is the single greatest leap in productivity we’ve had in the last 100 years.

Last week, I used GPT-4 to write my code. Later, I used it to analyze 100+ websites and come up with a personalized pitch for a relevant plugin/product idea - something that would have taken me 100+ hours.

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

#242

Post by achenatx »

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…

its good for so many things:

Need to write a speech as a best man

Write a eulogy for a deceased family member

Recently used it to speed up the time to fix an oauth problem in code I didnt write, knowing nothing about oauth. Replaces stackexchange with much more tailored answers.

can take hundreds of pages of text and distill it down to an executive summary of any length

Daughter uses it to explain how to solve algebra problems, not just give an answer. Will completely change education.

Marketing using it for all content. Devs hate writing blog posts, it will take some code as an input and write a blog post about what it does. Can use it to come up with questions to seed a podcast

Paralegals are virtually redundant. AI with all legal caselaw making it much easier

HR using it to write customized offer letters, review resumes, etc.

It isnt just about asking a question and getting an answer. You can keep adding context and the answers keep getting better.

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

#243

Post by jack_pp »

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 thought about learning Go and Fiber to build the backend of a side project of mine and I did but as it goes for any new language / stack I wasn't feeling confident in it. Then ChatGPT came out and I thought what the hell, let's see what all the fuss is about.

So I asked it to write me a struct for a table with the "id, name, longitude, latitude, news" columns. That worked well, I was surprised it automatically inferred the data types for said columns.

Then I asked it to write endpoints for retrieving a record from that table and it did so perfectly which again I was surprised by. Asked it to add endpoints for adding records and retrieving all records. Again, no bugs, perfect code. At the end I asked it to create a python script to test the API and it did so flawlessly.

Next day I created a docker env with postgres and went to test the code but it didn't work, turns out it wrote it with mysql in mind so went back and told it to rewrite the entire code with postgres in mind and again it did so flawlessly so overall writing this small API endpoint took maybe 30-60 min.

Considering I was a total newbie at Go this probably would have taken me several hours to complete successfully and this code is basically just boilerplate. I don't care to learn it by heart so I can be more productive in the future. Now that I have ChatGPT I basically don't have to, I don't have to write python to speed up my dev time, I can just have ChatGPT write the basic stuff in a highly performant language. It removed the only drawback which was more boilerplate.

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

#244

Post by blazespin »

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.

Folks need to start getting over themselves. It's pretty trivial to get GPT4 to explain how transformers work, where the bottlenecks are in both performance and learning, and start modifying pytorch.

It's really not that complicated. Gatekeeping is so over.

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

#245

Post by Buttons840 »

woeirua wrote: post #214

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 scien…

My understanding is that transformers are now favored over RNNs because they parallelize better.

It's hard to imagine, but I wonder if there's some non-parallelizable machine learning algorithms which might outperform these massive models? It seems improbable, but it's a small hope I've had. The greatest intellects were aware of (ourselves) do not scale very well, and maybe the same will ultimately apply to AI?

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

#246

Post by yummypaint »

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 think the killer app will involve adding more layers of AI to make something that is closer to an agent than a simple prompt completion engine. Maybe a more self-contained system that has an internal cycle of asessment, generating prompts, executing output, and readjusting prompts. These agents could conceivably work on long term, complex projects with minimal supervision or interaction. If a general purpose system can get a foothold and be even 10% as good as a person, it could be enough to fundamentally reshape the workforce.

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

#247

Post by sashank_1509 »

diego wrote: post #49
UncleOxidant wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If you try Bard or Claude or character.ai they are not far behind GPT4. They might even be on par in terms of raw LLM capabilities. ChatGPT has better marketing and in some cases better UX. A lot of this is self-fulfilling. We think it's far ahead, so it appears to be far ahead.

In my experiments:

GPT4>ChatGPT>Claude>Character AI> Bard

Claude and Character AI are great at holding a conversation but they lack the ability to do anything specialized that really makes these LLM’s useful in my day to day life. I ask GPT-4 and ChatGPT questions I would ask in stackoverflow, I can’t do that with Claude or Character AI. Bard actually seems behind even conversationally to the rest

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

#248

Post by jrumbut »

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…

I think this is a classic case of us overestimating the immediate impact and underestimating the long term impact.

Right now, they are definitely useful time savers, but they need a lot of handholding. Eventually, someone will figure out how to get hundreds of LLMs supervising teams of millions of LLMs to do some really wild stuff that is currently completely impossible.

You could spin up a giant staff the way we do servers now. There has to be a world changing application of that.

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

#249

Post by blazespin »

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…

They are a weird company, and their core motivations aren't money, though obviously they have to make money if they want to keep doing what they want to do.

Yes, the release was wild and disruptive, but when your core motivation isn't greed, you can do some seriously wild and disruptive things.

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

#250

Post by [deleted] »

achenatx wrote: post #242
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…

its good for so many things: Need to write a speech as a best man Write a eulogy for a deceased family member Recently used it to speed up the time to fix an oauth problem in code I didnt write, knowing nothing about oauth. Replaces stackexchange with much more tailored answers. can take hundreds of pages of text and distill it down to an executive summary of any length Daughter uses it to explain how to solve algebr…

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