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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

#261

Post by twright0 »

wuiheerfoj wrote: post #215
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

What gives you confidence its explanations are accurate?

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

This domain in particular strikes me as a poor choice for this approach. "Don't roll your own crypto... but definitely don't let a language model roll it for you, either"

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

#262

Post by mos_basik »

cgearhart wrote: post #234
joe_the_user wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

Thanks for your comment, I think this is actually very helpful framing! It at least gives me something more tangible to think about—“micro tasks”.

I, too, have been experimenting a bit to see if/how an LLM might help me. This microtask framing jives with my experience.

One of the best examples so far for me (and it's truly micro) was at grocery store. Friend trying to figure out how big of a rice bag to get and avoid not finishing it before a long trip coming up. She knew she ate a couple of cups dry a week.

"I eat 2 cups dry rice per week. Can I finish a 25lb bag in less than 4 months?" "Yes" (it did show its work).

One shot, perfect response. I know this kind of computational thing is what WolframAlpha was for, but that wasn't nearly as reliable. I know I could figure it out myself, but I'd need to find a reasonable figure for the density of rice and probably do some imperial metric conversions and generally futz around for longer than one would want to stand in front of a pallet of rice bags.

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

#263

Post by mach1ne »

jrumbut wrote: post #248
nwienert wrote: post #204

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…

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…

>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.

This is an intuitive direction. In fact, it’s so intuitive that it’s a little bit odd that nobody seems to have made proper progress with LLM swarm computation.

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

#264

Post by fomine3 »

rvz wrote: post #216
nwienert wrote: post #204

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…

English speakers tend to miss a huge use case: Translation.

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

#265

Post by mach1ne »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #241
csomar wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, but it hallucinates sometimes. /s

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

#266

Post by Analog24 »

zone411 wrote: post #154
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.

Scaling up an LM from 2017 would not achieve what GPT-4 does. It's nowhere near that simple. Of course companies saw the potential of natural language interfaces, there has been billions spent on it over the years and a lot of progress was made prior to ChatGPT coming along.

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

#267

Post by nazgul17 »

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 found ChatGPT helpful in a bunch of diverse situations. I'll go into detail below, but overall I think the most valuable thing it can do is understand questions that takes both knowledge (that I don't have and want to acquire) and understanding (that prior AI technologies did not have) and provide meaningful answers. I suppose I find it very useful for my own education - with the understanding that I should use 2 or 3 grains of salt when reading its answers.

For example, I am studying Japanese and often encounter expressions that seems to mean the same thing; I would ask my teacher, but her time is limited. I can instead ask ChatGPT and only bring to my teacher the questions whose ChatGPT answers did not convince me.

Another example: I like understanding why there are certain steps in a recipe. It would be hard to find someone with the knowledge and time to answer the question, never mind I should pay for their time. ChatGPT can explain what I want to know at the level of detail that I want.

I was also able to get a decent understanding of a mathematical question I had no business understanding by recursively asking questions until I was able to link its answers to my own knowledge.

It was also able to answer questions about the Spring framework that I had while reading the documentation itself. In that context, going in rabbit holes severely slows down learning and has the potential to just get me lost.

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

#268

Post by Washuu »

carabiner wrote: post #143
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.

Not just NLP, even 3D art: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzGEfYh9ITQ Top comment: I love seeing my job get transformed from 3D artist into prompt writer into jobless in a year or less, yay!

I do a lot of stylized 3D art: I still have time before AI figures that out!~

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

#269

Post by Salgat »

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…

It replaces googling. All the hard work of finding relevant info and piecing it together is done for you. For programmers it's just a faster stackoverflow.

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

#270

Post by SanderNL »

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, good sir, have a disturbing lack of imagination.

What I can ask my computer has just leaped from templated strings to raw human conversation.

I have a hard time imagining something not getting impacted.

First of all iPhone autocomplete.. (but I guess any decade old RNN is an improvement there)

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