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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

#301

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…

Sorry, one other thing, as an actual AI researcher:

These generative models, whether NLP or vision, are cool but are really examples from a very narrow field. Most ML researchers and practitioners are working in completely different areas and would not obviously benefit from the new generative models (which are themselves prodictized extensions of existing tech trained on more data) so nothing's going to change day-to-day. If you were working on some alternative general purpose generative model, maybe you got scooped. Otherwise it's business as usual.

The "revolution" is happening for tech savvy non-ML people, "tech-bros" colloquially.

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

#302

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…

- Amazing translations (this alone is a game changer) - Language learning... The ability to improvise realistic conversations is huge. I can ask to talk about cooking a specific dish or a sport! - As others have noted, refining documents similar to grammarly - Looking for a product with extremely specific features (though it isn't very good at comparing yet) - Searches that are too vague and complicated to articulate…

Didn't we have amazing translations for a long time?

I do not notice a significant improvement between new models and last year's deepl/Google translate.

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

#303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How did you use it to analyse websites? Did it go scrape stuff for you or did already have the data or did you paste in the website data?

It has plugins now. It can search the web. It's connected to Wolfram. Zapier. It can do things.

Even before that you could hack something together. I told it how to request an image be included in responses - it includes [fluffy unicorn], I parse that out, feed it to another GPT to get a better description, then feed that to DALL-E to get the image to include

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

#304

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?

I dont work at Google, I think other FAANGS underinvested in this area as they didnt think it was promising. But I will admit, I am suspicious that Google is incompetent. Probably they can come back given how much money they will be forced to throw at it. But Bard is clearly behind and I dont believe their "abundance of caution" arguments for why Bard cant even code.

I always thought that google would have an advantage because they have so much data.

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

#305

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 have a friend that has been using ChatGPT to help him write technical books which collect existing niche information and present it in a way that's more accessible and organized, in Spanish. You'd be amazed by how many small niches there are without robust technical books and well organized resources. And while the information is all "out there", it's often not really easily accessible to beginners.

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

#306

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…

Llm are a tool that understand intent. It makes super easy to compose api into agent and give them a task https://python.langchain.com/en/latest/modules/agents/agents...

That is just the introduction, showcasing what level of sophistication you get with just Google and Wikipedia as tools

Now imagine task rabbit or fiver as tools. Ai can make things happen in the real worlds.

These llm have limited attention but infinite focus. You can parallelize them, you can have one direct a fleet of other llm, you can have llm checking input and outputs for correctness from the other models and feedback that information to the controlling model so that it can improve the promp to the other as it tries to reach it's goal

And the goal can be far fetching (manufacture fake artsy trinket and import them from China to distribute etsy) or nefarious (produce subtle propaganda in a moltitude of wordpress website, register accounts on Wikipedia, reddit, create a sophisticate network of citations)

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

#307

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…

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

This is the kind of breathless claim that no doubt fuels the skeptics.

None of the context windows are large enough for "hundreds of pages" nor "executive summaries of any length".

I did believe that it's possible to make LLMs do that kind of task with significant engineering effort to make it do summaries iteratively somehow, essentially "compressing" parts of the document recursively. But it's not something that you can just give to ChatGPT and have it work.

So yes, the hype is real, in both ways: there's lots of potential to explore over the next years, but also a lot of the claims you read today are not sufficiently hedged, which makes them look outlandish.

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

#308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

1. ToS make it hard for a commercial entity to do so. So some third parties would have to collect the data first

2. You won't be able to get the hundreds of millions or more interactions that OAI will have (both due to cost of API as well as it being not easy to figure out a good way to generate that many queries for a good multiturn conversaton). Maybe you can make up for it by querying smartly. We don't know if we can right now.

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

#309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I”m not in ML, so excuse this maybe naive question: > get hundreds of LLMs supervising teams of millions of LLMs What does this mean or what can you do with this setup… do you mean running LLMs in parallel?

Yes, that's called 'ensembling'. There is a lot of work being done on this kind of solution. One way in which it could work is that you can use multiple models that have been fine tuned for various problems and then use the answer that returns the highest confidence.

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

#310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Amazing translations (this alone is a game changer) - Language learning... The ability to improvise realistic conversations is huge. I can ask to talk about cooking a specific dish or a sport! - As others have noted, refining documents similar to grammarly - Looking for a product with extremely specific features (though it isn't very good at comparing yet) - Searches that are too vague and complicated to articulate…

For translations, I use Google translate. Should I switch?

DeepL [1] usually does better in my experience, but I suspect Google Translate has gotten better since last time I used it.

[1] www.deepl.com

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