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Deep Learning Foundations to Stable Diffusion

course.fast.ai

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Re: Deep Learning Foundations to Stable Diffusion

#111
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pushing for AI output to be banned is not a long term approach IMO unless all countries do it in unison - countries who do not ban AI output will be much more competitive, and those that ban it will be left in the dust. Any country that banned computers in 1979 would have really hurt themselves. Society will need to adapt - doesn't necessarily make sense having several billion people doing something that a computer c…

> Pushing for AI output to be banned is not a long term approach IMO unless all countries do it in unison - countries who do not ban AI output will be much more competitive, and those that ban it will be left in the dust. Any country that banned computers in 1979 would have really hurt themselves. this argument is extremely similar to that which was used against proposals to ban slavery

What a bizarre comparison.

Automating jobs does not have the same moral implications as slavery.

That might be a valid argument for keeping slavery if it wasn’t entirely immoral.

But I suspect AI isn’t like the discovery of slavery - it’s more like the discovery of electricity which put candlemakers out of business.

Re: Deep Learning Foundations to Stable Diffusion

#112
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pushing for AI output to be banned is not a long term approach IMO unless all countries do it in unison - countries who do not ban AI output will be much more competitive, and those that ban it will be left in the dust. Any country that banned computers in 1979 would have really hurt themselves. this argument is extremely similar to that which was used against proposals to ban slavery

What a bizarre comparison. Automating jobs does not have the same moral implications as slavery. That might be a valid argument for keeping slavery if it wasn’t entirely immoral . But I suspect AI isn’t like the discovery of slavery - it’s more like the discovery of electricity which put candlemakers out of business.

it's the same argument

"if we don't have child labour/slavery/no workplace rights/lax environment law/planning restrictions/data privacy law/... then we'll be outcompeted by those that don't"

unregulated AI fits in there perfectly

these persisted for so long because of economics over ethics... maybe we'll make the correct decision this time

(separately: if we do get to AGI then the slavery comparison suddenly gains an extra dimension... as that's literally what its operators will be doing)

Re: Deep Learning Foundations to Stable Diffusion

#114
post #40
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get why your question is getting unvoted. This is a serious question. For engineers and "normal people" as well : why bother learning ?

That's not a serious question, it's the very definition of trolling. You can replace Stable Diffusion with any other subject to learn, and that particular doom scenario with a similar one or, if you don't feel very inclined to ellucubrate, just say the good old "why learn anything when we all are eventually going to die and be forgotten". Not cool.

accusing other people of trolling when they're not is trolling

Re: Deep Learning Foundations to Stable Diffusion

#115

This looks awesome, however I probably need to do a bootcamp with real people to compete and have comradery with to actually retrain on the basics in this. It doesn't matter where in the world this is (I like to travel), but does anyone have a recommendation for in person bootcamps on AI?

If you're interested in taking this course, you can check the forums and/or Discord where people will organize study groups going through the course. Some of the study groups organized are in-person, some are virtual. These are usually great opportunities to study with some real people at the same time and get that camaraderie. https://forums.fast.ai https://discord.gg/YHtEBwzV

Fantastic, I’ll sign up and have a look! Thanks

Re: Deep Learning Foundations to Stable Diffusion

#116
post #106
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not criticizing you, here, just asking a sincere question. It was obvious to me on first encounter that APL would never become widespread. Its character set was too abstruse for most programmers and at the time required a special monitor. Plus it seemed hard to maintain if you weren’t either a mathematician or a full-time APL developer. Your thoughts?

Not OP, but I'll say you're right, but for the wrong reasons. Having embarked on learning APL by doing a project in it, the character set becomes second nature in a few days time. No special monitor needed, at least on my Mac, just a new font and it all worked flawlessly. What caused me to hang up my glyphs were the inconsistencies and head scratching behavior of the language in so many corner cases. Working with ver…

Thanks for your perspective, which is easy to understand. I hasten to say that when I talk about special monitors, I first encountered APL in the early 80s.

Re: Deep Learning Foundations to Stable Diffusion

#117
post #96

The fast.ai courses are exceptionally good for getting started and learning the concepts, but, once you've mastered an intuitive understanding of the techniques, I highly encourage people to dig deeper into the concepts - specifically, reverse SDEs, stochastic calculus, optimization, score matching. Jeremy does an excellent job making the content approachable, but, if you want to go beyond being an excellent practici…

FYI this course does cover a lot of intuitive understanding of techniques, but it also does cover this theory. Everything is done from the foundation level, and all of the stuff you mentioned is taught and implemented from scratch as part of the course.

Of course there's loads more to do on gaining intuition, and loads more theory to be learned once the course is done! Only so much can fit in a single course :)

Re: Deep Learning Foundations to Stable Diffusion

#118
post #10

This is cool, but I have a fundamental question. Why learn machine learning when all the machines will learn how to create and control themselves and powerful elites will offload the burden of governments to control us? Or we race ourselves to fulfill the last jobs on earth? Is this progress for humanity or enslavement and the end of our species? I am serious. This question is honest. Maybe my IQ is too low to unders…

The future John Connor surely needs that kind of knowledge to re-program the T-800. So does Neo if you expect the future to be not quite that violent.

Maybe this is the most rational answer. We are flawed creatures, vanity, self-importance, greed, power. Who will watch the "watchers"? The good intentions are behind wars, behind removing gain of function research. But in reality, there is always a chance of some "lab" to leak the "agent" of destruction.

Re: Deep Learning Foundations to Stable Diffusion

#119
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for your reply, though I'm not sure if I get your comment correctly. As in, I agree that marketing is super important but if I had an idea about a certain SaaS product that requires a certain ML model, I need to decide either to build it myself, or using somebody else's APIs. > We found that as our AI got worse, our product got better. Interesting. Could you elaborate on this too?

I guess my last sentence was confusing. What I meant was that we fell into the common trap that scientists want to do as fancy science as possible when they leave academia and enter the startup world. Because there's an issue of pride and desire for uniqueness. Whereas good business is not like art, where the mandate is to be as creative and unique as possible. The analogy from sports (which I don't watch) applicable…

I see. Much clearer! Thanks for the explanation.

Re: Deep Learning Foundations to Stable Diffusion

#120
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a bizarre comparison. Automating jobs does not have the same moral implications as slavery. That might be a valid argument for keeping slavery if it wasn’t entirely immoral . But I suspect AI isn’t like the discovery of slavery - it’s more like the discovery of electricity which put candlemakers out of business.

it's the same argument "if we don't have child labour/slavery/no workplace rights/lax environment law/planning restrictions/data privacy law/... then we'll be outcompeted by those that don't" unregulated AI fits in there perfectly these persisted for so long because of economics over ethics... maybe we'll make the correct decision this time (separately: if we do get to AGI then the slavery comparison suddenly gains a…

I agree the last/separate point has interesting/complex ethical implications.

But in terms of the first point - the ethics of forcing someone into labour are just not the same as automating peoples work.

Although some people do genuinely enjoy their work, most people work because they are forced to (pay for shelter, food and a good life for their kids). Not forced in the same way as slavery, but there is still mostly a requirement to work in modern society.

It’s one thing asking people to do tasks that are valuable to society, but asking people to do jobs they hate which could be easily automated in the future just for the sake of them “being in a job” seems pointless as a society level to me. Why would we have people doing things they hate that don’t really deliver ‘real’ value because we could automate it and have them do something else? (Preferably something they hate less).

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