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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

#381

Post by petesergeant »

petesergeant wrote: post #373
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 use ChatGPT at least 10 times a day, as a software developer, and I agree with all your assessments about the use-cases you mention. Here are my ten most recent prompts: * Asking about how back-propagation works with multiple output nodes * Examples of successful ICOs * A deep dive into what it means to calculate the gradient of a function, with me asking lots of clarifying questions * A deep dive into how electric…

Also I've found it very useful for identifying books, TV shows, films, games, etc that I remember some details of (eg, was released around 1994, was about web design) but not all the details of

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

#382

Post by Eisenstein »

SanderNL wrote: post #333
jrumbut wrote: post #248

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…

We call that “companies”. We just need to apply what we learned in business school to a different set of workers, slightly deficient workers.

> We just need to apply what we learned in business school

Please don't. You've already ruined enough industries. Let the MBAs do finance and Wall Street and leave them out of the chain of command in organizations that make things.

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

#383

Post by [deleted] »

teaearlgraycold wrote: post #372
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…

For me it’s a perfect replacement for Stack Overflow. Except every solution is tailored to my exact code and situation. I’ve even gotten it to walk me through things like installing WSL 2 without using the Microsoft Store after I nuked all Appx packages. Maybe my favorite was pasting in pages of documentation describing all of the error codes for a library (the docs are the only source of truth) and getting it to out…

[deleted]

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

#384

Post by iLoveOncall »

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…

My girlfriend and I use it to turn a short bullshit paragraph of corporate lingo into a bigger one. It's great for that, but that's it.

GPT will only ever be a good writing support tool.

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

#385

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#386

Post by MattPalmer1086 »

maxilevi wrote: post #236
TheMode wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not believe that standard of living should be compared in a vacuum. Since I assume that this is what you are referring to, I am firmly convinced that happiness is relative. What this means is that improving the standard of living of the average person by 5% while improving it by 50% for a smaller population will hurt more than it helps.

Why would it hurt?

There is evidence that people do worse on average across a variety of metrics in more unequal societies.

Naturally this is disputed by those on the right and implicitly believed by those on the left.

See the book "The Spirit Level" and subsequent discussions around that for more info.

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

#387

Post by jack_pp »

riffraff wrote: post #298
jack_pp wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 infe…

> Again, no bugs, perfect code How do you know? Either you know enough Go to be able to tell, and thus you'd be able to write this yourself, or you don't and thus you can't really judge. I mean, it probably is right, but this "I don't know something, but I trust what the chatbot told me" is what worries me about the rise of the LLMs.

Because what the code does is simple enough, connects to a database, runs some queries and returns the results. I know it worked because I tested it and for that kind of code there aren't really edge cases. Even if I can't validate or catch syntax errors because I'm not yet experienced enough I can see the overall structure of the code and what it does and if it runs then there's no syntax errors.

It's like with riddles, someone asks you a riddle you think and you think and you draw a blank but if you are given the answer you can instantly validate it even if you didn't know the answer before hand, same with this.

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

#388

Post by csmpltn »

teaearlgraycold wrote: post #372
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…

For me it’s a perfect replacement for Stack Overflow. Except every solution is tailored to my exact code and situation. I’ve even gotten it to walk me through things like installing WSL 2 without using the Microsoft Store after I nuked all Appx packages. Maybe my favorite was pasting in pages of documentation describing all of the error codes for a library (the docs are the only source of truth) and getting it to out…

You don't need a full-blown LLM to find answers to questions on StackOverflow. You can do that today with any search engine.

> "I’ve even gotten it to walk me through things like installing WSL 2 without using the Microsoft Store after I nuked all Appx packages."

That's a search engine query you can issue already today, without involving any LLMs. It will cost a fraction of the cost of running this with an LLM, and it'll actually bring you to the "source" of the information (a thread on StackOverflow with the full context - including "wrong answers" which are just as useful) - unlike an LLM.

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

#389

Post by sj8822 »

maxilevi wrote: post #232
MVissers wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not what’s happening in the US. Too much concentration of wealth (not just tech), leading to almost 3rd world country health outcomes, education levels plummeting and unaffordability to live. Will backfire at one point if it continues.

I would argue that is caused by regulatory capture and government interference (e.g. zoning laws) and not technological progress

Hi Maxilevi, regarding some of your points:

"Tech might bring more inequality, but what is the problem with it if it substantially increases everyones standard of living?"

The problem is that ultimately, wealth inequality decreases the standard of living for most people. There are a finite amount of resources. This world we live in is finite. And these resources are being concentrated at the top, in the hands of a few, which leads to less and less of these finite resources being available for more and more people. Although economics is of course complex to some degree, don't lose sight of this very simple mechanism because it is a reality.

"I would argue that is caused by regulatory capture and government interference (e.g. zoning laws) and not technological progress"

If by regulatory capture, you are referring to regulatory corruption influenced by lobbying, then yes, of course that is increasing wealth inequality, and thus decreasing standard of living. Regarding government interference - it's the exact opposite of what you say - proper government interference is what we need. Under current conditions our economic system is not distributing wealth properly. That much is evident and easy to see. And there will be worse living conditions under more stark wealth inequality as opposed to a more even distribution of resources. As mentioned, this world we live in is finite. If these finite resources are syphoned to the hands of very few individuals, this leaves less of these finite resources for the rest of human beings. And as mentioned, tech has contributed to accelerating this, for the reasons mentioned in my above post. So, as mentioned, what we need is government interference. This means taxing heavily the areas that the finite resources I have spoken of are getting concentrated in and redistributing them more evenly.

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

#390

Post by Lio »

visarga wrote: post #209
HyperSane wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you could even program the LLM to try to subtly manipulate people into using the advertised product.

A LLM trying to trick and manipulate? That's how your multi-million dollar model quickly becomes worthless in the eyes of the public.

I could see this happening.

I’ve been infuriated with DuckDuckGo on occasion because it refused to exclude certain results.

In fact when you add an exclusion clause it simply boosts those results further instead of removing them.

I’ve been told this is because the underlying search providers refuse to exclude paying customer even when you explicitly don’t want to hear from them.

I could definitely see this happening in LLM answers too and I don’t expect it to be particularly subtle.

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