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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

#551

Post by alexvoda »

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 overlooking an important use case: SPAM.

Spam of all kinds and at automated-industry scale. Imagine blog-spam written in a variety of styles so you can no longer easily identify it as such. Imagine chum-boxes that no longer repeat themselves and are harder to identify as such. Imagine ads masquerading as content, as it already exists, but at scale.

And every time you slip up and click on one, it will learn a little more about you and create chum content better tailored to you.

Generative AI will facilitate a flood of algorithmic spam.

This kind of spam already exists, it just isn't scaled because it still takes time and resources to create and the people creating it are not the brightest, so for now it is easy to identify.

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

#552

Post by alexvoda »

YurgenJurgensen wrote: post #538
jiggawatts wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can program GPT in English. Let me repeat that: You can program GPT in English . ENGLISH! You're complaining about the first nuclear test bomb being impractical and uninteresting. How will this change the world? That huge monstrosity had to be affixed to the top of a test gantry and took years of effort by a veritable army of the best and brightest to make! No way it could change war, or geopolitics, or anything.…

The Ford Nucleon was a 1957 concept car that featured a compact nuclear reactor. Look at how well that prediction aged. It's apt that you mention the Trinity test, since 1950s inflated expectations of the applicability of nuclear everything are exactly where we are now. Perhaps I could interest you in some Radium Water? It's new and trendy and good for your health.

Wikipedia has a fascinating article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_quackery

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

#553

Post by ChatGTP »

nullsense wrote: post #468
csomar wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This suggests that LLM is the path to take us to AGI. There is no proof for that. That seems to be the current bet, but my thinking (and it is strictly mine) that we are still technologically under-powered to achieve such a leap. Maybe in 10 years, or in one year or in a hundred of years. However, for that leap (and strictly my opinion), we need significant infrastructure leaps. Something like processors are x100 fas…

Three observations here. Firstly it has been a really eye opening experience watching the innovation around Stable Diffusion and locally run LLMs and seeing that the unoptimized research code that needed such beefy hardware could actually be optimized to run on consumer hardware given sufficient motivation. Secondly it wasn't obvious that deep learning was going to work as well as it did if you simply threw enough co…

What actually is the trajectory we're on and what will we do once there?

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

#554

Post by brookst »

terpimost wrote: post #240
brookst wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google was built by brilliant people whose mission was to make any information available to anyone, instantly. Google is run by smart people whose mission is to maximize clicks on ads. If a user finds what they’re looking for quickly, that’s lost revenue. Google’s profit motives are not aligned with useful AI. The better AI is, the less people need to click through to lots of web pages and ads, the less revenue for G…

FAANG companies have distribution. They can sell anything. Give them a bit of time. They are not companies of a single product, they milk people better than governments.

80% of Google’s revenue is from Google Ads.

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4469984-how-does-google-mak...

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

#555

Post by literalAardvark »

glandium wrote: post #443
literalAardvark wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPT-4 is dramatically better with everything except speed. The minutia most people in this thread are complaining about is almost completely solved by GPT-4. For example I used it over like 30 minutes to conceptualize, solve, and write some code that draws a graphic for a simple physics problem (0-shot) that I could intuitively understand but had no (physics and math knowledge) tools to calculate properly and it was…

Specific examples don't generalize though. My experience with ChatGPT (GPT-3) is that it is vastly better at dealing with English than Japanese. That is still probably true with GPT-4, but that doesn't mean there hasn't been progress in GPT-4 with Japanese, which a sibling comment says is the case. But it's not because it does better at $task that you can extrapolate to a different one. People have reported GPT-3.5 b…

Yeah that's fair, it may be that Japanese ended up getting pruned out. I sincerely doubt that though, it seems very, very unlikely.

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

#556

Post by alexvoda »

lionkor wrote: post #484
kolinko wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As for googling, here are some examples of queries you can try and see how it works: - summary of all the carbon neutral concrete methods, especially ones that can be done in a small industrial workshop as a prototype - I have allergies in Thailand, mid-february. What may it be related to? - list all the companies from Japanese stock exchange that have high debt rate Those are top of my head, but really anything that…

For all of those, you HAVE to be okay with a complete garbage answer. Are you?

A machine generating confident bullshit will be the perfect companion for con-men to partially automate their workflow.

Humans are really gullible for the appearance of confidence. And humans are also very prone to wishful thinking.

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

#557

Post by alexvoda »

kolinko wrote: post #452
hutzlibu wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Who’s gonna trust a human doctor to diagnose their stuff if the human brain holds 9 things and the AI holds thousands?" The human brain can hold much more than 9 things and even though AI will be used in medicine broadly very soon, I really want the final diagnosis done by a human. Once true AGI arrieves, I might change my opinion, but that might take a while.

9 things is considered a standard for working memory (kind of like processor registers), for people with ADHD it's even less - 3-5. Try writing a number from one piece of paper to another. If it's more than 7-9 numbers, you won't do it in one shot, unless you spend extra time memorizing it.

The equivalent for computers would be L1 cache on the CPU which is tiny.

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

#558

Post by avidphantasm »

brookst wrote: post #180
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’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 guess if you don’t like writing, this is good for you. However, I like writing. Moreover, many people are lousy at it (not that I couldn’t improve). I’m not sure I want something trained on lots of mediocre writing doing editing for me.

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

#559

Post by mxmbrb »

riffraff wrote: post #302
unit_circle wrote: post #233

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…

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.

Sounds like you're a native english speaker? Translations to english often worked "well enough" with google. But as soon as you tried the other way arround, or from one non english language to another, the results where often fully incomprehensive. Btw. the same goes for t2s and s2t. It only got slightly usable in the last few years, therefore wasn't really adopted in many non english countries. As you can see, there is a huge market opening up. Then take voice synthesis into the picture. I think the simple amount of recent changes, including LLMs, will steamroll a totally new media envoirenment and with it substantial social and economical changes.

For me its less the capabilities of LLMs, but the speed and the inevitability of change. You can choose to ignore it, but you soon will be outdated then. Just like if someone would try to work an office job without using digital machines. Maybe you can still do it, but who would hire you?

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

#560

Post by alexvoda »

staunton wrote: post #471
loandbehold wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is "LLM swarm computation" different that single bigger LLM?

It's easy to distribute across many computers which communicate with high latency

LLMs are already running distributed on swarms of computers. A swarm of swarms is just a bigger swarm.

So again, what is the actual difference you are imagining?

Or is it just that distributed X is fashionable?

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