What it feels like to work in AI right now • Hacker News Board

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

#661

Post by DangitBobby » Fri, Apr 07, 2023, 4:50 PM UTC

literalAardvark wrote: post #464

epigramx wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just a glorified google search. You'd save more time googling what you need and picking 2-3 results to read briefly. People have no clue human intelligence has very little to do with "statistical analysis of old data".

It can't replace search, actually. It doesn't know everything a decent search engine can find, and might not even remember the specific php command line parameter you're looking for. What it can do is reason some pretty tricky interdisciplinary answers. It's about as useful as having an intern that's finished literally every white collar college out there but has no idea what they're doing. It takes some prompting to…

I use 3.5 because 4 is too slow and hangs half the time.

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

#662

Post by jazzyjackson » Fri, Apr 07, 2023, 4:50 PM UTC

jiggawatts wrote: post #592

palata wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Let me repeat that: You can program GPT in English. ENGLISH! For problems that are fine being defined ambiguously. Try to program a database in English, let's see where it goes.

You laugh, but this is why SQL reads kinda-sorta like English. People have tried, and failed. Meanwhile, if you give Chat GPT your database schema and ask it to write a SQL query for a report, it can do that for you.

If anyone wants to see the output of GPT4 when asked to define the tables and some sample queries for a hackernews clone in sqlite:

https://poe.com/lookaroundyou/1512927999932134

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

#663

Post by jazzyjackson » Fri, Apr 07, 2023, 4:52 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #309

uxcolumbo wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can also have adverserial generation where models given different expertises and attitude can go back and forth criticizing each others work

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

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Post by olalonde » Fri, Apr 07, 2023, 5:09 PM UTC

cgearhart wrote: post #637

olalonde wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, I can't tell if you are genuinely wondering or just (virtue) signaling that you're not using it, but here's a sample of my own usage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35299121

Not virtue signaling, but I seem to be asking a different question than people are answering. I’m asking what the product opportunity is and people keep telling me examples of tasks that they use it for. In many cases the examples are one-off and the only product opportunity is the generative model interface itself. Looking broadly over the replies what I’m seeing is “there’s a thing that used to fail the cost/benefi…

> Not virtue signaling, but I seem to be asking a different question than people are answering. I’m asking what the product opportunity is and people keep telling me examples of tasks that they use it for.

Sorry, I misunderstood. "I am not using AI" has become a sort of badge of honor in certain communities so I was wondering if that's what it was.

> (2) there may be some niche product opportunities on top of the model platform, but the primary big winner here is the platform itself. (That’s not necessarily a new insight, but it seems especially true here.)

I agree with that conclusion. I think the chat interface is the killer product. I treat ChatGPT as an assistant/intern that is really good at some tasks but that can also sometimes make dumb mistakes. It has also replaced a lot of queries I would have previously done on Google or questions I might have asked somewhere (e.g. in a forum, Reddit, Discord, etc.).

Many startups build domain specific UIs on top of it using the API, but whether that will become a sustainable business model remains to be seen[0]. I am reminded of the many "vertical" search engines that were once trying to compete with Google.

[0] Saying this as someone who did something like that: https://eli5.gg

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

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Post by akiselev » Fri, Apr 07, 2023, 5:23 PM UTC

ParetoOptimal wrote: post #630

SanderNL wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same reason why you don't let Mr Musk do all the work. He can't. One LLM is limited, one obvious limitation is its context window. Using a swarm of LLMs that each do a little task can alleviate that. We do it too and it's called delegation. Edit: BTW, "swarm" is meaningless with LLMs. It can be the same instance, but prompted differently each time.

> The same reason why you don't let Mr Musk do all the work. He can't. Better to limit his incompetence to one position.

I beg to differ. Imagine him taking down Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and all the others in one fell swoop!

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

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Post by alexvoda » Fri, Apr 07, 2023, 5:35 PM UTC

pixl97 wrote: post #654

alexvoda wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Rather large parts of your brain are more generalized, but in particular places we have more specialized areas. Now, you looking at it would consider it all the same brain most likely, but if you're looking at it in systems thinking view, it's a small separate brain with a slightly different task than the rest of the brain. If 80% of the processors in a cluster are running 'general LLM' and 20% are running 'math LLM'…

I think I would consider them split when the different modules are interchangeable so there is de facto an interface.

In the case of the brain, while certain functional regions are highly specialized I would not consider them "a small separate brain". Functional regions are not sub-organs.

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

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Post by tomkarho » Fri, Apr 07, 2023, 5:39 PM UTC

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’m asking what people want the models to do every day, all the time.

Rule 34. When in doubt, always defer to rule 34.

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

#668

Post by jazzyjackson » Fri, Apr 07, 2023, 5:40 PM UTC

nerdponx wrote: post #632

alfor wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s mostly different because they crippled the public version for now: no internet access, everything is done in one pass. In our mind we get an idea, we inspect it, we try different variations, we simulate how it will be perceive(consciousness). In this way we iterate before putting the information out. This is not difficult and is getting added on to it externally. Chat GPT is just to get us used to the id…

This is pure speculation, in a very implausible direction.

I would be interested to know which part you feel is implausible, to me it seems inevitable

You have a language model produce an outline with steps and then recursively set agents to consume and iterate on a task until another language model finds the results satisfies the specification.

This includes interactions with the real world (via instructions executed over an API) and using the success of those interactions for reinforcement learning on the model.

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

#669

Post by STM32F030R8 » Fri, Apr 07, 2023, 6:17 PM UTC

ModernMech wrote: post #636

sashank_1509 wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No idea why you had to tout out that you had a PhD when I was pointing out that you were not a user. Well news flash, I did my PhD in EECS with a focus on Perception and Autonomous Vehicle Applications from a top 4 CS school and so did most people in Autopilot (Most are from Stanford, Berkeley or CMU in Tesla AP), in fact I worked with people who were a part of the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge who are in Autopilot now…

I've calmed down after your "heads will roll" comment so I promise to be civil. To continue. Yes, you should put back your original comment to reduce confusion. I'm fine reading a long comment. > No idea why you had to tout out that you had a PhD when I was pointing out that you were not a user. You said: And then we have bystanders like you with no understanding of what’s actually going on, who want to ban everybody…

Yea people are going to hate Tesla because of musk or bc they’re always in the news. I’m not saying that there isn’t valid criticism it just seems that they’re held to a totally different standard than other companies. People really enjoy taking a moral stance against them like you’re doing but it really seems like an overreaction.

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

#670

Post by alexvoda » Fri, Apr 07, 2023, 6:18 PM UTC

tharne wrote: post #624

brookst wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time you go to the store and find that the store is still in business and there is food on the shelf, it is because someone went to business school and knows how to optimize demand estimation, pricing, and logistics. Yes, some MBAs fuck things up. Just like some CS grads fuck things up. But advocating against the study of business is just as naive as advocating against the study of computer science just because…

> advocating against the study of business is just as naive as advocating against the study of computer science just because there are some bad CS grads. Criticizing garbage MBA programs is not criticizing the study of business. Business schools don't study business. They're a place where people make a lot of money selling theories about business that are useless at best and it many places, quite harmful. Learning ab…

That is a great analogy.

I would say that just as every person is unique so is every company unique. And just as there is plenty of pseudoscience plaguing psychology so are MBAs full of pseudoscience. Two fields that are far too obsessed with generalising their advice. Which is not to say that there aren't any useful ideas in these fields. But the vitriolic reaction above is warranted.