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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

#701

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your main concern with all of this?

People are perceiving (rightly or wrongly, I'm not debating that in this comment) that this software is powerful enough that it can replace people even in jobs that were always considered safe. If that perception is accurate, it's really hard to see how this can lead to anywhere that isn't much worse for most people. If that perception is not accurate, people will still be upset by what looks like an existential thre…

> it's really hard to see how this can lead to anywhere that isn't much worse for most people.

It's very easy to see that, actually. Consider the problem statement again: economy is becoming more productive overall because we now have robots that can do some things that previously required people. This means that we can generate more total wealth for the same effort as before. That this translates to people being worse off, somehow, is a problem with the distribution of that generated wealth, not the ability to produce it. Even a sensible implementation of UBI could fix the most immediate problem, and I think we're looking at much bigger shifts in our economic system within the next couple decades.

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

#702
post #635

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The interviewer and his questions is in some way more impressive than the answers, which is weird.

Yeah. He's fast and it's just question after question. I didn't realize that was something I wanted to see in interviews.

Right, that's totally it. I came away thinking the interviewer seemed way sharper than the interviewee which is pretty rare. The sheer throughput and speed of interesting questions was incredible. Too bad that many of the answers were not.

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

#703

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, the stock price hasn't really tanked, so it didn't really backfire that much and it allowed them to get a bit of feedback as they try to figure out how to maintain revenue. What if they put out this insanely great model and people just stopped using search? That would be a backfire most likely.

You mean open ai put out a model and people stopped using search? Or Google? What Open ai offers currently can't really compete with search - I understand the data it's being fed gets newer and newer, but it's not really real time like the search engines are. Indexing and presenting data is so different than NLM. Even if it is fed data that's new it's going to have to infer a lot because of a lack of history. It migh…

It can compete with search by integrating it as part of its internal workflow when answering the question, which is exactly what Bing and web browsing mode in ChatGPT already do.

And yeah, this means that it still needs the search engine. But it also means that ads are out of the picture for the user.

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

#704

Huge crypto vibes Every single person I know working in AI these days ... has been sparked by the ChatGPT moment.

I see what you mean; but as external observer to both, I see crypto as having failed to provide or prove any particularly productive use; and chatGPT, for all its flaws, has been useful to me daily for last 2 months - and not in some crazy make-money-in-suspicious-ways sense, but like learning french and python and figuring out new concepts and stuff. But that's sample n=1 I suppose, there are both people that believ…

So far, crypto provides exactly one genuinely useful ability: transferring money outside of regulatory frameworks. If, say, you need to buy some things that aren't legal in your country on the black market, or your family lives in a country that's under sanctions and they need money quick, that might be very productive use of it.

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

#705

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> The advantage of using English (natural language that is), the humans around you tend to speak it. This is true, but of limited utility. English is so bad at this sort of thing that even native-speaking humans are constantly misunderstanding each other. Especially when it comes to describing things and giving instructions. That's why we have more formal languages (even ignoring programming languages) for when we ne…

That's the other nice thing about ChatGPT - if you say it something and it misunderstands, you can correct it by saying, "no, actually, what I meant is ...". Which, again, is how people generally do that kind of thing outside of programming. The advantage is that you're still remaining on a much higher level of abstraction. As far as formal languages... GPT doesn't know Lojban well, presumably because of its very sma…

Every text interface will eventually include a half baked implementation of a programming language.

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

#706

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sounds like the 'dead internet' is just around the corner!

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

#707

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> Do you think OpenAI has discovered something they haven't been open about? They have not, which makes me curious about which company gp works for because the "F" and "G" in FAANG are publicly known to already have LLMs. Not sure about Amazon, but I'm guessing they do too. As an outsider, the amazing thing about ML/AI research is that you get a revolutionary discovery of a technique or refinement that changes everyt…

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?

> What will anyone else including Google have?

Google has been collecting user interactions since 2007 via GOOG-411, which was a precursor to the Google Assistant - I suspect Google has billions of user interactions on hand through the latter. Facebook has posts and comment, Amazon has products pages, reviews and product Q&As and all of them have billions of dollars to draw upon if they choose to buy high-quality data, or spin-up / increase teams that create and/or categorize training data.

They also have deep roster of AI researchers[1] to potentially obsolete LLMs or make fine-tuning work without access to of ChatGPT records.

1. I suspect Google alone has more AI researchers that OpenAI has employees

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

#708

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s too much insanity over building new tech these days, and I find a lot of hate directed on Autopilot, to stem from hate directed on Elon. Let’s go over the basics for Autopilot: 1. It costs thousands of dollars a year + 15k one time and it’s very easy to get banned from autopilot for life. They have a 3 strike rule + 1000 miles driven on your Tesla with a good safety before you’re allowed to access autopilot 2…

> Let’s go over the basics for Autopilot: Go on Pornhub right now (if you're not at work) and search for sex in tesla. You'll find people driving Teslas on public roads while having sex in the driver's seat. The guy touches the steering wheel every so often to keep the car autopilot activated. The videos have been posted over a span of years. Another one was literally posted yesterday . Combined they have 10s of mill…

> sashank_1509: I find a lot of hate directed on Autopilot, to stem from hate directed on Elon

> ModernMech: disgusted at how Tesla in particular and Elon Musk especially are responsible

Nailed it. It seems like ModernMech didn't even read the post he's replying to.

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

#709

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

So, it seems the trajectory is one of increasing generality and capability of models and increasing reliance on them.

If it's at all possible to improve our technology then we will. If we improve it it increases in utility. If it increases in utility we use it more.

What other thesis is there?

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

#710

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are perceiving (rightly or wrongly, I'm not debating that in this comment) that this software is powerful enough that it can replace people even in jobs that were always considered safe. If that perception is accurate, it's really hard to see how this can lead to anywhere that isn't much worse for most people. If that perception is not accurate, people will still be upset by what looks like an existential thre…

> it's really hard to see how this can lead to anywhere that isn't much worse for most people. It's very easy to see that, actually. Consider the problem statement again: economy is becoming more productive overall because we now have robots that can do some things that previously required people. This means that we can generate more total wealth for the same effort as before. That this translates to people being wor…

> That this translates to people being worse off, somehow, is a problem with the distribution of that generated wealth, not the ability to produce it.

Exactly so.

> Even a sensible implementation of UBI could fix the most immediate problem

Which is simply not in the cards. The people who have the wealth are absolutely not going to give it away, because wealth equals power and they want power.

So what is more likely to happen is that the very wealthy will become fewer in number, and much wealthier, and everyone else will become poorer (in absolute, not relative terms) due to the reduction in the amount of jobs available that pay a living wage.

> I think we're looking at much bigger shifts in our economic system within the next couple decades.

Perhaps so -- but you can't ignore the serious harm between now and then.

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