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OpenAI’s CEO says the age of giant AI models is already over

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Re: OpenAI’s CEO says the age of giant AI models is already over

#151
I strongly believe the next generation of models will be based upon spiking neural concepts wherein action potentials are lazily-evaluated throughout the network (i.e. event-driven). There are a few neuron models that can be modified (at some expense to fidelity) in order to tolerate arbitrary delays between simulation ticks. Using actual latency between neurons as a means of encoding information seems absolutely essential if we are trying to emulate biology in any meaningful way.

Spiking networks also lend themselves nicely to some elegant learning rules, such as STDP. Being able to perform unsupervised learning at the grain of each action potential is really important in my mind. This gives you all kinds of ridiculous capabilities, most notably being the ability to train the model while it's live in production (learning & use are effectively the same thing).

These networks also provide a sort of deterministic, event-over-time tracing that is absent in the models we see today. In my prototypes, the action potentials are serialized through a ring buffer, and then logged off to a database in order to perfectly replay any given session. This information can be used to bootstrap the model (offline training) by "rewinding" things very precisely and otherwise branching time to your advantage.

The #1 reason I've been thinking about this path is that low-latency, serialized, real-time signal processing is somewhat antagonistic to GPU acceleration. I fear there is an appreciable % of AI research predicated on some notion that you need at least 1 beefy GPU to start doing your work. Looking at fintech, we are able to discover some very interesting pieces of technology which can service streams of events at unbelievable rates and scales - and they only depend on a handful of CPU cores in order to achieve this.

Right now, I think A Time Domain Is All You Need. I was inspired to go outside of the box by this paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.06035. Part 11 got me thinking.

Re: OpenAI’s CEO says the age of giant AI models is already over

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is cost really that much of a burden? Intelligence is the single most expensive resource on the planet. Hundreds of individuals have to be born, nurtured, and educated before you might get an exceptional 135+ IQ individual. Every intelligent person is produced at a great societal cost. If you can reduce the cost of replicating a 135 IQ, or heck, even a 115 IQ person to a few thousand dollars, you're beating biology b…

Are intelligent people that valuable? There's lots of them at every university working for peanuts. They don't seem to be that valued by society, honestly.

If you ask any Fortune 500 CEO if he could magically take all the 135 IQ artists and academics and vagabonds, erase all their past traumas, put them through business or tech school, and put them to work in their company, they would all say 100% yes.

An equivalent AI won't have any agency and will be happy doing the boring work other 135 IQ humans won't.

Re: OpenAI’s CEO says the age of giant AI models is already over

#153

Once you've trained on the internet and most published books (and more...) what else is there to do? You can't scale up massively anymore.

I doubt they have trained on 0.1% of the tokens that are 'easily' available (that is, available with licencing deals that are affordable to OpenAI/MSFT).

They might have trained on a lot of the 'high quality' tokens, however.

Re: OpenAI’s CEO says the age of giant AI models is already over

#154
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI has gone from open-sourcing its work, to publishing papers only, to publishing papers that omit important information, to GPT-4 being straight-up closed. And Sam Altman doesn't exactly have a track record of being overly concerned about the truth of his statements.

I had a fun conversation (more like argument) with ChatGPT about the hypocrisy of OpenAI. It would explicitly contradict itself and then began starting every reply with “I can see why someone might think…” and then just regurgitating fluff about democratizing AI. I finally was able to have it define democratization of technology and then recognize the absurdity of using that label to describe a pivot to gating models…

Transcripts of other people's GPT chats are like photos of other people's kids.

Re: OpenAI’s CEO says the age of giant AI models is already over

#155
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finetuning cost are nowhere near representative of the cost to pre-train those models. Trying to replicate the quality of GPT-3 from scratch, using all the tricks and training optimizations in the books that are available now but weren't used during GPT-3 actual training, will still cost you north of $500K, and that's being extremly optimistic. GPT-4 level model would be at least 10x this using the same optimism (mea…

$5M to train GPT-4 is the best investment I've ever seen. I've seen startups waste more money for tremendously smaller impact.

As I stated in my comment, $5M is assuming you can do a much much better job than OpenAI at optimizing your training, only need to make a single training run, your employees salaries are $0, and you get a clean dataset for essentially free.

Real cost is 10-20x that.

That's still a good investment though. But the issue is you could very well sink $50M into this endeavour and end up with a model that actually is not really good and gets rendered useless by an open-source model that gets released 1 month later.

OpenAI truly has unique expertise in this field that is very, very hard to replicate.

Re: OpenAI’s CEO says the age of giant AI models is already over

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is cost really that much of a burden? Intelligence is the single most expensive resource on the planet. Hundreds of individuals have to be born, nurtured, and educated before you might get an exceptional 135+ IQ individual. Every intelligent person is produced at a great societal cost. If you can reduce the cost of replicating a 135 IQ, or heck, even a 115 IQ person to a few thousand dollars, you're beating biology b…

115 IQ isn’t all that high- that’s basically every Indian American or a healthy percentage of the Chinese population. Edit: I don’t understand the downvotes. I don’t mean this in any disparaging way, just that an AGI is probably going to be a lot higher than that.

115 IQ is perfectly fine for the majority of human endeavors.

Re: OpenAI’s CEO says the age of giant AI models is already over

#157

Once you've trained on the internet and most published books (and more...) what else is there to do? You can't scale up massively anymore.

Youtube. This is where Google have huge advantage having largest collection of user generated video

Yeah, but it's not like the videos are private. Surely Amazon has the real advantage, given they have a ton of high quality tokens in the form of their kindle library and can make it difficult for OpenAI to read them all.

Re: OpenAI’s CEO says the age of giant AI models is already over

#159

>"the company’s CEO, Sam Altman, says further progress will not come from making models bigger. “I think we're at the end of the era where it's going to be these, like, giant, giant models,” he told an audience at an event held at MIT late last week. “We'll make them better in other ways.” So to reiterate, he is not saying that the age of giant AI models is over. Current top-of-the-line AI models are giant and likely…

Is cost really that much of a burden? Intelligence is the single most expensive resource on the planet. Hundreds of individuals have to be born, nurtured, and educated before you might get an exceptional 135+ IQ individual. Every intelligent person is produced at a great societal cost. If you can reduce the cost of replicating a 135 IQ, or heck, even a 115 IQ person to a few thousand dollars, you're beating biology b…

The reason we put everyone through school is we believe that it’s in society’s best interest to educate everyone to the peak of their abilities. It’s good for many different reasons.

It would be much easier to identify gifted kids and only educate them, but I happen to agree that universal education is better.

Re: OpenAI’s CEO says the age of giant AI models is already over

#160

Eh. Altman has a financial incentive to lie and obfuscate about what it takes to train a model like GPT-4 and beyond, so his word is basically worthless.

Does he even have any background in machine learning? I always found it bizarre that he was chosen to be OpenAI's CEO...

He has background in CEO (smooth-talking charmer in the VC crowd). That's why he's CEO.
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