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Many in the AI field think the bigger-is-better approach is running out of road

economist.com

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Re: Many in the AI field think the bigger-is-better approach is running out of road

#141

Post by exitb »

usrbinbash wrote: post #87
Animats wrote: post #11

We need a way to make tight little specialist models that don't hallucinate and reliably report when they don't know. Trying to cram all of the web into a LLM is a dead end.

> and reliably report when they don't know. Then we need a new system, because LMs, no matter if they are large or not, cannot do that, for a very simple reason: A LM doesn't understand "truthfulness". It has no concept of a sequence being true or not, only of a sequence being probable. And that probability cannot work as a standin for truthfulness, because the LM doesn't produce improbable sequences to begin with...…

If this is true, why is GPT-4 better in that regard than GPT-3.5? Or why do questions about Python yield much less hallucinations than questions about Rust, or other less popular tech?

Re: Many in the AI field think the bigger-is-better approach is running out of road

#142

Post by ignoramous »

thereare5lights wrote: post #114
bemmu wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not convinced the language part of my brain isn’t just a complex probability machine, just with different trade-offs.

There's no evidence for nondeterminism in the human brain

A recent discussion: People can be convinced they committed a crime that never happened https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36367147

Re: Many in the AI field think the bigger-is-better approach is running out of road

#143

Post by ignoramous »

goldenshale wrote: post #120

As if anyone is good at predicting the future. Please can we stop acting like expertise equates to fortune telling capabilities?! Nobody has any clue what a 1000x sized GPT model could do, and anybody who makes strong claims is a charlatan. In this age of paranoid AI risk cultists we need to cultivate humility and calm, a willingness to follow data rather than beliefs and predictions.

> As if anyone is good at predicting the future.

Whoever predicts the right direction, (and when the time is right) puts money where their mouth is, stands a shot at unseating... the alt man.

  I think the way to use these big ideas is not to try to identify a precise point in the future and then ask yourself how to get from here to there, like the popular image of a visionary. You'll be better off if you operate like Columbus and just head in a general westerly direction. Don't try to construct the future like a building, because your current blueprint is almost certainly mistaken. Start with something you know works, and when you expand, expand westward.
  
  The popular image of the visionary is someone with a clear view of the future, but empirically it may be better to have a blurry one.
paulgraham.com/ambitious.html

Re: Many in the AI field think the bigger-is-better approach is running out of road

#144

Post by ilaksh »

ftxbro wrote: post #94
croes wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better result from less data? I doubt that.

I mean 'better result from less data' is at least a little bit possible. For example you can just clean out obviously bad data from the trillions of tokens data sets. It's things like the subreddit where they are counting to a million or just like long lists of hash values in random cryptocurrency logs. I agree that in the bigger picture this doesn't matter, but it's technically true that cleaning the data in some wa…

I think TinyStories is a promising direction. I just wish we had an alternative to GPT-4 because supposedly you can't use it to train other models.

Or maybe clarification of people publicly saying they are going to ignore that restriction.

Re: Many in the AI field think the bigger-is-better approach is running out of road

#145

Post by jlawson »

usrbinbash wrote: post #88
nomel wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that don't hallucinate “Hallucination” is part of thought. Solving a new problem requires hallucinating new, non existing, possible outcomes and solutions, to find one that will work. It seems that eliminating the ability to interpolate and extrapolate (hallucinations) would make intelligence impossible. It would eliminate creativity, tying together new concepts, creation, etc. Is the goal AI, or a nice database fr…

The problem is, what we call "hallucinating" in LMs isn't a way of creative thinking and coming up with novel solutions. It also has nothing to do with "interpolate and extrapolate". It's simply when the predicted probable sequence isn't grounded in reality. When I ask an LLM to summarize the great water wars of 1999, and how the Trade Union was ultimately defeated by the Antarctic Coalitions hovercraft-fleet under V…

I passed your query to GPT4 and this is what it said, see below. It seems like it can recognize bollocks, at least sometimes.

"I'm sorry, but it appears there's a misunderstanding. As of my knowledge cutoff in September 2021, there were no events known as the "Great Water Wars of 1999" involving a Trade Union being defeated by an Antarctic Coalition's hovercraft fleet under Vice Admiral Zagalow. This might be part of a work of fiction, alternative history, or a future event beyond my last training cut-off.

My training includes real-world historical events and existing geopolitical structures, and as of 2021, Antarctica was governed by the Antarctic Treaty System, which prevents any military activity, mineral mining, nuclear testing, and nuclear waste disposal. It also supports scientific research and protects the continent's ecozone.

Please provide more context if this information is from a book, a movie, or a game, or if it refers to something else that I may assist better with."

Re: Many in the AI field think the bigger-is-better approach is running out of road

#146

Post by phreeza »

Legend2440 wrote: post #122
anikan_vader wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is plenty of evidence for non-determinism in matter, which the brain is notably made out of.

Not necessarily. Everything is deterministic above the quantum level, and it's possible that quantum non-determinism is the result of deterministic processes we can't see. Lots of deterministic processes (like PRNGs) look random from the outside - that's what chaos theory is about. I think it's likely that everything in the universe is deterministic.

The problem is that any hidden variable resolving quantum indeterminacy would have to be non -local, i.e. able to propagate itself faster than light, which would also violate our understanding of the world quite a bit.

Re: Many in the AI field think the bigger-is-better approach is running out of road

#147

Post by ilaksh »

goldenshale wrote: post #120

As if anyone is good at predicting the future. Please can we stop acting like expertise equates to fortune telling capabilities?! Nobody has any clue what a 1000x sized GPT model could do, and anybody who makes strong claims is a charlatan. In this age of paranoid AI risk cultists we need to cultivate humility and calm, a willingness to follow data rather than beliefs and predictions.

Warning people about potential extreme risks from advanced AI does not make you a cultist. It makes you a realist.

I love GPT and my whole life and plans are based on AI tools like it. But that doesn't mean that if you make it say 50% smarter and 50 times faster that it can't cause problems for people. Because all it takes is systems with superior reasoning capability to be given an overly broad goal.

In less than five years, these models may be thinking dozens of times faster than any human. Human input or activities will appear to be mostly frozen to them. The only way to keep up will be deploying your own models.

So to effectively lose control you don't need the models to "wake up" and become living simulations of people or anything. You just need them to get somewhat smarter and much faster.

We have to expect them to get much, much faster. The models, software, and hardware for this specific application all have room for improvement. And there will be new paradigms/approaches that are even more efficient for this application.

For hyperspeed AI to not come about would be a total break from computing history.

Re: Many in the AI field think the bigger-is-better approach is running out of road

#148

Post by llaolleh »

phreeza wrote: post #146
Legend2440 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. Everything is deterministic above the quantum level, and it's possible that quantum non-determinism is the result of deterministic processes we can't see. Lots of deterministic processes (like PRNGs) look random from the outside - that's what chaos theory is about. I think it's likely that everything in the universe is deterministic.

The problem is that any hidden variable resolving quantum indeterminacy would have to be non -local, i.e. able to propagate itself faster than light, which would also violate our understanding of the world quite a bit.

It won't be the first time our understanding is flipped upside down if such a framework of thought arises.

Re: Many in the AI field think the bigger-is-better approach is running out of road

#149

Post by lukeschlather »

Solvency wrote: post #139
koochi10 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with this slightly, modern computer chips follow a general purpose architecture not special purpose ones. The reason for this is building a computer chip is expensive and difficult to do. Similarly building any useful language model requires tons of compute power, and very smart ML researchers. Most of the smaller open source one's are just trained on GPT output. By "cramming all of the web" on a model wha…

Since when did the world decide to shed the grammatically correct "computing power" for this weird tech bro "compute power" phrase?

Definitions are a little fuzzy but "compute" is often used to distinguish between "compute," as in CPU, memory, and disk. And GPU is a very specialized kind of compute power. There's really no "grammatically correct" here these are different senses of the word. "Computing power" doesn't exactly have the same sense of specifically referring to a CPU or GPU as "compute power."

Re: Many in the AI field think the bigger-is-better approach is running out of road

#150

Post by Legend2440 »

phreeza wrote: post #146
Legend2440 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. Everything is deterministic above the quantum level, and it's possible that quantum non-determinism is the result of deterministic processes we can't see. Lots of deterministic processes (like PRNGs) look random from the outside - that's what chaos theory is about. I think it's likely that everything in the universe is deterministic.

The problem is that any hidden variable resolving quantum indeterminacy would have to be non -local, i.e. able to propagate itself faster than light, which would also violate our understanding of the world quite a bit.

Locality may also be an abstraction.

I find it very intriguing that a "speed of light" emerges automatically in Conway's Game of Life. It's not built into the system, but shows up from the convolutional update rule.

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