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My small, no name company has lost its mind with AI

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Re: My small, no name company has lost its mind with AI

#81

Post by janalsncm »

Volundr wrote: post #78
janalsncm wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn’t though. Like I said, if the model gets worse OpenAI can simply not release a new version. You also have to consider the money angle. As using ChatGPT and other chatbots becomes more popular, people will stop producing garbage internet articles because they will be less popular and therefore less profitable. Bloggers who enjoy writing will continue to do so because it was never about the money, they just enjo…

> Like I said, if the model gets worse OpenAI can simply not release a new version. So now it's got great information about the Model T Ford but knows nothing about our new mars colony? I don't think "just don't update the model" is a likely option.

You don’t update models to add new information. That’s extremely inefficient and susceptible to catastrophic forgetting. If you want the model to have new information you update an offline knowledge base. So yes you can simply not update the model.

Re: My small, no name company has lost its mind with AI

#82

Post by tnecniv »

taylorfinley wrote: post #35

This post reads like a neoluddite AI-skeptic trashing someone for trying new things. Every CEO should be trying to automate human tasks with AI right now--not to fire all the humans, but to increase their efficiency. Good on your CEO for trying. Sounds like they've largely failed to execute, which is a valid thing to criticize, but at least they're trying. The CEO of my company has also been trying, and we've done so…

It’s definitely not parlor tricks but I am skeptical that it’s going to be making skilled professionals obsolete any time soon. For many jobs, even a 10% error rate is too high. I think it certainly makes sense as a way to amplify what your employees are capable of doing on any given day by reducing busy work they hated doing in the first place, but improving the performance of these models to get that 10% error rate down to a 1% error rate (and having an understanding of what kinds of tasks it can achieve those results on) will be a lot harder.

Maybe I’m wrong, but AI has a huge history of things we thought were easy turning out to be very difficult. Self-driving cars weren’t expected to be nearly as challenging as they turned out to be. In the original AI summit, all the big thinkers of that era thought that physical tasks like manipulation would be easy and logical reasoning would be hard. It turned out that it was the other way around.

Re: My small, no name company has lost its mind with AI

#83

Post by mrguyorama »

throw9away6 wrote: post #79
threeseed wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My partner runs a B2B ecommerce company with revenue ~$5m with lots of different products coming from a range of suppliers all over Asia. And the jobs were the sort of generalist types you see in most small businesses and startups. Examples of tasks mostly involving writing e.g. emails to suppliers and customers, marketing copy for products/campaigns, website content. But also coming with potential new products and h…

Who would reply to a message generated by a chat bot. That would set off all my fraud alarms

And yet CEOs routinely click on the most basic of phishing emails. Maybe they don't teach media literacy in business school.

Re: My small, no name company has lost its mind with AI

#84

Post by mrguyorama »

friend_and_foe wrote: post #61
jnsaff2 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Step 1. Humans write copy for humans to buy their garbage, humans counter by tuning out and switching channels Step 2. Humans write SEO copy for machines to rank them higher. Step 3. LLM writes copy for machines to rank them higher. Step 4. Human uses LLM to try to distill the LLM generated SEO spam for any remaining signal. Also to your point: > SEO listicle garbage filling the internet. the feeling that the LLM is…

You're missing the point. If we want to know something, we won't even have to google it; we will just ask an LLM . There will be no market for websites full of it because we can just directly ask it to answer our questions. The only "if" to all this is if we will destroy the LLMs by feeding them their own diarrhea. I expect a sort of natural selection here to play out, especially in the open source space. Ones that a…

But there's still no way to get an LLM to only output "fact", because that's not a property of language.

Re: My small, no name company has lost its mind with AI

#85

Post by mrguyorama »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #25

I don’t know what to make of stuff like this. On the one hand, AI in its present form is a great learning tool, and little else. So you’d call the CEO a fool. On the other hand, you have the leading AI firm publicly devoting 1/5th of its resources on controlling AI and declaring that we will likely have Superintelligence within this decade. If the latter is right, this CEO might be a genius who was early on a trend,…

>If the latter is right, this CEO might be a genius who was early on a trend, instead of a kook.

Lottery and slot machine winners aren't smart, they're lucky.

Re: My small, no name company has lost its mind with AI

#86

Post by Volundr »

janalsncm wrote: post #81
Volundr wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Like I said, if the model gets worse OpenAI can simply not release a new version. So now it's got great information about the Model T Ford but knows nothing about our new mars colony? I don't think "just don't update the model" is a likely option.

You don’t update models to add new information. That’s extremely inefficient and susceptible to catastrophic forgetting. If you want the model to have new information you update an offline knowledge base. So yes you can simply not update the model.

Huh? You won't update the model you'll just give it new information? The exact concern is that the new information will be garbage aimed at pushing the model to produce certain output. Much like SEO spammers do to manipulate Google search results.

"Just don't update the model, only feed it new information" is exactly how to get to the outcome of concern in this thread.

Re: My small, no name company has lost its mind with AI

#87

Post by jmye »

friend_and_foe wrote: post #61
jnsaff2 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Step 1. Humans write copy for humans to buy their garbage, humans counter by tuning out and switching channels Step 2. Humans write SEO copy for machines to rank them higher. Step 3. LLM writes copy for machines to rank them higher. Step 4. Human uses LLM to try to distill the LLM generated SEO spam for any remaining signal. Also to your point: > SEO listicle garbage filling the internet. the feeling that the LLM is…

You're missing the point. If we want to know something, we won't even have to google it; we will just ask an LLM . There will be no market for websites full of it because we can just directly ask it to answer our questions. The only "if" to all this is if we will destroy the LLMs by feeding them their own diarrhea. I expect a sort of natural selection here to play out, especially in the open source space. Ones that a…

> Ones that are trained on LLM generated blogspam will probably, I expect, get outperformed by ones that are trained on genuine information, or at the very least ones made using new techniques that adequately filter noise.

Yes, humans are notorious for only seeking out high quality, accurate data, especially when it conflicts with our priors.

To say nothing of our ability to assess the accuracy or truthiness of information in the first place (look at how many people take, on faith, that Chat GPT isn’t wrong as often as it is right).

Re: My small, no name company has lost its mind with AI

#88

Post by jmye »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #28
riku_iki wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to me potential killer app is the search, you already now can find better answers fast in many verticals asking chatgpt than going through the tons of seo spam at google.

Health and medical queries are a big one for me. The top results in Google are the same cookie cutter responses from the same 5-10 domains. There is no expertise there - just an article ghost written by a freelance writer with a random doctor’s name attached to it. With the right prompt, chatGPT gives me far better insight and can even point out academic papers to back its claims.

There are no health issues that anyone should ever be using Chat GPT for - the hallucinations are very real, and often severe. Not that you should be googling your symptoms either - there’s a reason we put medical folks through more than a few minutes of training.

LLMs are absolutely worthless for medical information.

Re: My small, no name company has lost its mind with AI

#89

Post by bombcar »

flangola7 wrote: post #20
Fatboyrunning wrote: post #3

The absence of real applications incorporating this stuff is damning. Where are the killer apps?

> Where are the killer apps? Even though it is just a bare kernel (LLM), GPT-4 is a better teacher than any I've ever had. Who can I ask at 3AM on a Saturday night to explain ancient Greek philosophy using dwarf fortress mechanics? And iterate with infinite patience and focus on any follow up questions?

You must reveal the results. Armok demands it.

Re: My small, no name company has lost its mind with AI

#90

Post by bombcar »

1123581321 wrote: post #52
lelanthran wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And before people make "buggy whip manufacturer" arguments, I've always wondered about that argument. Weren't buggy whip manufacturers making lots of other things at the same time? After all, a buggy whip is almost certainly used much longer by the new owner than a cars is, so I wouldn't expect a large amount of the economy to be comprised of buggy whip sales, because a) Not many people had their own buggy (down ne…

It was really was a disaster for whip companies, carriage companies and saddle makers, though, disruption didn’t proliferate as quickly then as it does today. You can read some of the history of buggy whip makers. They were specialized manufacturers with established brands built around quality, special materials and style. Some were able to convert to new products but not all. They did survive a couple decades past t…

The key was it took decades - it was a slow moving disaster for them, not a sudden overnight Wonka style shutting of the factories.
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