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What we know about LLMs

willthompson.name

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Re: What we know about LLMs

#71

Post by llm_nerd »

"Crypto VCs & ”builders” making a hard left into AI"

This is a humorous intro graphic caption, but this sentiment appears on here constantly and it's self-destructive. This response might seem a bit over the top to a funny graphic, but I am replying to the general "ha ha AI like crypto amirite?" sentiment that is incredibly boring and worn out.

When confronted with challenging new technology that we don't understand, some knee-jerk to acting dismissive. As if that has any hope at all of changing outcomes.

It's especially weird when people who are clearly on the "I must desperately learn this as quickly as I can and try to present myself as some sort of expert" still incant the rhetoric -- "joking on the square" as it were -- as if they need to defend their prior dismissals. Constantly on here there is yet another trivial "intro to tokenization" blog entry that brays some tired crypto comparison.

Stop it.

The Venn diagram of people at the forefront of ML/LLM, and its advocates, is almost entirely separate from the web/crypto sphere. There is astonishingly little overlap. Crypto was hyped because some people truly saw a purpose, coupled with masses of scammers and getrichquick sorts. AI/LLM/ML is hyped because it is revolutionary and has already yielded infinitely more practical impact than crypto ever did.

Re: What we know about LLMs

#72

Post by Mertax »

killernap wrote: post #13

ChatGPT was announced November, 2022 - 8 months ago. Time flies. Question for HN: Where are we in the hype cycle on this? We can run shitty clones slowly on Raspberry Pi's and your phone. The educational implementations demonstrate the basics in under a thousand lines of brisk C. Great. At some point you have to wonder... well, so what? Not one killer app has emerged. I for one am eager to be all hip and open minded…

I wonder if language translation will be one of the "killer apps".

Especially if it can be done real-time and according to the context/level of the audience/listener. Even within the same language, translation from a more technical/expert level to a simplified summary helps education/communication/knowledge transfer significantly.

Re: What we know about LLMs

#73

Post by Maxamillion96 »

killernap wrote: post #13

ChatGPT was announced November, 2022 - 8 months ago. Time flies. Question for HN: Where are we in the hype cycle on this? We can run shitty clones slowly on Raspberry Pi's and your phone. The educational implementations demonstrate the basics in under a thousand lines of brisk C. Great. At some point you have to wonder... well, so what? Not one killer app has emerged. I for one am eager to be all hip and open minded…

To be extremely cynical, all of this hype seems to be the mid-life crisis of gen-xers who grew up on the jetsons trying to bring the future they saw on tv as children to life, withour regard to the economic or technical feasibility.

(See flying cars and vertical farms as well.)

Re: What we know about LLMs

#74

Post by tmpz22 »

famouswaffles wrote: post #61
tmpz22 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t the summarization of text like legal documents where the notion of hallucinations come in as a huge blocker? Is the industry making progress on fixing such hallucinations? Or for that matter the privacy implications of sharing such documents with entities like OpenAI that don’t respect IP? Until hallucinations and IP/PII are fixed I don’t want this technology anywhere near my legal or personal documents.

Tasks like summarization and translation get extremely low hallucinations. The more a model "doesn't know" and "has to guess", the more it hallucinates. This isn't much of a problem with what i like to call "morphing" tasks. >Until hallucinations and IP/PII are fixed I don’t want this technology anywhere near my legal or personal documents. Good luck with that https://twitter.com/ai__pub/status/1644735555752853504

> Good luck with that. https://twitter.com/ai__pub/status/1644735555752853504

Is it fair to say these deals claimed to have been closed by the worlds largest law firms using OpenAI backed tooling double check all outputs at their own expense? Could this be a marketing stunt versus a real world usage that actually saved the firm money or time?

Re: What we know about LLMs

#75

Post by killthebuddha »

killernap wrote: post #13

ChatGPT was announced November, 2022 - 8 months ago. Time flies. Question for HN: Where are we in the hype cycle on this? We can run shitty clones slowly on Raspberry Pi's and your phone. The educational implementations demonstrate the basics in under a thousand lines of brisk C. Great. At some point you have to wonder... well, so what? Not one killer app has emerged. I for one am eager to be all hip and open minded…

I don't want to make any real assertions but my intuitive reaction to this comment is _this person has no clue what they are talking about_. I would rather turn of syntax highlighting than turn off Copilot and I'd rather disable Google search rather than ChatGPT. And frankly, it's not even close, I use these tools "all the time for everything".

Re: What we know about LLMs

#76

Post by rm445 »

killernap wrote: post #13

ChatGPT was announced November, 2022 - 8 months ago. Time flies. Question for HN: Where are we in the hype cycle on this? We can run shitty clones slowly on Raspberry Pi's and your phone. The educational implementations demonstrate the basics in under a thousand lines of brisk C. Great. At some point you have to wonder... well, so what? Not one killer app has emerged. I for one am eager to be all hip and open minded…

We're still on the exponential rise of the hype cycle. If capabilities appear to plateau - no GPT5/6 that are even more amazing, then the hype will not merely plateau but plummet. For now, anything seems possible.

As for a killer app, I'm another person for whom ChatGPT is it. I use GPT-4 something like Google, Wikipedia and Stack Overflow in one, but being very aware of the limitations. It feels a bit like circa 2000 when being good at googling things felt like a superpower. It doesn't do everything for you but can make you drastically more effective.

There's three levels of what's going on with AI at the moment, each with their own momentum and hype cycle: (1) the current generation of chat bots and image generators, which some of us would be using for the rest of our lives even with only minor refinements; (2) the prospect that new tools built on top of this and subsequent generations could remake the internet and how we interact with our gadgets; and (3) the prospect that the systems will keep getting smarter and smarter.

Re: What we know about LLMs

#77

Post by mjr00 »

tmpz22 wrote: post #58
mjr00 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not one killer app has emerged. I for one am eager to be all hip and open minded and pretend like I use LLMs all the time for everything and they are "the future" but novelty aside it seems like so far we have a demented clippy and some sophomoric arguments about alignment and wrong think. In my mind I divide LLM usage into two categories, creation and ingestion. Creation is largely a parlor trick that blew the min…

Isn’t the summarization of text like legal documents where the notion of hallucinations come in as a huge blocker? Is the industry making progress on fixing such hallucinations? Or for that matter the privacy implications of sharing such documents with entities like OpenAI that don’t respect IP? Until hallucinations and IP/PII are fixed I don’t want this technology anywhere near my legal or personal documents.

I've been using the ChatGPT API to do summarization of text from free-form documents. Not in the legal domain though, so no real regulatory risks. It works very well. I didn't see any hallucinations when spot checking, though of course I can't rule it out. But even if it only gets things 98% correct, that accuracy is good enough for my use case, and being able to programmatically feed these documents in instead of hiring multiple contractors to read through and parse out the data is a massive, massive time and money saver.

> Or for that matter the privacy implications of sharing such documents with entities like OpenAI that don’t respect IP?

Their permissions/organization model is a mess, but ChatGPT does offer the ability to opt out of data collection, at least for corporate accounts.

Re: What we know about LLMs

#78

Post by tmaly »

>Rather than explicitly labeling data, it might be easier for a human to read two or more LLM outputs and encode their preferences through comparison.

This reminded me a lot of what economist Murray Rothbard talked about on preferences in his treatise Man, Economy, and State.

There is likely to be other insights hidden in these philosophical works on human choices.

Re: What we know about LLMs

#79

Post by uhtred »

llm_nerd wrote: post #71

"Crypto VCs & ”builders” making a hard left into AI" This is a humorous intro graphic caption, but this sentiment appears on here constantly and it's self-destructive. This response might seem a bit over the top to a funny graphic, but I am replying to the general "ha ha AI like crypto amirite?" sentiment that is incredibly boring and worn out. When confronted with challenging new technology that we don't understand,…

I think when the dust settles we are just going to have some chat bots and a few rich grifters.

Re: What we know about LLMs

#80

Post by NhanH »

llm_nerd wrote: post #71

"Crypto VCs & ”builders” making a hard left into AI" This is a humorous intro graphic caption, but this sentiment appears on here constantly and it's self-destructive. This response might seem a bit over the top to a funny graphic, but I am replying to the general "ha ha AI like crypto amirite?" sentiment that is incredibly boring and worn out. When confronted with challenging new technology that we don't understand,…

> The Venn diagram of people at the forefront of ML/LLM, and its advocates, is almost entirely separate from the web/crypto sphere. There is astonishingly little overlap

That statement seems false. Especially since this was a headline I saw in half a dozen online news in my country yesterday.

> OpenAI's Sam Altman launches Worldcoin crypto project[0]

If anything, even without taking into account the greed stuff, people who are drawn to fun tech is likely to be drawn to both LLM and cryptocurrency stuffs.

[0]https://www.reuters.com/technology/openais-sam-altman-launch...

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