41–50 of 112 posts
My hypothesis is that a lot of high-status intellectuals are reflexively dismissing AI out of fear that it threatens their status, as AI poses to turn intellectual labor into a cheap commodity rather than the premium bespoke product they offer it as via their professorships, speaking fees and book sales. Most criticism of AI has all the hallmarks of coping mechanisms. They seem to shift quickly between declaring it a…
Everyone should read this Reddit comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/blender/comments/121lhfq/i_lost_eve... This is happening, and the reddit thread is just a single instance of a wide phenomenon. I wonder how one can square "snakeoil" theories against reality like this.
All snark aside it must be really tough to make a name for yourself by calling something snake oil only to have a flavor of it become massively successful...and then have to double down because you already had a book deal to fulfill.
My hypothesis is that a lot of high-status intellectuals are reflexively dismissing AI out of fear that it threatens their status, as AI poses to turn intellectual labor into a cheap commodity rather than the premium bespoke product they offer it as via their professorships, speaking fees and book sales. Most criticism of AI has all the hallmarks of coping mechanisms. They seem to shift quickly between declaring it a…
My favorite part with crap predicting doom is the sheer unawareness of the rate of change of the rate of change.
If you had asked me 18 months ago how long after GPT-3 until something existed with the capabilities of GPT-4, I'd probably have guessed about 5 years.
If you asked me 5 years ago how long until an AI could explain why a joke was funny, I'd have maybe guessed at least a decade or two, if it was even possible.
If you asked me 10 years ago if I'd see AI replacing artists or copywriters in my lifetime, I'd have guessed maybe when I was in a retirement home (I'm still a fair ways away from that).
No one thought what exists today was even possible within our lifetimes a decade back.
I'm reminded of the Louis C.K. routine about everything being amazing and no one is happy.
Unthinkable AI has already become so normalized that people are predicting its doom based on shortcomings that are less than two years old because AI doing fucking IMPOSSIBLE things (or so everyone thought) is only that old.
The rate is outrageous, and while I do think there's currently a significant setback with obsolete alignment approaches being carried forward to models that probably need new techniques, that's going to be a temporary step back in parallel to significant strides forward in the underlying technology from hardware to model design to improved knowledge in how to squeeze the most water from the rock.
I just hope when all these folks turn out to have been dead wrong that we don't collectively forget. Futurists should live and die by their record, but too many have goldfish memory and continue to listen to false futurists well after they've shown their own snake oil hand.
The key way I try to distinguish "Snake Oil" is: Is anyone actually using this routinely , and are the problems it solves self-evident to new non-zealot users after a demo? Take blockchain for example; people spent years and millions of dollars looking for additional usages for the technology beside coins/coin-contracts; and aside from the forementioned usages it didn't really gain routine adoption. That was why the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Based on current hardware trends, GPT-4 will run on your phone within 6-10 years they quantized model from 16 bits to 4 bits which was low hanging fruit, and looks like they can't quantize it anymore to 2 bits..
CPU/GPUs are general purpose, if enough workload demand exists specialized Transformer cores will be designed. Likewise, its not at all clear that current O(N^2) self-attention is the ideal setup for larger context lengths. All to say, I'd believe we have another 8-10x algorithmic improvement in inference costs over the next 10 years. In addition to whatever Moore's law brings.
Pixel 6+ phones have TPUs (in addition to CPUs and an iGPU/dGPU).
Tensor Processing Unit > Products > Google Tensor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensor_Processing_Unit
TensorFlow lite; tflite: https://www.tensorflow.org/lite
From https://github.com/hollance/neural-engine :
> The Apple Neural Engine (or ANE) is a type of NPU, which stands for Neural Processing Unit.
From https://github.com/basicmi/AI-Chip :
> A list of ICs and IPs for AI, Machine Learning and Deep Learning
It's not really about "ai hype", it's about funding. "In the last few months, there has been this increasing so-called rift between the AI ethics and AI safety communities. There is a lot of talk about how this is an academic rift that needs to be resolved, how these communities are basically aiming for the same purpose. I think the thing that annoys me most about the discourse around this is that people don’t recogn…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm routinely using LLMs in place of search engines. Would you rather type in a cocktail and instantly get a recipe? or do you want to open google, scroll past 50 ads, click through a bunch of blogspam that gives you the history of cocktails, the prohibition, the chemical formula for ethanol and their life story, followed by a recipe that was itself generated by a substandard AI model anyway edit: I'm prepared for th…
> or do you want to open google, scroll past 50 ads, click through a bunch of blogspam that gives you the history of cocktails, the prohibition, the chemical formula for ethanol and their life story I think in this aspect the difference between GPT vs Google not in level of tech, but because GPT took text from copyright owners and distributes it without their consent and without showing their ads, which is being chal…
They were wrong and now they have to pivot, from "AI isn't effective" to "it's bad that AI is so effective."
The key way I try to distinguish "Snake Oil" is: Is anyone actually using this routinely , and are the problems it solves self-evident to new non-zealot users after a demo? Take blockchain for example; people spent years and millions of dollars looking for additional usages for the technology beside coins/coin-contracts; and aside from the forementioned usages it didn't really gain routine adoption. That was why the…
NFTs as domain names is novel, interesting, and non-financial. https://ens.donains
In this instance, I don't see how this offers any advantage over the usual registrar-based DNS: at the end of the day I'm just using the ENS rootnode keyholders as my registrar, and I don't see how the blockchain is solving any problem that couldn't be more efficiently solved with a traditional database.