Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI isn’t good enough

skventures.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 374 posts

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#141

Post by lucubratory »

worrycue wrote: post #110
TeMPOraL wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And LLMs are the opposite of dictionary, actually. They suck at storing facts. They excel at extracting patterns from noise and learning them. It's not obvious to me that this isn't intelligence; on the contrary, I feel it's very much a core component of it.

> They excel at extracting patterns from noise and learning them. You can argue those are facts too.

Yes, I have noticed that a lot of extreme AI cynics have been arguing that any and every example of reasoning or thinking that an LLM displays is just some variant of memorisation.

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#142

Post by __loam »

nine_k wrote: post #137
ambrozk wrote: post #18

This entire piece is based on one massive, unsupported assertion, which is that LLM progress will cease. Or, as the author puts it, "we are at the tail end of the first wave of large language model-based AI... [it] ends somewhere in the next year or two with the kinds of limits people are running up against." I want to know only one thing, which is what gives him the confidence necessary to say that. If that one stat…

The current crop of LLMs is like Paleozoic megafauna, or like Egyptian Pyramids. It takes a few relatively simple approaches and stretches them wildly, using colossal computing resources. Live systems in nature seem to solve similar problems with way less compute available. There should be better architectures. Also, as somebody said, every exponential growth curve is a lower part of a sigmoid. LLMs will plateau at s…

I'm not convinced we're going to get much further than this, at least without a see change in how this stuff is done. We saw a pretty big amount of diminishing returns with GPT-4, which cost 2 orders of magnitude more money to train than 3.5. Is the performance more than 2 orders of magnitude better than 3.5?

How much compute is too much to be spending on this bullshit. 30% of humanity's total computing resources? 70%?

GPT was a big innovation in parallelizing the training process. I think the optimism that we're on the beginning of a sigmoid curve here ought to be questioned.

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#143

Post by worrycue »

lucubratory wrote: post #141
worrycue wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They excel at extracting patterns from noise and learning them. You can argue those are facts too.

Yes, I have noticed that a lot of extreme AI cynics have been arguing that any and every example of reasoning or thinking that an LLM displays is just some variant of memorisation.

The biggest evidence that LLMs can’t reason is hallucinations. If it could reason it would have rejected fictional generated output that make no sense.

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#144

Post by __loam »

auggierose wrote: post #135
RandomLensman wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they learn world models, those world models are incredible poor, i.e., there is no consistency of thought in those world models. In my experience, things outside coding quickly devolve into something more like "technobabble" (and in coding there is always a lot of made-up stuff that doesn't exists in terms of functions etc.).

I see them more as creative artists who have very good intuition, but are poor logicians. Their world model is not a strict database of consistent facts, it is more like a set of various beliefs, and of course those can be highly contradictory.

So bullshit then?

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#145

Post by layer8 »

Havoc wrote: post #128

I don't think the assertion that we've reached the end of current wave of AI is correct. It hasn't even been rolled out to anything yet. Once it is fully integrated into os/browser/corporate workspace and the MBA's have thrown LLMs at every business problem they can think of then perhaps but right now it hasn't even left high tech circles

> It hasn't even been rolled out to anything yet.

The question is why that is, after almost 9 months of ChatGPT API availability.

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#146

Post by beefield »

velvetz wrote: post #104
beefield wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLMs won't get intelligent. That's a fact based on their MO. I kind of agree. However, I see a real possibility that in the near future LLM behaviour would be practically indistinguishable from intelligent/sentient behavior. And at that point we (or at least I) are facing some really interesting/difficult questions, namely how do you know an intelligent looking thing actually is intelligent (or sentient). How do yo…

Off-topic and might sound strange but I find it intriguing that you wrote behavior and behaviour in these two different forms in the same sentence:)

I don't have any excuses but being non native in english having exposure to both British and US english seems to confuse my brain.

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#147

Post by semi-extrinsic »

auggierose wrote: post #122
nopinsight wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Geoffrey Hinton, Andrew Ng, and quite a few other top AI researchers believe that current LLMs (and incoming waves of multimodal LFMs) learn world models; they are not simply 'stochastic parrots'. If one feeds GPT-4 a novel problem that does not require multi-step reasoning or very high precision to solve, it can often solve it.

Anyone who has worked a bit with a top LLM thinks that they learn world models. Otherwise, what they are doing would be impossible. I've used them for things that are definitely not on the web, because they are brand new research. They are definitely able to apply what they've learnt in novel ways.

What really resonated with me is the following observation from a fellow HNer (I forgot who):

In many cases, we humans have structured our language such that it encapsulates reality very closely. For these cases, when an LLM learns the language it will by construction appear to have a model of the world. Because we humans already spent thousands of years and billions of actually intelligent minds building the language to be the world model.

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#148

Post by bowsamic »

glenstein wrote: post #115
usrbinbash wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This entire piece is based on one massive, unsupported assertion, which is that LLM progress will cease. Which is countered by...the assertion that it won't? LLMs won't get intelligent. That's a fact based on their MO. They are sequence completion engines. They can be fine tuned to specific tasks, but at their core, they remain stochastic parrots. > I want to know only one thing, which is what gives him the confide…

>Which is countered by...the assertion that it won't? No it's countered by principled restraint in not making an affirmative claim one way or the other. I've heard this referred to as the overconfident pessimism problem. Which is that normal, well founded scientific discipline and evidence-based restraint go out of the window when people declare, without evidence that they know certain advances won't happen. Because…

> No it's countered by principled restraint in not making an affirmative claim one way or the other.

It’s maddening to me that people don’t get this nuance

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#149

Post by msp26 »

system2 wrote: post #36
ryanklee wrote: post #2

"We are quickly reaching the limits of current AI" So many words in this piece, but nothing to back up this primary assertion.

For what it's worth, I can actually tell the hype around AI died down a little. 8-10 months ago you'd hear AI from grandmas and their interest in playing with gpt. That's gone. From programmer's perspective, it is still useless. I can't still get chatgpt to give me a useful ffmpeg or a basic php database script. I don't know who is really using ai for what, other than crappy chatbots. They are saying JSON works perfe…

Making good tools with language models takes time. There are nuances that aren't immediately visible without working on them.

Unless there's a mismatch in the schema/messages, function calling is very reliable at providing JSON.

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#150

Post by layer8 »

worrycue wrote: post #143
lucubratory wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I have noticed that a lot of extreme AI cynics have been arguing that any and every example of reasoning or thinking that an LLM displays is just some variant of memorisation.

The biggest evidence that LLMs can’t reason is hallucinations. If it could reason it would have rejected fictional generated output that make no sense.

Maybe it’s more accurate to say that LLMs lack (self-)awareness. Because when you point out things that make no sense, they do have some limited ability to produce reasoning about that. But I agree that this lack of awareness is a serious and maybe fundamental deficit.
Post reply on HN