Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Everyone has tunnel vision on LLM's like they are the only thing just because they are the latest big shiny thing. "oh, they are at their limit". People were saying they were at their limit 5 years ago too. There are a lot of AI techniques, some more advanced than LLM, just with other limitations so they don't look 'amazing'. Seems like engineering at this point to tie them together for the next 'big thing'.
AI isn’t good enough
221–230 of 374 posts
Re: AI isn’t good enough
#222We're just not that good at managing AI yet.
Current agent-based systems are little more than toys ... but this situation is improving very rapidly.
Re: AI isn’t good enough
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but it's embarrassingly easy to train the AI on interesting or not content based on upvote information... And yet, the best topics and answers do not necessarily correlate with the most upvoted.
How would you qualify the best?
We can't all agree on what best means.
It can't be objective since we are humans.
HN guidelines and moderation are doing a decent job of promoting interestingness in general. I don't think upvotes are a reliable indicator, but maybe they are as close to good enough as a system can be.
Depending on timing, you see great topics flying under the radar. Likewise, "poor" posts regularly prove to be quite popular. But then again, this is also subjective.
Re: AI isn’t good enough
#224As impressive as AI is and what it can do. I've felt the same way in my last job. It was almost there; it was almost good enough such that we could almost ship the project but we didn't. GPT3.5 was not good enough, GPT4 seemed like it was good enough in terms of accuracy but it was too slow and we were getting throttled like crazy. I lost my job over it. When I was worried about AI taking my job, I didn't picture it…
Our use case was that we needed to consider information from thousands of pages of documents to answer customer questions. I let GPT decide where to look based on content tables of the documents (thankfully each section was not more than ~500 words) and only fetched information from the relevant sections to let GPT answer the user's question. GPT3.5 was fast enough to be usable but often inaccurate; it would ignore s…
Why didn't you go the retrieval augmented generation route with a vector store?
Re: AI isn’t good enough
#225As impressive as AI is and what it can do. I've felt the same way in my last job. It was almost there; it was almost good enough such that we could almost ship the project but we didn't. GPT3.5 was not good enough, GPT4 seemed like it was good enough in terms of accuracy but it was too slow and we were getting throttled like crazy. I lost my job over it. When I was worried about AI taking my job, I didn't picture it…
>It was almost there; it was almost good enough such that we could almost ship
I feel like that a lot but we've been shipping for years.
Re: AI isn’t good enough
#226Labor shortage it BS. It's rhetoric to increase immigration so we can continue sustaining a slave class and don't have to pay people properly. Canada's been very successful at this.
Re: AI isn’t good enough
#227>We are bumping against many of its >limits He keeps saying that as a fact with absolutely no proof and based his whole argument on it.
Yeah, it's frustrating that he doesn't call out the specific limits.
Re: AI isn’t good enough
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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…
AI has been around the corner since the 1950s, this is the historical evidence for the pessimistic stance against over optimistic predictions. LLMs are a huge stride forward, but AI does not progress like Moore's law. LLM have revealed a new wall. Combining multi agents is not working out as hoped.
1. AI has not been "around the corner since the 1950s," and 2. if you think there hasn't been forward progress in AI since the 1950s, you have no valid opinions on this subject.
Re: AI isn’t good enough
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair a toddler's brain isn't "offline" while it's musculature develops, they kick and move their limbs constantly, and then later crawl and and even stand, before they finally take the first walking steps. It's just objectively wrong to say a toddler goes from zero to walking in "several tries".
Sure, not several. Not several trillions either though. As mentioned in a sibling comment, HN anthropomorphizes AI too much. And is too optimistic about it. I just don't see the results and the value, people trip up all over themselves to congratulate themselves and the researches, yet 99.99% of the problems in the world persist. I am one of these a-holes that wants to see results when money are invested. It still co…
Blank checks are flying like it is the dot com era again. Money is most definitely being invested in it.
Re: AI isn’t good enough
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps without intending to, you've cited a pretty appropriate example of overconfident pessimism. Philosopher Hubert Dreyfus is most responsible for this portrayal of AI research in the '50s and '60s. He made a career of insisting that advances in AI would never come to pass, famously predicting that computers couldn't become good at chess because it required "insight", and routinely listing off what he believed we…
There is no doubt that some leading AI proponents in the 1960s were overconfident.
This is exactly the point. The pessimists get the pedantic thrill of pointing out that, 60 years ago, some proponents were overconfident. But they neglect to notice the larger picture, which is one of extraordinary progress. They'll be sitting in the passenger seat of a self-driving car, arranging their travel itinerary with a chatbot fluent in English and 60 other languages, and smugly commenting on HackerNews about how "AI pessimists got it right in the 60s."