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AI isn’t good enough

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Re: AI isn’t good enough

#251

Post by FrustratedMonky »

StackOverlord wrote: post #217
FrustratedMonky wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can research predict this wave is coming to an end, when research also didn't think this wave would happen either. It seems like there are always people saying 'it can't be done'. Then it happens. If there was a way to predict the future, then wouldn't that research need to know how something would be implemented, in order to know it can't be?

For the first time with GPT4, OpenAI as been able to predict model progress with accuracy: > A large focus of the GPT-4 project has been building a deep learning stack that scales predictably. The primary reason is that, for very large training runs like GPT-4, it is not feasible to do extensive model-specific tuning. We developed infrastructure and optimization that have very predictable behavior across multiple sca…

There was an entire Post/Discussion on HN a few weeks ago discussing whether or not this Post from OpenAI was for:

"just trying to temper investor enthusiasm"

"trying to downplay AI threats to calm down regulators"

etc....

etc....

But it is not some 'Proof', that LLM's have reached a limit.

It is a self reported note along the lines of : "nothing to see here, we're at our limit, it's all good, stop probing us".

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#252

Post by RandomLensman »

ambrozk wrote: post #230
RandomLensman wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Lots of progress in some areas, very little in others. Neither the pessimists nor the optimists got it right.

(Btw., a really hardened pessimist might even say your example is mostly things that were doable when there were not many computers around at all... taxi driver to drive you, a secretary to book a flight, meet in a club to discuss things, ...)

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#253

Post by pixl97 »

pdimitar wrote: post #186
lynx23 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A toddler capable of walking is still miles away from the topic at hand, a LLM capable of processing relatively complex text. It is well know that humans have a particularily long training period compared to other animals. So I dont understand why you are bringing up the walking-training. It seems quite unrelated.

Because humans learn from much less samples sizes than "AI". The overly optimistic point of view on "AI" is over-represented in HN and that makes the discussion unbalanced and puts nearly everyone in it in a filter bubble. That's not OK.

Again, as per my previous response, you're missing the optimization timeline and how long it took nature to do it.

"Walking" at least on dry land has been around 420 million years or so. The locomotion part of the learning algorithms has been around a very, very long time, and it's going to be very hard to duplicate the efficiency that nature brute forced.

Nature has not hype optimized human level intelligence. Really human intelligence is at the limits of birth. Our heads can't be any larger at birth or we'll kill the mother too much of the time. Then the human body has a power budget that's been the defining factor of human/animal survival for just about forever. Humans were already 'smart' before we invented agriculture and excess fuel storage.

AI takes that a step further. We're not using reversible computing so the heat generated is pretty high. We've not been doing it very long and our algorithms are not optimal in any sense. But what we do have that nature does not is nearly unlimited energy, nearly unlimited cooling capacity, and a lot of computer systems working on the problem at once. In an evolutionary sense we're doing closer to the bacteria method, we have a lot of different experiments going on at once and at least a few of them are likely to be fruitful.

Personally I hope the AI development is no insanely rapid. Rapid and powerful changes in society can cause as many problems as they find fixes for, and the pace of society change is not that fast.

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#254

Post by maxlamb »

jongjong wrote: post #7

As 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…

What do you mean you lost your job over it? All because GPT4 was too slow for your project?

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#255

Post by FrustratedMonky »

wredue wrote: post #232
FrustratedMonky wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can research predict this wave is coming to an end, when research also didn't think this wave would happen either. It seems like there are always people saying 'it can't be done'. Then it happens. If there was a way to predict the future, then wouldn't that research need to know how something would be implemented, in order to know it can't be?

Blockchain was a complete bust, and middle managers need buzzwords to sell senior leadership. That’s my personal take on the current wave.

There was incredible hype. That doesn't mean there was 'nothing to get hype about'. Just that the hype might have overshot, not that GPT isn't amazing.

It doesn't follow that when new tech arrives, the post hype everything goes back to status quo. Typically after the hype, the new tech just grows or gets absorbed a little more quietly, in un-foreseen ways, and does end up having a big impact. Just when the impact is stretched out a little, people stop noticing.

Like replacing drive through ordering with GPT like tools. Kind of under-radar, not fancy, not flashy. At some point you'll notice that the drive through you are talking too isn't a human, and go 'huh, that's interesting'. But, big impact on jobs, so nobody is hyping it.

People/Companies are already using AI to replace or augment Graphic Artists, Coding, etc... etc... That is happening, not just a power point from a middle-manager.

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#256

Post by chongli »

garblegarble wrote: post #158
nine_k wrote: post #137

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…

>Live systems in nature seem to solve similar problems with way less compute available Do they really? They're certainly more energy-efficient in business-as-usual mode, but a human brain has 86 billion neurons, 600+ trillion synapses(!), and each instance takes 15-20+ years to train to do complex logical tasks. Even if the per-cell work is tiny (and, is it? cells are amazingly complex), 86 billion (or 600+ trillion)…

86 billion (or 600+ trillion) times 20 years is a lot of computation

What is that in kilowatt hours? Human brains are remarkably energy-efficient with their compute. We should get credit for that. Comparing one of us to an AI being trained at a data centre with the energy budget of a small city isn’t really fair, is it?

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#257

Post by chongli »

idopmstuff wrote: post #231
ChatGTP wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Guy calls humans flawed why claiming the same flawed species will build superhuman intelligence...", pretty good for a bunch of dumb LLMs in "meat bags"...

Humans have repeatedly built things that are beyond their own physical and intellectual capabilities. A calculator can do math problems much more quickly than any human being.

A calculator can do arithmetic faster than a human being. How well would a calculator do at proving Fermat’s Last Theorem?

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#258

Post by seanthemon »

cbozeman wrote: post #32
seanthemon wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious, how does it do when you give it examples / use playground.openai? I find that no examples often leads to the same result as a befuddled junior, but with examples often it gains confidence. Also I find playground to give me much better code snippets than chat sometimes

You've identified the problem inherent in these models right now, though. There's a lot of "extraneous" information and details that appear useless and unrelated, but that long-time developers have tucked away in their brains (or really anyone who has done something at a high level for a long time), that turns out to be incredibly useful; generally these people don't require examples - they just know what the right a…

Very insightful point - do you think that OpenAI and Microsoft are aiming at developers so that we may spill this knowledge by N-shotting the chat query? I.e if the AI doesn't understand some fundamental knowledge, often i'll teach it so that it can be more effective at helping me, inadvertently I spill some of this tucked knowledge.

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#259

Post by jimbokun »

cgio wrote: post #213
garblegarble wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At that point, the toddler's still run years of self-reinforced learning (as well as learning supported by parents, and observing other humans solving the problem) on controlling their muscles... and again, think of the computational power expended over that time (by a computational approach that's been highly-optimised over millions of years of trial-and-error recursive descent style). Our intellect and capabilities…

Human is not the most efficient learner for walking. See other animals, e.g. deer or elephant, that walk straight after being born. Relevant since the discussion is not about human learning but animal learning in nature.

Isn't that just biped vs quadruped difference in skill required to walk?

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#260

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

Tanjreeve wrote: post #46
astrange wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely not. You wouldn't like the food, cars and home appliances of 1969, and you really wouldn't like the healthcare.

Why do you think there is a zero sum choice between real terms purchasing power increases and the technology we have today? (Also worth noting I'd happily take a lot of goods from a time where they were built to last)

Built to last, but also generally MUCH less efficient in terms of energy & material usage. Difficult tradeoff.
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