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AI isn’t good enough

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261–270 of 374 posts

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

There isn't a choice, the original post is incorrect. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DSPIC96

That's a graph of disposable personal income, not purchasing power, and it doesn't account of the increased cost of several major spending categories.

It's also the total disposable personal income for the entire country, and not median household income. See the "Units" field: it's in billions of chained 2012 dollars.

It's from 2018, but this shows what's going on more clearly:

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-...

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 languag…

Do LLMs trained on languages that treat any double (or more) negatives as one have a slightly different world model than those that treat negatives like separate logical elements, like English? I wonder if that'd be one way to demonstrate what you're saying.

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

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Re: AI isn’t good enough

#264
Rather than asserting that current LLMs are at their tail end, or that AI isnt good enough, it is much more instructive to check what are the bottlenecks or constraints to further progress, and what would help remove these bottlenecks.

They can largely be divided into 3 buckets

1) Compute constraint - Currently large companies using expensive nvidia chips do most of the heavylifting of training good models. Although chips will improve over time, and competition like Intel/AMD will bring down prices, this is a slow process. But what could be a faster breakthrough is training using distributed computing over millions of consumer GPUs. There are already efforts in that direction (eg. petals/swarm parallelism for finetuning/full training, but the eastern europe/russian guys developing them dont seem to have enough resources).

2) Data constraint - If you just rely on human generated text data, you will soon exhaust this resource (maybe GPT4 has already). But the Tinystories dataset generated from GPT4 shows if we can have SOTA models generate more data (and especially on niche topics that appear less frequently in human generated data), and have deterministic/AI filters to segregate the good and bad quality data thus generated, data quantity would not be an issue any longer. Also, multimodal data is expected (with the right model architectures) to be more efficient at training world grokking SOTA models than single modal data and here we have massive amounts of online video data to tap into.

3) Architectural knowledge constraint - This may be the most difficult of all, figuring out what is the next big scalable architecture after Transformers. Either we keep trying newer ideas (like the stanford hazy research group does), and hope something sticks, or we get SOTA models few years down the line to do this ideation part for us.

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#265

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.

A typical parrot repeats after you said something. A parrot that could predict your words before you said them, and could impersonate you in a phone call, would be quite scary (calling Hollywood, sounds like an interesting move idea). A parrot that could listen to you talking for hours, and then provide you a short summary, would probably also be called intelligent.

Surfing Uncertainty was a really cool book. I think we think too highly of ourselves.

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#266
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. This is absolutely wrong. There is nothing about their MO that stops them from being intelligent. Suppose I build a human LLM as follows: A random human expert is picked and he is shown the current context window. He is given 1…

Humans will never be intelligent. They're optimized for producing offspring, not reasoning. Humans may appear to be intelligent from a distance, but talk to one for any length of time and you'll find they make basic errors of reasoning that no truly thinking being would fall for. /s

Take out the /s tag and you are right on the money. Humans can not be trusted with anything because they are trivially fallible. Humans are terribly stupid, destroy their own societies and refuse to see reason. They also hallucinate when their destructive tendencies start catching up to them.

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#267

Earlier 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.

And AI has been consistently successful since the 1950s, steadily achieving more and more that was once only the purview of human beings.

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#268
I do not think it is fair to use AI in support call centers as an example.

These call centers are not there to help customers (cancel subscription, refund, change something, etc.) and AI is perfectly tuned for that. Or at least they have procedures and AI is perfectly train to follow these.

In other words, AI in support centers is designed and works to follow companies procedures and rules—which may not always align with customer expectations.

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#269
post #184
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLMs won't get intelligent. That's a fact based on their MO. They are sequence completion engines. A system that could perfectly predict what I would do in response to any particular stimuli, as a continuing sequence, would be exactly as intelligent as me. > They can be fine tuned to specific tasks, but at their core, they remain stochastic parrot Othello GPT was an attempt at answering this exact question, it's a…

A system that could perfectly predict what I would do in response to any particular stimuli, as a continuing sequence, would be exactly as intelligent as me. That's certainly interesting but it's not a depiction of a LLM is it ? LLM's are not deterministic, and (perhaps) so are we so two non-deterministic systems can only occasionally align (or so I assume). Intuition says they may get "close enough", whatever that m…

Why do you assume the human brain is non-deterministic? It might still be, but at a level of complexity we don't yet grasp.

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#270
post #268

I do not think it is fair to use AI in support call centers as an example. These call centers are not there to help customers (cancel subscription, refund, change something, etc.) and AI is perfectly tuned for that. Or at least they have procedures and AI is perfectly train to follow these. In other words, AI in support centers is designed and works to follow companies procedures and rules—which may not always align…

So is a simple form on a website in most cases. It would also be cheaper for the company and less frustrating for the customer. No one wants this "AI" chatbot bullshit except for companies selling "AI".
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