AI isn’t good enough • Hacker News Board

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#271

Post by xpe » Fri, Aug 25, 2023, 3:03 PM UTC

I’m so done with writing that has an implicit but uncommunicated quantitative model. (AI costs are too high? Relative to what? Show us!) Almost all analytical / business / industry writing should quantified.

I hope for better. We all should. It is within reach. Yes, I'm grumpy on this topic, but this doesn't make it unwarranted; it is a consequence of wanting better for a decade or longer.

At this point, if you claim to be a business analyst and you aren't sharing a simulation, logic, or code, I'm just not going to take you seriously.

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#272

Post by wildermuthn » Fri, Aug 25, 2023, 3:07 PM UTC

The most interesting part of this article isn’t its assertion that AI innovation is about to slow, but rather that current LLMs can only produce “so-so automation” — that although LLMs can replace many jobs, LLMs aren’t good enough to offset the cost of people losing such jobs.

True as of today, but the article is overlooking multi-modal LLMs. Once AI can see, we’ll go from “wow, GPT4 is pretty good at helping me to my job” to “uh oh, GPT4-Vision can do my job better than I can”.

This is especially true if the model can read text off a screen. At that point, it’s likely to replace many workers who stare at screens for a few hours a day and pretend to work the remainder. The model won’t take coffee breaks, or long lunches, or take the afternoon off to drive their kid to the dentist. If you’re a worker whose work depends upon looking at a screen, and mostly involves moving data from one place to another with light transformations and interpretations, you’re going to be in trouble by the end of the decade.

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#273

Post by NumberWangMan » Fri, Aug 25, 2023, 3:07 PM UTC

worrycue wrote: post #106

savolai wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me that the real question here is what is true human intelligence. Ai has made it plain to see, by being able to replicate it so convincingly, that much of what we have considered intelligence has been pattern matching or acting as complex parrots. There is much more to the abilities of human body-mind-emotional-experiential being, but it is only slowly becoming mainstream. (Edit: Of course there are also…

> It seems to me that the real question here is what is true human intelligence. IMHO the main weakness with LLMs is they can’t really reason. They can statistically guess their way to an answer - and they do so surprisingly well I will have to admit - but they can’t really “check” themselves to ensure what they are outputting makes any sense like humans do (most of the time) - hence the hallucinations.

Apparently GPT-4 is getting pretty good at knowing when it's wrong: https://thezvi.substack.com/p/ai-26-fine-tuning-time#%C2%A7g...

(They asked GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 "are you sure" to see if it would change its answer, both when the original answer was right, and when it was wrong)

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#274

Post by ted_bunny » Fri, Aug 25, 2023, 3:08 PM UTC

saberience wrote: post #218

dclowd9901 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disingenuous: given the proper processing, you’d get a 100% deterministic and reliable answer. How do you get that out of an LLM? What tool is any good if it doesn’t work 100% of the time predictably?

How many tools do you know of that work 100% of the time. As someone that’s worked in software 20 years now, I don’t think there is anything from Linux to eMacs to visual studio to Java which doesn’t have bugs, issues, crashes, shitty stuff, and yet we expect a revolutionary and amazing technology to generate code perfectly? It’s funny those the LLM haters keep raising the bar to a level that no other software can re…

Poor is the carpenter!

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#275

Post by tlogan » Fri, Aug 25, 2023, 3:09 PM UTC

manicennui wrote: post #270

tlogan wrote: 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".

Or that customer wanting to cancel spend hours talking to the bot so they finally give up and hopefully forget.

Having a simple form to cancel/refund/change/lost item/sent to wrong address/etc. is easier way to do and handle. But companies do not want that so … chatbot to rescue.

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#276

Post by intrasight » Fri, Aug 25, 2023, 3:15 PM UTC

> too few people for all the jobs, for the most part.

Change that qualifier to "for a minority part" and it would be correct.

There are plenty of workers - old and young and everything in between - who would gladly work if a) you allowed them to and/or b) you paid them enough.

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#277

Post by notahacker » Fri, Aug 25, 2023, 3:19 PM UTC

jimbokun wrote: post #259

cgio wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Nope, puppies are walking within the first month of their life, a stage where human babies have barely any voluntary limb control and no apparent desire to move.

The puppies are benefitting from a different type of "learning" process of course, in having genetic instincts tuned by many generations of ancestors who had good enough genetic wiring of motor capabilities and instincts sufficiently well attuned to their environments to survive. Humans have weaker priors and reach physical and mental maturity much more slowly but ultimately achieve greater mastery of their environment by learning it from first principles or communication with other humans (there may be a tradeoff, and of course humans are so good at protecting their young over years of infancy the early instincts aren't that important to retain)

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#278

Post by asynchronous » Fri, Aug 25, 2023, 3:20 PM UTC

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…

I’d agree with the sentiment that we are not at the end of the LLM development, simply because looking at other similar things like Stable Diffusion, the community has made so many crazy enhancements in such a short amount of time. With more time to refine these enhancements I think we can close a lot of gaps.

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#279

Post by tempodox » Fri, Aug 25, 2023, 3:22 PM UTC

wildermuthn wrote: post #272

The most interesting part of this article isn’t its assertion that AI innovation is about to slow, but rather that current LLMs can only produce “so-so automation” — that although LLMs can replace many jobs, LLMs aren’t good enough to offset the cost of people losing such jobs. True as of today, but the article is overlooking multi-modal LLMs. Once AI can see, we’ll go from “wow, GPT4 is pretty good at helping me to…

And since everyone who has been writing has been replaced by machines as well, most of those texts will be machine-generated by then.

Machines reading and processing texts written by machines would be the logical consequence in this scenario, but I can't help finding the whole idea deeply absurd.

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#280

Post by intended » Fri, Aug 25, 2023, 3:23 PM UTC

astrange wrote: post #60

intended wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apples and oranges. You would like a home from 1969. You would like the salary saved from 1969.

> You would like a home from 1969. As I live in California, I've seen 'em. They're not all Eichlers. > You would like the salary saved from 1969. A tech worker makes more than 5 times the median 2023 personal income and their industry didn't exist then, so I mean, I wouldn't even if I could afford the house in Palo Alto. And you wouldn't want to say this to a racial minority or even someone in Appalachia.

You’ve kinda proven the point. The argument made was cherry picking.

Here again - You’ve used the most highly paid subset of workers. In any other nation, and in other industries in America - Tech workers dont get paid that much.