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AI isn’t good enough

skventures.substack.com

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Re: AI isn’t good enough

#291

Post by intended »

dontupvoteme wrote: post #49
intended wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can take a bet that it haha already failed - the hype cycle has already made a promise that LLMs can’t keep. Hallucinations to the normal person are a bug. The issue is that only humans can hallucinate. We know there is a “reality”. For an LLM, everything it does is a hallucination. That’s why you have more POCs than production goods. Your “hallucination rate” is unknown. Yesterday Ars has an article that described…

Why not "simply" multigen every (important) query and take the statistical average? Hallucinations are random, the truth isn't. This is absurdly expensive with GPT4, cheaper with 3, and dirt cheap locally with LLaMA

How?

Truth is a human thing. Statistically averaging out 4, 5, 6, N text generations from an LLM will not converge to any “truth”.

You have essentially stated that outputs from a text generator are normally distributed around “Facts”.

May I gently suggest, that and older quote about an infinite number of simians, typewriters and the works of Shakespeare, is more appropriate ?

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#292

Post by intended »

jiggawatts wrote: post #99
dontupvoteme wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not "simply" multigen every (important) query and take the statistical average? Hallucinations are random, the truth isn't. This is absurdly expensive with GPT4, cheaper with 3, and dirt cheap locally with LLaMA

That’s an established technique with papers written on the topic and everything. Anecdotally I tested this by having GPT4 translate Acadian cuneiform — which it can just barely do. I had it do this four times and it returned four gibberish answers. I then prompted it with the source plus the four attempts and asked for a merged result. It did it better than the human archeologists did! More readable and consistent. I…

I don’t know if I will sound rude, but your example itself illustrates the crux of problem.

The only way you could know that the output was wrong was because you could verify it in the first place.

You can’t verify answers for questions in unfamiliar domains - or even for novel questions in your own domain.

Hah, it feels like a weird version of P!=NP.

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#293

Post by zoogeny »

When I read articles like this I can't help but question my own intuitions since they are so opposed to this author's thinking.

Firstly, his suggestion on the worker shortage and the anecdotal $1000 sign on bonus at some local McDonalds. These seem more tailored to a narrative interpretation of the state of the world that is formed to the author's own bias. I look at my own small town homeless and drug addicted population and consider the changes in the last 5-10 years on that front. I consider the insane rise in the cost of home ownership and the massive rise in rental costs locally. I just don't see $1000 signing bonuses at fast food restaurants as a sign of some latent demand for labor. It feels like the author is using a single anecdote and a narrow reading of a few graphs to support a world view that I don't see existing in my own experience.

Then he says: "We are quickly reaching the limits of current AI". You mean the AI that surpassed most informed peoples expectations on AI capability less than one year ago? I feel like I'm in 1996 reading an article about the Internet where someone gives some list of reasons why the Internet is reaching its limits.

And just as an aside, this author uses the term "explosive" especially in the context of "explosive growth" over and over. It may be that his target market just isn't me. The narrative and analysis probably hits home for a particular set of capitalist minded investor class individuals. Perhaps they really do see North America as having a huge labor shortage and that we just need the "right" kinds of automation so we don't all feel so bad about the continuing displacement of workers. As long as they keep seeing "explosive growth" in the value of their assets.

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#294

Post by jedbrown »

earthboundkid wrote: post #250
wredue wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I am a mild LLM skeptic. But I find the response of "oh, it's all just post-crypto scamming" really weird. Crypto was a total scam. There was never a concrete, non-criminal (important caveat) application where crypto was easier than just using PayPal or whatever. LLMs are very imperfect and still have a lot of work to do, but they do actually do some job related tasks today. If I have JS snippet and I wish it were in…

The LM industry valuation would be way smaller if they were not laundering behavior that would be illegal if a human did it. If "AI" were required to practice clean-room design (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design) to avoid infringing copyright, we would laugh at the ineptitude. If people believed the FTC-CFPB-DOJ-EEOC joint statement was going to lead to successful prosecutions, the industry valuation would collapse. https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/EEOC-CRT-FTC-CF...

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#295

Post by IKantRead »

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 work in this space and think that it's far more rational to accept the axiom that LLM progress will not be significant than to bank product work on assuming it will increase drastically.

I do think we still have yet to squeeze the most value out of current LLMs, but most people's radical AI dreams are completely out-of-touch with reality for anyone working closely on these problems.

My biggest fear in this space is that disappointment in the inability of these tools to live up to the hype will cause people to irrationally abandon exploring the spaces where they do work.

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#296

Post by coryfklein »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #204
jug wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There has actually been research that found that there are strong diminishing returns in terms of at least expanding parameter sizes. While I think there are still breakthroughs to be made in terms of window sizes and workarounds like Mixture of Experts, I'm not sure how much farther we will get here in the long term in terms of raw performance of the LLM itself. FWIW, Sam Altman agrees and has a surprisingly similar…

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?

"Research" is not some monolithic single concept. One might also ask, "How can research produce ChatGPT when for decades research failed to produce ChatGPT?"

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#297

Post by IKantRead »

earthboundkid wrote: post #250
wredue wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I am a mild LLM skeptic. But I find the response of "oh, it's all just post-crypto scamming" really weird. Crypto was a total scam. There was never a concrete, non-criminal (important caveat) application where crypto was easier than just using PayPal or whatever. LLMs are very imperfect and still have a lot of work to do, but they do actually do some job related tasks today. If I have JS snippet and I wish it were in…

> Crypto was a total scam.

As someone who have been very anti-crypto for a long time, it wasn't always a complete scam.

The first wave of the crypto boom, before anyone that wasn't a programmer had even heard of it, there was a lot of real work being done that very much mirrors current AI work. Lot's of very sharp developers learning about block chain, figuring out how to implement things, experimenting with ideas. Back then everyone owned their own wallet and you would meet at coffee shops to exchange cash for BTC.

Most of the serious engineers that were really into crypto during the first crypto boom of 2012 left in disgust when the second boom came around.

Having worked in AI/ML for a long time, I myself can start to see how they felt. We do have some really cool technology in front of us, I think it has a lot of potential, but so many of the loudest voices in this space are entirely out of touch with what's possible, and far more interested in hype and making money than the underlying technology.

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#298

Post by jy1 »

People often conflate AI progress with hardware progress.

If we had hardware as flexible, robust, and "cheap" as the human body, we'd solve a lot of these problems such as retail, trades etc.

The problem isn't software. It's hardware.

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#299

Post by jstummbillig »

andrepd wrote: post #209
Kiro wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why is it always the same reply? When there's one definitive answer to something that people keep repeating there's a slight chance that it's actually true. Shocking, I know.

Well but it's not. Also, your reasoning would imply e.g. Qanon is true based on the number of people repeating the same thing, so that's pretty weak.

Well. You would definitely have to very carefully select a very, VERY narrow slice of society, to get a piece where Qanon supporters make up a significant percentage of people.

But hey, if you are really looking to convince yourself of something, I have no doubt that it can be done.

Re: AI isn’t good enough

#300

Post by TeMPOraL »

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.

In comparing to human minds, LLMs are better understood as the "inner voice" part, not the mind. From that perspective, it's eerie how similar the two are in success and failure modes alike.

Yes, I'm saying here that peoples' inner voices are hallucinating in very similar fashion; "rejecting fictional generated output that makes no sense" is a process that's consciously observable and involves looping the inner voice on itself.

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