NB resident here. It’s still miserable, but removing stop lights on route 18 between landing lane and the turnpike made things excellent for folks getting to somerset/piscataway!
NB/EB resident, has construction ever stopped in this area since 2000? I'm glad that 18 is finally (mostly) done as you say
Been running the set all my life. Construction on 18 was a long time coming, probably shaved 10 minutes off the drive to the turnpike. And I’m okay with all of the over runs to fix the runoff creating those crazy pools of water on the roadway!
Did you work in this field? I just don’t find that a fair characterization. They are all still doing blue-sky research. There is a ton of further research to be done in deep models. A lot of it will incorporate LLMs because that is currently the most powerful primitive you have. Research is a lot more closed now but I would not take that to mean research is no longer happening.
No - I don't work in the ML field, or for any of these companies (but I have built a Torch-like NN framework in C++ from scratch, and followed the early transformer development closely, so do understand the tech). I'm just writing about the changes to these organizations, and their corporate governance, as reported in the press. I don't think you need to be an insider to appreciate the difference between, say, DeepMi…
> I have built a Torch-like NN framework in C++ from scratch
Mm, care to share? I am skeptical when people make claims like this, even though it is very achievable. Many people are simply "playing house" when it comes to ML tech.
I would not believe everything you read even in the tech aligned press, it is very often false. Google Deepmind is not exclusively researching LLMs.
Seems like we have ended up on the wrong side of the HN hivemind, reality be damned.
Well, if you're an insider at one of these companies, then please enlighten us! What has changed from DeepMind as independent entity to Google DeepMind (following the hivemind LLM "path" to AGI ;) ) ? What does it mean for FAIR to now be part of a product group ? I'm sure the CEOs of these companies hope these changes are significant and will better align these research organizations with their corporate goals and ma…
Google Deepmind is still publishing tons of non-LLM research. The difference is that these directions are being incorporated as Gcloud products faster.
I am not sure about FAIR, but they have been chatbot/LLM/ASR focusd from before this change.
OpenAI has definitely pivoted towards product. !
Most of that pivot is through new growth while still maintaining existing research products, but I wont deny there is a new level of product focus.
No - I don't work in the ML field, or for any of these companies (but I have built a Torch-like NN framework in C++ from scratch, and followed the early transformer development closely, so do understand the tech). I'm just writing about the changes to these organizations, and their corporate governance, as reported in the press. I don't think you need to be an insider to appreciate the difference between, say, DeepMi…
> I have built a Torch-like NN framework in C++ from scratch Mm, care to share? I am skeptical when people make claims like this, even though it is very achievable. Many people are simply "playing house" when it comes to ML tech. I would not believe everything you read even in the tech aligned press, it is very often false. Google Deepmind is not exclusively researching LLMs.
I never released my framework, and don't intend to (abandoned this a good few years ago), but it was more than "playing house" ... It was complete enough to build/train a convnet that worked with CIFAR-10, supporting both GPU via cuDNN and CPU via my own Tensor class with MKL/IPP BLAS/etc acceleration. The API was Torch-like where you build the graph (create nodes, then connect them), then run it. I was in process of writing a version 2 with support for RNNs and auto migration of tensors from CPU to/from GPU, but gave up since PyTorch had since appeared (obviously a better approach) and it became increasingly obvious how ridiculous it was for a one-man project to attempt to catch up to SOTA!
Any recommendations for books on the history of computing from that period?
hackers: heroes of the computer revolution by Steven Levy. I think he also wrote some of the other well known books, maybe including fire in the valley. need to check. He is a journalist, so the book is sure to be embellished to sound good, but a cool read nonetheless, IMO.
No, I didn't write Fire in the Valley, but did write some other books. I appreciate that you felt Hackers was a cool read. But whether you believe me or not, the default for real journalists is NOT embellishing, but doing reporting to get to the nearest thing to truth. Not all writers do that (some "nonfiction" authors are frank about making up dialogue, and even moving the timeline) but to me and the vast majority of my peers, nonfiction means just that.