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AI Is Smoke and Mirrors

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Re: AI Is Smoke and Mirrors

#21

Post by lambdaba »

mlyle wrote: post #6
whimsicalism wrote: post #4

No matter how much the chattering class wants to portray this as a "fad" and not an inevitability, those of us who can type and read can see the reality for ourselves.

Yah-- what we have now is enough to be enormously disruptive as it is absorbed. The big question is how much better it's going to get. We may be plateauing in capability-- or at least slowing in capability growth-- or we may not be. But it doesn't need to get better for it to eat a lot of peoples' lunch.

My opinion shifts every other day it seems, recently, Roon, the "famous" anon X account that works at OpenAI, and presumably has access to some unreleased info, said, in response to "are we plateauing soon", "not even close". I honestly don't know what to think.

Re: AI Is Smoke and Mirrors

#22

Post by Upvoter33 »

furyofantares wrote: post #3

The usual pattern is to overestimate short-term change and underestimate long-term change. We're a year since this stuff really got popular, and so I think a thing that's happening right now is many people noticing the short-term changes were overestimated.

yes, exactly. There will be a lot of these types of articles in the next few years, some disappointments along the way, but deep and longlasting change in the tech sector and beyond is coming.

Re: AI Is Smoke and Mirrors

#23

Post by whimsicalism »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #19
yawnxyz wrote: post #10

That's a lot of words from someone who doesn't seem to have tried using these tools yet? The Hype is smoke and mirrors, but there are tons of real use cases where things were MUCH easier than before. Things like text to speech or image recognition previously required a team of 10 ML engineers a couple of years to build now take a weekend. It's smoke and mirrors to the "business world" because none of these translate…

I'm just kinda sad at how cynical so many of us have become. I mean, I see tons of comments "But it hallucinates!!!!!" Yeah, no shit. At the same time, you're having a perfectly grammatically correct, natural, sensical conversation with a computer . Just a couple years ago that was purely the realm of Star Trek.

Luckily I don't think this is trending worse, HN has always been like this.

If anything, it was worse a few years ago - especially during peak pandemic and the reddit issues. Nowadays people seem more positive.

Re: AI Is Smoke and Mirrors

#24

Post by ctoth »

> a bombshell scientific paper recently cast serious doubt on AI developers’ ability to continue to dramatically improve their models’ performance.

This is the problem with this type of (AI isn't real, I promise!) writing. Each and every single time. This bombshell scientific result that he links to? Is Gary Marcus lamenting about a single paper, specific to a single architecture, which primarily shows how quickly algorithmic improvements are bringing down energy costs[0].

We get it. You don't like AI. But you don't have to lie about it, unless of course you are Gary Marcus and this is how you talk your book and earn your speaking fees.

[0]: Algorithmic progress in language models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.05812

Re: AI Is Smoke and Mirrors

#25

Post by whimsicalism »

lambdaba wrote: post #21
mlyle wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yah-- what we have now is enough to be enormously disruptive as it is absorbed. The big question is how much better it's going to get. We may be plateauing in capability-- or at least slowing in capability growth-- or we may not be. But it doesn't need to get better for it to eat a lot of peoples' lunch.

My opinion shifts every other day it seems, recently, Roon, the "famous" anon X account that works at OpenAI, and presumably has access to some unreleased info, said, in response to "are we plateauing soon", "not even close". I honestly don't know what to think.

I know his real identity and I doubt there is some key insider info there although he does work at OAI

Re: AI Is Smoke and Mirrors

#27

Post by skybrian »

bigyikes wrote: post #12

This article, like so many AI hit pieces, fails to make any credible claim against AI. This one spent far too long propping up a tenuous analogy to smoke and mirrors. Is current-gen AI valuable? Obviously. Look at how many people say as much and willingly pay for the services. Is current-gen AI worth the hype? No, not really. Current models are impressive but highly limited, as any user can attest (and as any hater w…

The hype is the part where you start talking about the future. We have little idea what will be in GPT-5. OpenAI hasn't announced anything. Sam Altman does hype it up sometimes, in very vague terms.

> future models are world-changing

Possibly, but talking about what you imagine the future will be in the present tense is hype. That's not the future, it's speculation about one scenario. There are others.

There's been a lot of progress making models that aren't quite as good as GPT-4, or are maybe comparable. Why is that? Have we hit a wall? I don't know, but that's a scenario, too.

Re: AI Is Smoke and Mirrors

#28

Post by dinobones »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #19
yawnxyz wrote: post #10

That's a lot of words from someone who doesn't seem to have tried using these tools yet? The Hype is smoke and mirrors, but there are tons of real use cases where things were MUCH easier than before. Things like text to speech or image recognition previously required a team of 10 ML engineers a couple of years to build now take a weekend. It's smoke and mirrors to the "business world" because none of these translate…

I'm just kinda sad at how cynical so many of us have become. I mean, I see tons of comments "But it hallucinates!!!!!" Yeah, no shit. At the same time, you're having a perfectly grammatically correct, natural, sensical conversation with a computer . Just a couple years ago that was purely the realm of Star Trek.

"But it hallucinates!!!!!"

Yeah, and it's getting quantitatively better, all the time. There is a clear progress curve.

Go back and look at the comical quality of GPT2 outputs, and the things people were getting excited about on Twitter. I wrote GPT off at the time because it just seemed like Markov model shenanigans to me, then I tried GPT3.5 and had my mind blown (but was still skeptical due to all the hallucinations), and GPT4 has finally convinced me that this is inevitable, and it's now just an iterative improvement game.

Re: AI Is Smoke and Mirrors

#29

Post by mlyle »

lambdaba wrote: post #21
mlyle wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yah-- what we have now is enough to be enormously disruptive as it is absorbed. The big question is how much better it's going to get. We may be plateauing in capability-- or at least slowing in capability growth-- or we may not be. But it doesn't need to get better for it to eat a lot of peoples' lunch.

My opinion shifts every other day it seems, recently, Roon, the "famous" anon X account that works at OpenAI, and presumably has access to some unreleased info, said, in response to "are we plateauing soon", "not even close". I honestly don't know what to think.

I feel like for LLM's at least, we've not seen a lot of progress on the high end for a year or so. GPT4-Turbo is a little better than GPT4, but mainly only for things that can benefit from huge contexts.

Re: AI Is Smoke and Mirrors

#30

Post by ramesh31 »

whimsicalism wrote: post #4

No matter how much the chattering class wants to portray this as a "fad" and not an inevitability, those of us who can type and read can see the reality for ourselves.

>No matter how much the chattering class wants to portray this as a "fad" and not an inevitability, those of us who can type and read can see the reality for ourselves.

Right. Regardless of any "superhuman" abilities, we can talk to our computers now, and they can talk back. The decades old holy grail of HCI has been achieved. That fact alone is going to change everything.

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