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Rodney Brooks on limitations of generative AI

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Re: Rodney Brooks on limitations of generative AI

#111

Post by raincole »

fxtentacle wrote: post #13

To me, this reads like a very reasonable take. He suggests to limit the scope of the AI problem, add manual overrides in case there are unexpected situations, and he (rightly, in my opinion) predicts that the business case for exponentially scaling LLM models isn't there. With that context, I like his iPod example. Apple probably could have made a 3TB iPod to stick to Moore's law for another few years, but after they…

> Apple probably could have made a 3TB iPod

It's a very weird comparison, as putting more music tracks to your iPod doesn't make them sound better, while giving a LLM more parameters/computing power make it smarter.

Honestly it sounds like a typical "I've drawn my conclusion, and now I only need an analogy that remotely supports my conclusion" way of thinking.

Re: Rodney Brooks on limitations of generative AI

#112

Post by openmajestic »

portaouflop wrote: post #3

Let’s call it machine learning, the AI term is just so far from what it actually is

I like using AI or generative AI. Each term we use signifies the era of the technology. When I was starting, expert systems were the old thing, AI was a taboo phrase that you avoided at all costs if you wanted funding, and ML was the term of the day. Then it was the deep learning era. And now we are in the generative AI era - and also an AI spring which makes the term AI appropriate (while the spring lasts).

Re: Rodney Brooks on limitations of generative AI

#113

Post by lostmsu »

locallost wrote: post #101
lostmsu wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copilot can not read your mind: that is an impressive argument against AI!

I actually said it can read my mind which I interpret as my work being repetitive and not that clever. It can still read my mind poorly most of the time, although it's in the ballpark, but on occasion it hammers one home which feels like magic. Whether or not it can get good at reading my mind or not I don't know. But whether it can get good at doing non repetitive tasks that have been done a billion times, well, it…

No, you literally said the opposite. Read your first sentence.

> ... Copilot ... is pretty bad at guessing what I exactly want to do

Re: Rodney Brooks on limitations of generative AI

#114

Post by raincole »

globalnode wrote: post #12

i dont know much about machine learning but what i think i know is that its getting an outcome based on averages of witnessed data/events. so how's it going to come up with anything novel? or outside of normal?

> i dont know much about machine learning but what i think i know is that its getting an outcome based on averages of witnessed data/events

"Extrapolation" is the word you're looking for, for a superficial understanding of machine learning. "Average" isn't even remotely close.

Re: Rodney Brooks on limitations of generative AI

#115

Post by geoduck14 »

surfingdino wrote: post #110
aurareturn wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m still waiting for SalesForce to integrate an LLM into Slack so I can ask it business logic and decisions long lost. Still waiting for Microsoft to integrate an LLM into outlook so I can get a summary of a 20 email long chain I just got CCed into. I don’t think the iPod comparison is a valid one. People only have so much time to listen to music. Past a certain point, no one has enough good music they like to put i…

> integrate an LLM into Slack They are already training their models https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/trust/data-management/privacy-p... > Microsoft to integrate an LLM into outlook Unlikely to happen. Orgs that use MS products do not want content of emails leaking and LLMs leak. There is a real danger that an LLM will include information in the summary that does not come from the original email thread, but from other em…

>>Microsoft to integrate an LLM into outlook

Didn't they already do this? A friend of mine showed me his outlook where he could search all emails, docs, and video calls and ask it questions. To be fair, he and I asked it questions about a video call and a doc - but not any emails, we only searched emails.

This was last week amd it worked "mostly OK," but having a q/a conversation with a long email feels inevitable

Re: Rodney Brooks on limitations of generative AI

#116

Post by georgeecollins »

mjburgess wrote: post #103

Were one to slice the corpus callosum, and burn away the body, and poke out the eyes.. and pickle the brain, and everything else besides... and attach the few remaining neurones to a few remaining keys.. then out would come a program like ChatGPT's -- "do not run it yet!" the little worker ants say dying on their hills, out here each day: it's only version four -- not five! Queen Altman has told us: he's been busy in…

That's really nice-- did you just make that?

Re: Rodney Brooks on limitations of generative AI

#117

Post by derefr »

raincole wrote: post #111
fxtentacle wrote: post #13

To me, this reads like a very reasonable take. He suggests to limit the scope of the AI problem, add manual overrides in case there are unexpected situations, and he (rightly, in my opinion) predicts that the business case for exponentially scaling LLM models isn't there. With that context, I like his iPod example. Apple probably could have made a 3TB iPod to stick to Moore's law for another few years, but after they…

> Apple probably could have made a 3TB iPod It's a very weird comparison, as putting more music tracks to your iPod doesn't make them sound better, while giving a LLM more parameters/computing power make it smarter. Honestly it sounds like a typical "I've drawn my conclusion, and now I only need an analogy that remotely supports my conclusion" way of thinking.

No, it makes sense: he's coming at it from the perspective of knowing exactly what task you want to accomplish (something like "fixing the grammar in this document.") In such cases, a model only has to be sufficiently smart to work for 99.9999% of inputs — at which point you cross a threshold where adding more intelligence is just making the thing bulkier to download and process, to no end for your particular use-case.

In fact, you would then tend to go the other way — once you get the ML model to "solve the problem", you want to then find the smallest and most efficient such model that solves the problem. I.e. the model that is "as stupid as possible", while still being very good at this one thing.

Re: Rodney Brooks on limitations of generative AI

#118

Post by bamboozled »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #86

The iPod didn't stop growing. It turned into an iPhone - a much more complex system which happened to include iPod features, almost as a trivial add-on. If you consider LLMs as the iPod of ML, what would the iPhone equivalent be?

He made an analogy to discuss the business case for scaling an iPod, not whether or not new products and services would be invented. My iPhone still only has about 64gb of storage.

Re: Rodney Brooks on limitations of generative AI

#119

Post by oska »

lucubratory wrote: post #107
oska wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your responses indicate (at least to me) that you are, philosophically, a Materialist or a Physicalist. That's fine; I accept that's a philosophy of existence that one can hold (even though I personally find it sterile and nihilistic). However many, like me, do not subscribe to such a philosophy. We can avoid any argument between ppl who hold different philosophies but still want to discuss machine learning productiv…

Every scientist has to be a materialist, it comes from interacting with the world as it is. Most of them then keep their materialism in their personal life, but unfortunately some come home from work and stop thinking critically, embracing dualism or some other unprovable fantasies. If you want people engaging with the world and having correct ideas, you need to tolerate materialism because that's how that happens. I…

> Every scientist has to be a materialist

Quite obviously not true (and also untrue in a documented sense in that many great scientists have not been materialists). Science is a method, not a philosophical view of the world.

> it comes from interacting with the world as it is

That the world is materialistic is unproven (and not possible to prove).

You are simply propounding a materialist philosophy here. As I've said before, it's fine to have that philosophy. It's not fine to dogmatically push that view as 'reality' and then extend on that to build and push fantasies about 'artificial intelligence'. Again, we avoid all of this philosophical debate if we simply stick to the term 'machine learning'.

Re: Rodney Brooks on limitations of generative AI

#120

Post by derefr »

surfingdino wrote: post #110
aurareturn wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m still waiting for SalesForce to integrate an LLM into Slack so I can ask it business logic and decisions long lost. Still waiting for Microsoft to integrate an LLM into outlook so I can get a summary of a 20 email long chain I just got CCed into. I don’t think the iPod comparison is a valid one. People only have so much time to listen to music. Past a certain point, no one has enough good music they like to put i…

> integrate an LLM into Slack They are already training their models https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/trust/data-management/privacy-p... > Microsoft to integrate an LLM into outlook Unlikely to happen. Orgs that use MS products do not want content of emails leaking and LLMs leak. There is a real danger that an LLM will include information in the summary that does not come from the original email thread, but from other em…

> There is a real danger that an LLM will include information in the summary that does not come from the original email thread, but from other emails the model was trained on. You could learn from the summary that you are going to get fired, even though that was not a part of the original conversation. HR doesn't like that.

There could be separate personal fine-tunes per user, trained (in the cloud) on the contents of that user's mail database, which therefore have knowledge of exactly the mail that particular user can access, and nothing else.

AFAICT this is essentially what Apple is claiming they're doing to power their own "on-device contextual querying."

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