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Rodney Brooks on limitations of generative AI

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Re: Rodney Brooks on limitations of generative AI

#171

Post by chumpro »

none_to_remain wrote: post #5

> Brooks explains that this could eventually lead to robots with useful language interfaces for people in care situations. I've been thinking, in Star Trek terms, what if it's not Lt. Cdr. Data, but just the Ship's Computer?

AI is a tool, not a thing. With better integration into the traditional programming environment it will become yet another programming tool.

This is basically like when programs went from being text based to UI based. Future software will have AI, LLMs, as a component/interface.

The "LLM is the program" is not adequate, reliable, scalable.

Re: Rodney Brooks on limitations of generative AI

#172

Post by locallost »

lostmsu wrote: post #113
locallost wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

...but still occasionally right on the money and often pretty close.

Re: Rodney Brooks on limitations of generative AI

#173

Post by roenxi »

Sharlin wrote: post #63
roenxi wrote: post #9

> He uses the iPod as an example. For a few iterations, it did in fact double in storage size from 10 all the way to 160GB. If it had continued on that trajectory, he figured out we would have an iPod with 160TB of storage by 2017, but of course we didn’t. I think Brooks' opinions will age poorly, but if anyone doesn't already know all the arguments for that they aren't interested in learning them now. This quote see…

Exponentials have a bad habit of turning into sigmoids due to fundamental physical and geometric, and also practical, constraints. There’s the thing called diminishing returns. Every proven technology reaches maturity; it happened to iPods, it happened to smartphones, it happened to digital cameras and so on. There’s still growth and improvement, but it’s greatly slowed down from the early days. But that’s not to say…

> That’s an entirely meaningless and nonsensical statement unless you have some rigorous way to quantify quality.

We have a qualitative measure of quantity, that was where the discussion started - size in bytes.

Storage size in bytes on a pocket iDevice seems to be growing exponentially. Brooks said it stopped doubling and I don't think that is true. iDevices are still doubling their storage size every 2-4 years or so and have been for a while. There was a one-time change to SSDs where they lost a few generations and they are only up to 1TB instead of 160TB (suggesting SSDs are around 7 generations behind HDD which seems reasonable on the face of it to me). But apart from that it has been a pretty steady doubling every few years.

His claim was that iPods didn't get to 160TB because it "nobody actually needed more than that" and that observation is misunderstanding what happened. Apple switched from HDD to SSD because SSD is a much better fit and put the rate of growth back by a few generations but the growth is still ongoing and probably will reach 100s of TB sooner or later.

He was right that iPods didn't need >a few gig of storage ... but that just meant Apple discontinued the iPod brand and replaced it with iPhones, where there is no usage barrier to consuming terabytes of storage. They were obsoleted by the very trend he claimed was over! It appears Apple thinks people did need more, because they aren't making iPods any more.

Re: Rodney Brooks on limitations of generative AI

#174

Post by t0bia_s »

I use Midjourney for my work here and there. It let me done job faster, however it would be useless without my years of experience with visual production. It still require knowledge of postprocessing, drawing, imagination, photomanipulation, creating assets... And a taste which is subjective but it helps a lot.

Aesthetic is complex subject but cannot be generated if task is more precise.

Re: Rodney Brooks on limitations of generative AI

#175

Post by mewpmewp2 »

Jensson wrote: post #162
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WHO exactly is treating them as human? It is a strawman.

Have you never seen someone say "ChatGPT is smarter than most humans"? Tons of people mistake knowledge and eloquence for intelligence, even here on HN, it isn't a strawman at all.

Not sure if said in such generic ways. You need to define what "smarter" means. E.g. ChatGPT probably outperforms most people at math. Does it make it smarter than most people?

Re: Rodney Brooks on limitations of generative AI

#176

Post by simianparrot »

surfingdino wrote: post #129
derefr wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 o…

> There could be separate personal fine-tunes per use Yes, but that contradicts the earlier claim that giving AI more info makes it better. If fact, those who send few emails or just joined may see worse results due to the lack of data. LLMs really make us hard to come up with ideas on how to solve problems that did not exist without LLMs.

A problem looking for a problem to solve is how I like to think of it

Re: Rodney Brooks on limitations of generative AI

#177

Post by surfingdino »

bongodongobob wrote: post #140
derefr wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asking questions about a document is one thing; asking questions that synthesize information across many documents — the human-intelligent equivalent of doing a big OLAP query with graph-search and fulltext-search parts on your email database — is quite another. Right now AFAICT the latter would require the full text of all the emails you've ever sent, to be stuffed into the context window together.

Yes this is already a thing. Copilot for m365 fine tunes on your entire orgs data.

So that's a hard stop for many orgs. Not everyone is supposed to see all of the org's data even if they work for it.

Re: Rodney Brooks on limitations of generative AI

#178

Post by bilalq »

> Panasonic Professor of Robotics Emeritus at MIT

Can someone translate what that means? I'm struggling to read past that line, since I just can't wrap my head around what a "Panasonic Professor" is. Does that word refer to something other than the corporation in this context?

Re: Rodney Brooks on limitations of generative AI

#179

Post by Dr_Birdbrain »

bilalq wrote: post #178

> Panasonic Professor of Robotics Emeritus at MIT Can someone translate what that means? I'm struggling to read past that line, since I just can't wrap my head around what a "Panasonic Professor" is. Does that word refer to something other than the corporation in this context?

I think it means it’s an endowed chair, where the endowment is provided by Panasonic.

It’s common for corporations or wealthy individuals to donate large amounts of money to fund prestigious academics.

Re: Rodney Brooks on limitations of generative AI

#180

Post by mjburgess »

georgeecollins wrote: post #116
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?

I did.
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