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Do AI companies work?

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Re: Do AI companies work?

#191

Post by alexashka »

christianqchung wrote: post #157
alexashka wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can solve Wikipedia's woes quite easily - Wikipedia should limit itself to math, science, engineering, medicine, physics, chemistry, geography and other disciplines that are not at all in dispute. Politics, history, religion and other topics of conversation that are matters of opinion, taste and state sponsored propaganda need to be off limits. Its mission ought to be to provide a PhD level education in all technic…

Is this satire? All of those industries listed significant disputes. If this is serious it's a concerning view of how science actually works.

Please name me these 'significant' disputes. Start with math.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#192

Post by thfuran »

namaria wrote: post #185
thfuran wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been something like half a billion years since the first brain.

That was a much smaller model, couldn't do much more than crawl around and run away.

It was still used as part of pretraining the current model.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#193

Post by arbuge »

> What, then, is an LLM vendor’s moat? Brand? Inertia? A better set of applications built on top of their core models? An ever-growing bonfire of cash that keeps its models a nose ahead of a hundred competitors?

Missed one I think... the expertise accumulated in building the prior generation models, that are not themselves that useful anymore.

Yes, it's true that will be lost if everybody leaves, a point he briefly mentions in the article. But presumably AWS would also be in trouble, sooner or later, if everybody who knows how things work left. Retaining at least some good employees is tablestakes for any successful company long-term.

Brand and inertia also don't quite capture the customer lock-in that happens with these models. It's not just that you have to rewrite the code to interface with a competitor's LLM; it's that that LLM might now behave very differently than the one you were using earlier, and give you unexpected (and undesirable) results.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#194

Post by VirusNewbie »

torginus wrote: post #181
bradhilton wrote: post #114

Kind of feels like the ride-sharing early days. Lots of capital being plowed into a handful of companies to grab market share. Economics don't really make sense in the short term because the vast majority of cash flows are still far in the future (Zero to One). In the end the best funded company, Uber, is now the most valuable (~$150B). Lyft, the second best funded, is 30x smaller. Are there any other serious ride sh…

Uber is not really a tech company though - its moat is not technology but market domination. If it, along with all of its competitors were to disappear tomorrow, the power vacuum would be filled in very short order, as the core technology is not very hard to master. It's a fundamentally different beast from AI companies.

How is it not a tech company? They're literally trying to approximate TSP in the way that makes them money. In addition, they're constantly optimizing for surge pricing to maximize ROI. What kind of problems do you think those are?

Re: Do AI companies work?

#195

Post by skydhash »

Alex-Programs wrote: post #163
datavirtue wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"In my mind, already with GPT-4, we're not generating ideas fast enough on how best to leverage it." This is the main bottle neck, in my kind. A lot of people are missing from the conversation because they don't understand AI fully. I keep getting glimpses of ideas and possibilities and chatting through a browser ain't one of them. On e we have more young people trained on this and comfortable with the tech and under…

Just the fact that I can have something proficient in language trivially accessible to me is really useful. I'm working on something that uses LLMs (language translation), but besides that I think it's brilliant that I can just ask an LLM to summarise my prompt in a way that gets the point across in far fewer tokens. When I forget a word, I can give it a vague description and it'll find it. I'm terrible at writing em…

> I can benchmark the quality of one LLM's translation by asking another to critique it

Do you speak two or more languages? Anyone that does is wary of automated translations, especially across estranged cultures.

> It's a new tool in the toolbox, one that we haven't had in our seventy years of working on computers,

It's data analysis at scale, and reliant on scrapping what humans produced. A word processor does not need TB of eBooks to do it's job.

> They're bad at mathematics, forgetful, imprecise, and yet they're incredible at poetry and soft tasks.

Because there's no wrong or right about poetry. Would you be comfortable having LLMs managing your bank account?

> If everyone asked for help with every little problem she'd be unable to do anything else.

That would be hand-holding, not learning.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#196

Post by pzs »

foobiekr wrote: post #104
bhouston wrote: post #90

I think we are in the middle of a steep S-curve of technology innovation. It is far from plateauing and there are still a bunch of major innovations that are likely to shift things even further. Interesting time and these companies are riding a wild wave. It is likely some will actually win big, but most will die - similar to previous technology revolutions. The ones that win will win not just on technology, but on t…

In particular: "There is, however, one enormous difference that I didn’t think about: You can’t build a cloud vendor overnight. Azure doesn’t have to worry about a few executives leaving and building a worldwide network of data centers in 18 months." This isn't true at all. There are like 8 of these companies stood up in the last three or four years fueled by massive investment of sovereign funds - mostly the saudi,…

"The real problem is the ROI on AI spending is.. pretty much zero. The commonly asserted use cases are the following: Chatbots Developer tools RAG/search"

I agree with you that ROI on _most_ AI spending is indeed poor, but AI is more than LLM's. Alas, what used to be called AI before the onset of the LLM era is not deemed sexy today, even though it can still make very good ROI when it is the appropriate tool for solving a problem.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#197

Post by namaria »

thfuran wrote: post #192
namaria wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was a much smaller model, couldn't do much more than crawl around and run away.

It was still used as part of pretraining the current model.

Nonsense, the current model is a new architectural approach.

It was all explained in that recent paper, "Attention is all your meat"

Re: Do AI companies work?

#198

Post by Tarsul »

Nemi wrote: post #171
culebron21 wrote: post #162

I think the article contradicts itself, missing some simple math. Contradicting points: 1. it takes huge and increasing costs to build newer models, models approached asymptote 2. a startup can take an open-source model and get you out of business in 18 months (with CocaCola example) The size of LLM is what protects them from being attacked by startups. Microsoft's operating profit in 2022 was $72B, which is 10x bigg…

So riddle me this - Netflix’s revenue is around $9.5B. So a little more than the running costs of OpenAI. Do you think it is plausible that they will be able to get enough people to pay for OpenAI that Netflix? They would need much more revenue than Netflix to make it viable. Considering that there are other options available, like Google’s, MSFT’s, Anthropic’s, etc. As a business model, this is all very suspect. GPT…

That's Netflix's revenue for a single quarter, not year. (nonetheless, your point is relevant)

Re: Do AI companies work?

#199

Post by chatmasta »

foobiekr wrote: post #104
bhouston wrote: post #90

I think we are in the middle of a steep S-curve of technology innovation. It is far from plateauing and there are still a bunch of major innovations that are likely to shift things even further. Interesting time and these companies are riding a wild wave. It is likely some will actually win big, but most will die - similar to previous technology revolutions. The ones that win will win not just on technology, but on t…

In particular: "There is, however, one enormous difference that I didn’t think about: You can’t build a cloud vendor overnight. Azure doesn’t have to worry about a few executives leaving and building a worldwide network of data centers in 18 months." This isn't true at all. There are like 8 of these companies stood up in the last three or four years fueled by massive investment of sovereign funds - mostly the saudi,…

While it might be possible for a deep-pocketed organization to spin up a cloud provider overnight, it doesn't mean that people will use it. In general, the switching cost of migrating compute infrastructure from one service to another is much higher than the switching cost of changing the LLM used for inference.

Amazon doesn't need to worry about suddenly losing its entire customer base to Alibaba, Yandex, or Oracle.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#200

Post by sillyLLM »

I think a selling point for LLMs would be to match you with people that you find perfect for that use case. For example a team for a job, a wife, real friends, clubs for sharing hobbies, for finding the best people mastering something you want to accomplish. Unfortunately we and LLMs don't know how to match people in that way.
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