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Do AI companies work?

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Re: Do AI companies work?

#251

Post by TRiG_Ireland »

vrosas wrote: post #117
martin_drapeau wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure it does. Ask any common mortal about AI and they'll mention ChatGPT - not Claude, Gemini or whatever else. They might not even know OpenAI. But they do know ChatGPT. Has it become a verb yet? Waiting to peole to replace "I googled how to..." with "I chatgpted how to...".

I see that a lot already. “I asked ChatGPT for a list of places to visit in Vermont and we planned our road trip around that!”

People relying on ChatGPT, or asking it for information, just confuse me.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#252

Post by SrslyJosh »

LASR wrote: post #147

I lead an applied AI research team where I work - which is a mid-sized public enterprise products company. I've been saying this in my professional circles quite often. We talk about scaling laws, superintelligence, AGI etc. But there is another threshold - the ability for humans to leverage super-intelligence. It's just incredibly hard to innovate on products that fully leverage superintelligence. At some point, AI…

> I lead an applied AI research team where I work

Your paycheck depends on people believing the hype. Therefore, anything you say about "superintelligence" (LOL) is pretty suspect.

> Getting AI to do work involves getting AI to understand what needs to be done from highly bandwidth constrained humans using mouse / keyboard / voice to communicate.

So, what, you're going to build a model to instruct the model? And how do we instruct that model?

This is such a transparent scam, I'm embarrassed on behalf of our species.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#253

Post by charlescurt123 »

snapcaster wrote: post #155
jfengel wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never gave much thought to the Turing test one way or the other. It never struck me as especially informative. I've always been more interested in the non-verbal aspects of human intelligence. I believe that "true AGI", whatever that is, is likely to be able to mimic sentient but non-verbal species. I'd like to see an AGI do what a dog or cat does. LLMs are quite astonishing at mimicking something humans specifical…

What do you think a dog or cat does that can't be replicated by LLMs?

continually learn with a fixed computational budget over massively extended task horizons.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#254

Post by SrslyJosh »

troupo wrote: post #212
LASR wrote: post #147

I lead an applied AI research team where I work - which is a mid-sized public enterprise products company. I've been saying this in my professional circles quite often. We talk about scaling laws, superintelligence, AGI etc. But there is another threshold - the ability for humans to leverage super-intelligence. It's just incredibly hard to innovate on products that fully leverage superintelligence. At some point, AI…

> In my mind, already with GPT-4, we're not generating ideas fast enough on how best to leverage it. It's a token prediction machine. We've already generated most of the ideas for it, and hardly any of them work because see below > Getting AI to do work involves getting AI to understand what needs to be done from highly bandwidth constrained humans using mouse / keyboard / voice to communicate. No. Gettin AI to work…

> hallucinates and generates invalid data

The model is doing the exact same thing when it generates "correct" output as it does when it generates "incorrect" output.

"Hallucination" is a misleading term, cooked up by people who either don't understand what's going on or who want to make it sound like the fundamental problems (models aren't intelligent, can't reason, and attach zero meaning to their input or output) can be solved with enough duct tape.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#255

Post by tqi »

Personally, I think the more interesting question is: if not AI then what? I doubt we will go back to Metaverse (lol) or Crypto, B2B SaaS seems safe but stagnant (and competing over a largely fixed pie of IT spend). It feels like it doesn't matter if the companies work-- until there is something shinier to invest in it will be the defacto choice for LPs chasing returns (and VCs chasing carry).

Re: Do AI companies work?

#256

Post by pas »

kibwen wrote: post #217
felideon wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguably form factor, i.e. smartphones and tablets. Whether you think that's incremental or not is subjective, I guess. I would say incremental, but it does solve a different set of problems (connectedness, mobility) than the PC.

Smartphones and tablets aren't PC replacements, they're TV replacements. Even we, deep into the throes of the smartphone age, still need to use real computers to do the tasks we were using them for in 1995, e.g. programming and word processing.

The fact that computing went through yet another phase transition with mobile is pretty much undisputed. Battery tech, energy efficient chips, screens, radios, solid-state storage, etc. Of course it's not the same as a desktop/notebook, because it's optimized for being in our pockets/hands not put on a desk. (But the compute power is there, plug in peripherals and many phones easily beat a desktop even from ~10-15 years ago.)

It remains to be seen where LLMs and this crop of ML tech can go in the garden of forking paths, and whether they can reach truly interesting places.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#257

Post by ddfs123 »

LASR wrote: post #239
yibg wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* We're seeing much less of "it's making mistakes" these days.* Perhaps less than before, but still making very fundamental errors. Anything involving number I'm automatically suspicious. Pretty frequently I'd get different answers for the same question (to a human). e.g. ChatGPT will give an effective tax rate of n for some income amount. Then when asked to break down the calculation will come up with an effective t…

Yes. Numbers / math is pretty much instant hallucination. But. Try this approach instead: have it generate python code, with print statements before every bit of math it performs. It will write pretty good code, which you then execute to generate the actual answer. Simpler example: paste in a paragraph of text, ask it to count the number of words. The answer will be incorrect most of the time. Instead, ask it to out…

>I wouldn't be able to simply look at some text and give you an accurate word count.

I actually think you would, lots of time I've been surprised by how accurate people can eye-ball stuffs.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#258

Post by johnsutor »

valine wrote: post #227

This period of model scaling at all cost is going to be a major black eye on the industry in a couple years. We already know that language models are few shot learners at inference time, and yet OpenAI seems to be happy throwing petaflops of compute training models the slow way. The question is how can you use in-context learning to optimize the model weights. It’s a fun math problem and it certainly won’t take a bil…

Seems like this is already being answered:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.10930 https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.04439

Re: Do AI companies work?

#259

Post by miunau »

alexashka wrote: post #150
mellosouls wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure the Wikipedia example is a strong one as that site has it's own serious problems with "abusive monopolies" in its moderator cliques and biases (as with any social platform). At least with the current big AI players there is the potential for differentiation through competition. Unless there is some similar initiative with the Wikipedias, the problem of single supplier dominance is a difficult one to see…

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…

This seems like the kinda thing one would write while drunk off their keister.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#260

Post by rpcope1 »

pavlov wrote: post #140
ActionHank wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The car wasn't a horse that was better, but a car has not changed drastically since they went mainstream. They've gotten better, more efficient, loaded with tech, but are still roughly 4 seats, 4 doors, 4 wheels, driven by petroleum. I know that this is a massive oversimplification, but I think we have seen the "shape" of LLMs\Gen AI\AI products already and it's all incremental improvements from here on out with more…

Feels like someone might have said this in 1981 about personal computers. "We've pretty much seen their shape. The IBM PC isn't fundamentally very different from the Apple II. Probably it's just all incremental improvements from here on out."

I mean, were they actually wrong though?
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