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Do AI companies work?

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Re: Do AI companies work?

#261

Post by Terr_ »

SrslyJosh wrote: post #254
troupo wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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) c…

I like the analogy of an Ouija board: "This magical conduit to supernatural forces sometimes gives out nonsense, but soon we'll fix it so that it always channels the correct ghosts and spirits."

Re: Do AI companies work?

#262

Post by shiroiushi »

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.

Smartphones let us do some tasks we couldn't do at all in 1995, such as GPS turn-by-turn navigation.

Sure, they also do other tasks we were already doing in 1995: mobile telephony, mobile TV watching (we had portable handheld TVs back then--they were awful but they worked), mobile music listening (Sony Walkman), easy-to-use photography, but there's some things that we couldn't do at all before this technology became mainstream, like mobile banking.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#263

Post by hatthew »

cubefox wrote: post #238
llm_trw wrote: post #31

I've found that everything that works stops being called AI. Logic programming? AI until SQL came out. Now it's not AI. OCR, computer algebra systems, voice recognition, checkers, machine translation, go, natural language search. All solved, all not AI any more yet all were AI before they got solved by AI researchers. There's even a name for it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect?utm_source=perplex...

I think the best definition is AI = machine learning Yes, that makes a convolutional net trained on recognizing digits an AI.

What about computer characters in video games? They're usually controlled by a system that everyone calls AI, but there's almost never any machine learning involved. What about fitting a line to a curve, i.e. linear regression? Definitely ML, but most people don't call it AI.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#264

Post by shiroiushi »

ForHackernews wrote: post #215
pavlov wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

And that's more or less true? By 1989 certainly, we had word processors, spreadsheets, email, BBSes. We have better versions of everything today, but fundamentally, yes, the "shape" of the personal computer was firmly established by the late 1980s. Anyone comfortable with MS-DOS Shell would not be totally lost on a modern desktop.

Anyone comfortable with a UNIX workstation from the late 1980s wouldn't be lost at all on a modern Linux desktop.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#265

Post by furyofantares »

dartos wrote: post #37
malfist wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a saying in the stock market that probably applies here: past performance does not indicate future performance. Getting lucky twice is a row is really really lucky. Getting lucky three times in a row is not more likely because they were lucky two times in a row

It may be getting lucky, or it may be that they have really great leadership. Very few other large tech companies have deep technical competence at CEO level leadership

It's definitely both at the same time.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#266

Post by winwang »

namaria wrote: post #175
llm_trw wrote: post #31

I've found that everything that works stops being called AI. Logic programming? AI until SQL came out. Now it's not AI. OCR, computer algebra systems, voice recognition, checkers, machine translation, go, natural language search. All solved, all not AI any more yet all were AI before they got solved by AI researchers. There's even a name for it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect?utm_source=perplex...

I've said it before, AI is the default way to hype technology. A hundred years ago computers were 'electronic brains'. It goes dormant after loosing its edge and then re-emerges when some research project gains traction again.

"Computer" in (simplified) Chinese is still "电脑" -- literally "electric/electronic brain".

Re: Do AI companies work?

#267

Post by winwang »

analog31 wrote: post #40
llm_trw wrote: post #31

I've found that everything that works stops being called AI. Logic programming? AI until SQL came out. Now it's not AI. OCR, computer algebra systems, voice recognition, checkers, machine translation, go, natural language search. All solved, all not AI any more yet all were AI before they got solved by AI researchers. There's even a name for it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect?utm_source=perplex...

On an amusing note, I've read something similar: Everything that works stops being called philosophy. Science and math being the two familiar examples.

Is the contrapositive of this "philsophers (are those who) do stuff which don't work"? :P

Re: Do AI companies work?

#270

Post by shiroiushi »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #242
WhyOhWhyQ wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with everything you said in your previous post. The LLM as a search engine might basically eat Google's lunch in the same way the internet ate cable tv's lunch. Cable tv was a terrible product due to the advertising, and you could escape the BS by watching stuff online. Now look where we are.

Fun fact: Cable itself was originally the ad-free "premium" version of over-the-air television! And it eventually added some ads and then more ads and now we're at present day, where you get roughly 8 minutes of ads per 22 minutes of content. I noticed visiting a hotel recently (like fuck I pay for cable!) that their cable service had sped up the intro of Law and Order SVU , presumably to make room for more advertise…

>I noticed visiting a hotel recently (like fuck I pay for cable!) that their cable service had sped up the intro of Law and Order SVU, presumably to make room for more advertisements.

That's pretty smart of them! It makes sense to try to increase the time for ads, and decrease the time for the TV show; maybe next they can just cut the credits, or cut out parts of each act in the show. There's no reason not to. After all, the only people still paying for cable TV subscriptions are elderly people who absolutely refuse to give up their reruns of decades-old shows and also refuse to learn how to use Hulu, so they'll happily pay $150/month so they can watch 70s shows with even worse video quality than TVs in the 70s had.

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