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Do AI companies work?

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Re: Do AI companies work?

#271

Post by lmm »

nine_k wrote: post #74
cageface wrote: post #35

It seems very difficult to build a moat around a product when the product is supposed to be a generally capable tool and the input is English text. The more truly generally intelligent these models get the more interchangeable they become. It's too easy to swap one out for another.

Humans are the ultimate generally intelligent agents available on this planet. Even though most of them (us) are replaceable for mundane tasks, quite some are unique enough so that people seek their particular services and no one else's. And this is among the pool of about eight billion such agents.

> Even though most of them (us) are replaceable for mundane tasks, quite some are unique enough so that people seek their particular services and no one else's.

Very few people manage that - indeed I can't think of anyone. Even movie stars get replaced with other movie stars if they try to charge too much. Certainly everyone in the tech industry (including the CEOs, the VCs, the investors etc.) has a viable substitute.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#272

Post by Terr_ »

nineteen999 wrote: post #169
bhouston wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The real problem is the ROI on AI spending is.. pretty much zero. Companies in user acquisition/growth mode tend to have low internal ROI, but remember both Facebook and Google has the same issue -- then they introduced ads and all was well with their finances. Similar things will happen here.

So I go to ask an LLM to answer to a question and it starts trying to sell me products I don't want or need? I'll need to filter it's output through a locally run adblock LLM which detects/flags/strips out advertising text before delivering the output. Hmmm.

I still have this pipe-dream of an augmented reality system where you can walk through the grocery store and it will superimpose a warning label over any brand connected to a company on the individual user's shit-list.

For many decades consumers have been told that the magnanimous "Free Market" (multiple definitions) is empowering them to vote with their wallets, however some of those same groups start acting rather suspiciously when faced with the possibility consumers might ever exercise that power.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#273

Post by Terr_ »

sushid wrote: post #133
foobiekr wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> And RAG has many, many issues with document permissions Why can't these providers access all documents and when answers are prompted, self-censor if the reply has references to documents that the end users do not have access permissions? In fact, I'm pretty sure that's how existing RAGaaS providers are handling document/file permissions.

Would the texts of those documents be part of the LLM training data? If so, there's an reliable way to keep a determined user from fetching stuff back out.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#274

Post by ang_cire »

Havoc wrote: post #229
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…

> It's just incredibly hard to innovate on products that fully leverage superintelligence. Once we have actual super intelligence there is no need for humans to innovate anymore. It is by definition better than us anyway. I guess you could still have artisanal innovation

Today I carved a front panel for my cyberdeck project out of a composite wood board. I hand-drafted everything, and planned out the wiring (though I won't be onto the soldering phase for a while now). It felt good. I don't think having a 3d printer + AI designing my cyberdeck would feel the same.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#275

Post by bronco21016 »

digging wrote: post #219
OJFord wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've kind of done it in reverse with AI though - 'chatbots' have been universally shit for ages, and now we have good ones, but they're 'AI'.

Chatbot is the form factor; LLMs are what is being called AI. SmarterChild wasn't an LLM.

There's a throwback. I hear the dial up modem now!

Re: Do AI companies work?

#276

Post by shiroiushi »

alexashka wrote: post #191
christianqchung wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well for medicine, there's alternative medicines like chiropractic and homeopathy. According to some people, these are snake oil and quackery, but many others swear by them, and many healthcare systems even provide these treatments despite the complete lack of scientific backing.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#277

Post by adamc »

tonyarkles wrote: post #237
adamc wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say smartphones and tablets are new devices, not, per se, PCs. Smartphones did bring something huge to the table, and exploded accordingly. But here we are, less than 2 decades from their introduction and... the pace of improvement has gone back to being incremental at best.

They're, at a minimum, PC replacements in the sense that I'm currently on the Internet and posting on a message board from my bathtub instead of needing to go over to my desk to do that.

When people go shopping for a PC, they don't buy a cell phone. Both can connect to the internet, but they're different products.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#278

Post by _heimdall »

bennettnate5 wrote: post #235
Animats wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Perhaps less than before, but still making very fundamental errors. Yes. Suppose someone developed a way to get a reliable confidence metric out of an LLM. Given that, much more useful systems can be built. Only high-confidence outputs can be used to initiate action. For low-confidence outputs, chain of reasoning tactics can be tried. Ask for a simpler question. Ask the LLM to divide the question into sub-questions…

I remember watching IBM's Watson soundly beat Ken Jennings on Jeapordy. One of the things that sticks out most to me about the memory is that Watson had a confidence rating score for each answer it gave (and there were a few questions for which it had very low confidence). I didn't realize it at the time, but that was actually pretty impressive given the overconfidence issues LLMs have nowadays. Of course, citing sou…

Providing sources gets interesting to because (a) LLMs have been known to hallucinate nonexistent sources and (b) there isn't a perfect way of knowing whether the source itself was generated by an LLM and contains hallucinations.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#279

Post by FridgeSeal »

ang_cire wrote: post #274
Havoc wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's just incredibly hard to innovate on products that fully leverage superintelligence. Once we have actual super intelligence there is no need for humans to innovate anymore. It is by definition better than us anyway. I guess you could still have artisanal innovation

Today I carved a front panel for my cyberdeck project out of a composite wood board. I hand-drafted everything, and planned out the wiring (though I won't be onto the soldering phase for a while now). It felt good . I don't think having a 3d printer + AI designing my cyberdeck would feel the same.

Yeah I think the whole “humans won’t need to do ” argument misses is the fundamental human aspect.

Computers might do some things “better” than humans, but we’re still going to do things because we _want_ to. Often the fun is in the doing.

LLM’s can vomit out code faster than me, I still enjoy writing software. They’ll vomit out a novel or a song, but I still like reading/listening to stuff a human has taken time and effort to create something, because they can.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#280

Post by jcgrillo »

Havoc wrote: post #229
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…

> It's just incredibly hard to innovate on products that fully leverage superintelligence. Once we have actual super intelligence there is no need for humans to innovate anymore. It is by definition better than us anyway. I guess you could still have artisanal innovation

Get back to me when you actually have superintelligence ;)... I'll wait.
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