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Do AI companies work?

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Re: Do AI companies work?

#281

Post by noisy_boy »

p1necone wrote: post #236
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…

We're seeing much less of "it's making mistakes" these days. Is this because it's actually making less mistakes, or is it just because most people have used it enough now to know not to bother with anything complex?

They have trained us and we have fine tuned our questions.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#282

Post by britzsquad »

tqi wrote: post #255

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).

How about a good old financial crisis?

Re: Do AI companies work?

#283

Post by jcgrillo »

SrslyJosh wrote: post #252
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…

This is absolutely on point, I don't understand why your post is being down-voted.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#284

Post by Terr_ »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #144
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…

The big missing thing between both the metaphor in the OP's link and yours is that I just can't fathom any of these companies being able to raise a paying subscriber base that can actually cover the outrageous costs of this tech. It feels like a pipe dream. Putting aside that I fundamentally don't think AGI is in the tech tree of LLM, if you will, that there's no route from the latter to the former: even if there is,…

> I fundamentally don't think AGI is in the tech tree of LLM

There is a lot of hype and investor money running on the idea that if you make a really good text prediction engine, it will usefully impersonate a reasoning AI.

Even worse is the hype that a extraordinarily good text prediction engine will usefully impersonate a reasoning AI that usefully impersonating a specialized AI.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#285

Post by valine »

johnsutor wrote: post #258
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

Not really the first paper is just fine-tuning on synthetic data. The second paper doesn’t optimize the model weights.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#286

Post by Terr_ »

winwang wrote: post #266
namaria wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

If you trace the etymology of computer in English, it means something like "small chalk/limestone pebbles used for counting do-er." (See Latin "calx".)

Re: Do AI companies work?

#287

Post by pier25 »

tqi wrote: post #255

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).

What about nothing?

Only vcs need something new to hype.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#288

Post by mvdtnz »

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.

This is just another way of saying this technology, like Blockchain before it, is a solution in search of a problem.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#289

Post by cubefox »

hatthew wrote: post #263
cubefox wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would say people call NPCs "AI" only for historical reasons. Typically handwritten algorithms are not called AI nowadays.

I'm not sure, but I think statistical regression already specifies a simple model (e.g. a linear one), while the approach with neural networks doesn't make such strong assumptions about the model.

I actually think linear regression isn't usually called ML in practice. Anyway, I meant something like neural networks.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#290

Post by ryukoposting »

I don't really buy the "cost of hardware" portion of the argument, even if everything else seems sound. In 1992 if you wanted 3D graphics, you'd call up SGI and drop $25,000 on an Indigo 2. 6 years later, you could walk into Circuit City and buy a Voodoo2 for 300 bucks, slap it in the PC you already owned, and call it a day.

I know we aren't in the 90s. I know that the cost of successive process nodes has grown exponentially, even when normalizing for inflation. But, still. I'd be wary of betting the farm on AI being eternally confined to giant, expensive special-purpose hardware.

This stuff is going to get crammed into a little special purpose chip dangling off your phone's CPU. Either that, or GPU compute will become so commodified that it'll be a cheap throw-in for any given VPS.

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