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Do AI companies work?

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Re: Do AI companies work?

#291

Post by 29athrowaway »

Just like supermarkets know what products you are buying, LLM inference providers what requests you are making. And just like supermarkets list the most profitable products and then clone them, LLM inference providers could come up with their own versions of the most profitable products based on LLMs.

My prediction is that the thin layer built on top of LLMs will be eaten up starting from the most profitable products.

By using inference APIs you are doing their market research for free.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#292

Post by romanhn »

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.

Significant (as in, directly impacting millions of people) geography-related disputes are in the news literally every day.

Medicine - COVID vaccines.

Science - global warming.

Unfortunately, humans and their politics are intertwined into more aspects of life than one might deem rational.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#293

Post by gleenn »

jcgrillo wrote: post #283
SrslyJosh wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

One of the rules of HN is to assume good intent. People do and say the right thing often even when it's antithetical to their source of income. If there is a substantive way to otherwise then say it, don't immediately write-off people's opinions, especially people in their fields because of a possibility of bias.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#294

Post by chx »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #279
ang_cire wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Fifteen was a massive success partially because Taylor was only 19 when she recorded it and so it sounded authentic. It's a human singing about her experiences. Also, the lyrics both on macro and micro levels is exceptionally well done and genuinely new.

In other words, in another area: you can take all the art made in the world before Guernica and throw it in any probabilistic network but for sure you won't get Guernica out of that.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#295

Post by jcgrillo »

gleenn wrote: post #293
jcgrillo wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

One of the rules of HN is to assume good intent. People do and say the right thing often even when it's antithetical to their source of income. If there is a substantive way to otherwise then say it, don't immediately write-off people's opinions, especially people in their fields because of a possibility of bias.

OK, but the post this was in response to was bloviating about all kinds of sci-fi stuff like "super-intelligence" and the like. It was the opposite of "antithetical to their source of income", instead it was playing into some techno-futurist faith cult.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#296

Post by vel0city »

shiroiushi wrote: post #262
kibwen wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

GPS turn-by-turn wasn't commonly available in the consumer space in 1995, but the first successful consumer turn-by-turn GPS came out 1998 with the Garmin StreetPilot. So close to 1995 but not quite there.

Still though, GPS navigation was definitely a common thing pre-iPhone. I remember being gifted a cheap one a few years before the iPhone came out. We didn't need smartphones to do GPS navigation. TomTom came out in 2004, three years before the iPhone launched and four years before Android had Google Maps with Turn by Turn navigation.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#297

Post by arminiusreturns »

charlescurt123 wrote: post #253
snapcaster wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, but it could help me make such a thing.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#298

Post by sobellian »

ryukoposting wrote: post #290

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 expon…

This stuff is going to get crammed through an algorithm orders of magnitude more efficient. We have living proof that it does not take 5GW to make a brain.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#299

Post by jamilton »

jcgrillo wrote: post #283
SrslyJosh wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

1. It's not actually refuting the point being made which is "it's seems hard to take advantage of LLMs' capabilities", which to me seems like a good point that stands on it's own, regardless of who is saying it.

2. The original post is, to my eyes, not implying anything about training a model to help use other models, so the second part seems irrelevant.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#300

Post by fwip »

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.

That's a pretty quick way to expose what information you're trying to keep secret.
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