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Do AI companies work?

benn.substack.com

361–370 of 457 posts

Re: Do AI companies work?

#361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I disagree. The comment is striking directly at the claim that people aren't taking "advantage of LLMs' capabilities". This is their capability and no amount of "clear communication" is going to change that

Re: Do AI companies work?

#362
post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is a strong argument that super-intelligence is already in the rear-view mirror. My computer is better than me at almost everything at this point; creativity, communication, scientific knowledge, numerical processing, etc. There is a tiny sliver of things that I've spent a life working on where I can consistently outperform a CPU, but it is not at all clear how that could be defensible given the strides AI has…

>My computer is better than me at almost everything at this point; creativity, communication, scientific knowledge

By that logic, libraries, art museums and calculators are "super intelligent"

Re: Do AI companies work?

#363

I am wondering where exactly are the AI products. I am not talking about boring, nerd stuff but rather about products that are well-known (to the point where non-technical users have heard of them) and are used on a daily basis by a significant amount of people. Currently only ChatGPT fits this bill despite the fact that the "AI revolution" is nearly two years old at this point.

Well, hype up trash products on the iOS app store for example. Search AI there. Hundreds of useless things.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#364

I am wondering where exactly are the AI products. I am not talking about boring, nerd stuff but rather about products that are well-known (to the point where non-technical users have heard of them) and are used on a daily basis by a significant amount of people. Currently only ChatGPT fits this bill despite the fact that the "AI revolution" is nearly two years old at this point.

> I am wondering where exactly are the AI products

ChatGPT is most popular and often in news, because it is the first of its kind(after siri/cortana) which was accessible to general public. I think, I have seen at least 100+ indie and commercial wrappers/apps offering access to better chat interface and common place to access various models from OAI/Anthropic/Mistral. At least one business I read about this weekend uses OAI API to ingest and summarize extensive mountain of documents to simplify some sort of regulatory certification process for medical device manufacturers. There was another one, which allowed a virtual assistant with basic activity ability(book appointments, write emails, transcribe phone calls, summarize letters etc.)

Things will come eventually, as more and more people get access to the APIs and access becomes cheap(current model of per-token price is still immensely expensive imho) and general people do not understand what context is, what embedding is, what exactly is a model, what is an API.

AI was/is being used massively in medical sector, defense/military, fraud detection(finance) and various other sectors for decades or more. Unfortunately, those applications are behind closed door and do not need to drum up public interest or investments directly as those are already well financed and usually referred to as ML/DL/CV etc.

For example, I was doing an internship many many years back where my employer was using "AI"(though it was not referred to as such) to combine vision, noise, vibration, pressure and hundreds of other data to detect hit-n-run, break-in crimes, structural damage, prediction of collapse of large structures etc. and these were prominently used by insurance as well as some public service offices. These were specialized things, and outside of their closed doors, no one was interested about these.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#365
post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a strong argument that super-intelligence is already in the rear-view mirror. My computer is better than me at almost everything at this point; creativity, communication, scientific knowledge, numerical processing, etc. There is a tiny sliver of things that I've spent a life working on where I can consistently outperform a CPU, but it is not at all clear how that could be defensible given the strides AI has…

>My computer is better than me at almost everything at this point; creativity, communication, scientific knowledge By that logic, libraries, art museums and calculators are "super intelligent"

Are you in the habit of talking to your calculator?

Re: Do AI companies work?

#366
post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is a strong argument that super-intelligence is already in the rear-view mirror. My computer is better than me at almost everything at this point; creativity, communication, scientific knowledge, numerical processing, etc. There is a tiny sliver of things that I've spent a life working on where I can consistently outperform a CPU, but it is not at all clear how that could be defensible given the strides AI has…

> The typical AI seems more capable than the typical human to me

Your microwave is more capable than a typical human.

If of course your definition of capabilities is narrowly defined to computations and ignores the huge array of things humans can do that computers are no where close to.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#367
post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is a strong argument that super-intelligence is already in the rear-view mirror. My computer is better than me at almost everything at this point; creativity, communication, scientific knowledge, numerical processing, etc. There is a tiny sliver of things that I've spent a life working on where I can consistently outperform a CPU, but it is not at all clear how that could be defensible given the strides AI has…

You forget energy efficiency friend. We are FAR more efficient...

Re: Do AI companies work?

#368
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.e. long story short - are you saying that this tech is a solution looking for a problem?

Makes sense.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#369
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Logic programming? AI until SQL came out. Now it's not AI. logic programming is not directly linked to SQL, and has its own AI term now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOFAI .

The original SQL was essentially Prolog restricted to relational algebra and tuple relational calculus. SQL as is happened when a lot of cruft was added to the mathematical core.

[deleted]

Re: Do AI companies work?

#370

I am wondering where exactly are the AI products. I am not talking about boring, nerd stuff but rather about products that are well-known (to the point where non-technical users have heard of them) and are used on a daily basis by a significant amount of people. Currently only ChatGPT fits this bill despite the fact that the "AI revolution" is nearly two years old at this point.

I am pretty sure we will see communication devices to surpass any language barriers within the next few years. The technology is already there, but not accessible to the broad masses in a fast and convenient enough way. Already, people are using their phones to break language barriers (Google lens, translation websites), but this will become much more common.
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