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Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

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Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#31

Post by anon7000 »

petesergeant wrote: post #14
AlotOfReading wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't "solve" autonomous driving as such. There's a long, slow grind of gradually improving things until failures become rare enough.

I wonder at what point all the self-driving code becomes replaceable with a multimodal generalist model with the prompt “drive safely”

Very advanced machine learning models are used in current self driving cars. It all depends what the model is trying to accomplish. I have a hard time seeing a generalist prompt-based generative model ever beating a model specifically designed to drive cars. The models are just designed for different, specific purposes

Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#33

Post by AdieuToLogic »

furyofantares wrote: post #21
AdieuToLogic wrote: post #17

It's an interesting presentation, no doubt. The analogies eventually fail as analogies usually do. A recurring theme presented, however, is that LLM's are somehow not controlled by the corporations which expose them as a service. The presenter made certain to identify three interested actors (governments, corporations, "regular people") and how LLM offerings are not controlled by governments. This is a bit disingenuo…

> The presenter made certain to identify three interested actors (governments, corporations, "regular people") and how LLM offerings are not controlled by governments. This is a bit disingenuous. I don't think that's what he said, he was identifying the first customers and uses.

>> A recurring theme presented, however, is that LLM's are somehow not controlled by the corporations which expose them as a service. The presenter made certain to identify three interested actors (governments, corporations, "regular people") and how LLM offerings are not controlled by governments. This is a bit disingenuous.

> I don't think that's what he said, he was identifying the first customers and uses.

The portion of the presentation I am referencing starts at or near 12:50[0]. Here is what was said:

  I wrote about this one particular property that strikes me
  as very different this time around.  It's that LLM's like
  flip they flip the direction of technology diffusion that
  is usually present in technology.

  So for example with electricity, cryptography, computing,
  flight, internet, GPS, lots of new transformative that have
  not been around.

  Typically it is the government and corporations that are
  the first users because it's new expensive etc. and it only
  later diffuses to consumer.  But I feel like LLM's are kind
  of like flipped around.

  So maybe with early computers it was all about ballistics
  and military use, but with LLM's it's all about how do you
  boil an egg or something like that.  This is certainly like
  a lot of my use.  And so it's really fascinating to me that
  we have a new magical computer it's like helping me boil an
  egg.

  It's not helping the government do something really crazy
  like some military ballistics or some special technology.
Note the identification of historic government interest in computing along with a flippant "regular person" scenario in the context of "technology diffusion."

You are right in that the presenter identified "first customers", but this is mentioned in passing when viewed in context. Perhaps I should not have characterized this as "a recurring theme." Instead, a better categorization might be:

  The presenter minimized the control corporations have by
  keeping focus on governmental topics and trivial customer
  use-cases.
0 - https://youtu.be/LCEmiRjPEtQ?t=770

Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#34

Post by throwawayoldie »

_kb wrote: post #28
throwawayoldie wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm old enough to remember when Twitter was new, and for a moment it felt like the old utopian promise of the Internet finally fulfilled: ordinary people would be able to talk, one-on-one and unmediated, with other ordinary people across the world, and in the process we'd find out that we're all more similar than different and mainly want the same things out of life, leading to a new era of peace and empathy. It was…

Believe it or not, humans did in fact have forms of written language and communication prior to twitter.

You missed the point, but that's fine, it happens.

Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#35

Post by tock »

throwawayoldie wrote: post #16
reducesuffering wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I'm old enough to remember when Twitter was new, and for a moment it felt like the old utopian promise of the Internet finally fulfilled: ordinary people would be able to talk, one-on-one and unmediated, with other ordinary people across the world, and in the process we'd find out that we're all more similar than different and mainly want the same things out of life, leading to a new era of peace and empathy. It was…

I believe the opposite happened. People found out that there are huge groups of people with wildly differing views on morality from them and that just encouraged more hate. I genuinely think old school facebook where people only interacted with their own private friend circles is better.

Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#36

Post by distalx »

AdieuToLogic wrote: post #17

It's an interesting presentation, no doubt. The analogies eventually fail as analogies usually do. A recurring theme presented, however, is that LLM's are somehow not controlled by the corporations which expose them as a service. The presenter made certain to identify three interested actors (governments, corporations, "regular people") and how LLM offerings are not controlled by governments. This is a bit disingenuo…

Hang in there! Your comment makes some really good points about the limits of analogies and the real control corporations have over LLMs.

Plus, your historical corrections were spot on. Sometimes, good criticisms just get lost in the noise online. Don't let it get to you!

Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#38

Post by miki123211 »

karpathy wrote: post #22
gchamonlive wrote: post #2

I think it's interesting to juxtapose traditional coding, neural network weights and prompts because in many areas -- like the example of the self driving module having code being replaced by neural networks tuned to the target dataset representing the domain -- this will be quite useful. However I think it's important to make it clear that given the hardware constraints of many environments the applicability of what…

I kind of say it in words (agreeing with you) but I agree the versioning is a bit confusing analogy because it usually additionally implies some kind of improvement. When I’m just trying to distinguish them as very different software categories.

What do you think about structured outputs / JSON mode / constrained decoding / whatever you wish to call it?

To me, it's a criminally underused tool. While "raw" LLMs are cool, they're annoying to use as anything but chatbots, as their output is unpredictable and basically impossible to parse programmatically.

Structured outputs solve that problem neatly. In a way, they're "neural networks without the training". They can be used to solve similar problems as traditional neural networks, things like image classification or extracting information from messy text, but all they require is a Zod or Pydantic type definition and a prompt. No renting GPUs, labeling data and tuning hyperparameters necessary.

They often also improve LLM performance significantly. Imagine you're trying to extract calories per 100g of product, but some product give you calories per serving and a serving size, calories per pound etc. The naive way to do this is a prompt like "give me calories per 100g", but that forces the LLM to do arithmetic, and LLMs are bad at arithmetic. With structured outputs, you just give it the fifteen different formats that you expect to see as alternatives, and use some simple Python to turn them all into calories per 100g on the backend side.

Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#39

Post by nothrabannosir »

nodesocket wrote: post #24

llms.txt makes a lot of sense, especially for LLMs to interact with http APIs autonomously. Seems like you could set a LLM loose and like the Google Bot have it start converting all html pages into llms.txt. Man, the future is crazy.

Couldn’t believe my eyes. The www is truly bankrupt. If anyone has a browser plugin which automatically redirects to llms.txt sign me up.

Website too confusing for humans? Add more design, modals, newsletter pop ups, cookie banners, ads, …

Website too confusing for LLMs? Add an accessible, clean, ad-free, concise, high entropy, plain text summary of your website. Make sure to hide it from the humans!

PS: it should be /.well-known/llms.txt but that feels futile at this point..

PPS: I enjoyed the talk, thanks.

Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#40

Post by andrethegiant »

nothrabannosir wrote: post #39
nodesocket wrote: post #24

llms.txt makes a lot of sense, especially for LLMs to interact with http APIs autonomously. Seems like you could set a LLM loose and like the Google Bot have it start converting all html pages into llms.txt. Man, the future is crazy.

Couldn’t believe my eyes. The www is truly bankrupt. If anyone has a browser plugin which automatically redirects to llms.txt sign me up. Website too confusing for humans? Add more design, modals, newsletter pop ups, cookie banners, ads, … Website too confusing for LLMs? Add an accessible, clean, ad-free, concise, high entropy, plain text summary of your website. Make sure to hide it from the humans! PS: it should be…

> If anyone has a browser plugin which automatically redirects to llms.txt sign me up.

Not a browser plugin, but you can prefix URLs with `pure.md/` to get the pure markdown of that page. It's not quite a 1:1 to llms.txt as it doesn't explain the entire domain, but works well for one-off pages. [disclaimer: I'm the maintainer]

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