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Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI

boydkane.com

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Re: Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI

#431

Post by beyarkay »

gchamonlive wrote: post #336

> One popular dataset, FineWeb, is about 11.25 trillion words long3, which, if you were reading at about 250 words per minute, would take you over 85 thousand years to read. It’s just not possible for any single human (or even a team of humans) to have read everything that an LLM has read during training. Do you have to read everything in a dataset with your own eyes to make sense of it? This would make any attempt t…

> Do you have to read everything in a dataset with your own eyes to make sense of it?

I mean, if you don't read it yourself, you're going to have to rely on _something/someone_ to filter/summarise the output, and at that point you might as well just accept that you'll never truly understand the entire thing?

I'll agree that we can do meaningful work (like reducing bias) without reading the entire dataset ourselves, but that doesn't reduce the fact that we cannot read everything that's going into these machines.

Re: Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI

#432

Post by beyarkay »

brookst wrote: post #160

The article doesn’t even mention prompting. Wha? Is it just talking about the ML foundations, not applications?

> Is it just talking about the ML foundations, not applications?

Yes, actually. I care about the foundations, the application get rewritten or made obsolete every time a new foundational LLM gets released.

Re: Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI

#433

Post by beyarkay »

GuB-42 wrote: post #395

This made me think about a conversation I had recently with a friend who is a researcher in Natural Language Processing. Obviously what we now call LLMs have taken her field by storm, which now mostly consists of trying to understand how the fuck they work. I mean, we know they work, and they work unreasonably well, but no one knows how, no one even knows why they work!

Woah, I didn't realise NLP was still a field, but cool that they're working on interpretability now!

Re: Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI

#435

Post by beyarkay »

jongjong wrote: post #43

This article makes a solid case. The worst kinds of bugs in software are not the most obvious ones like syntax errors, they are the ones where the code appears to be working correctly, until some users do something slightly unusual after a few weeks of some code change being deployed and it breaks spectacularly but the bug only affects a small fraction of users so developers cannot reproduce the issue... And the cose…

Thanks, I appreciate the positive feedback.

Re: Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI

#437

Post by beyarkay »

meonkeys wrote: post #79
freediver wrote: post #22

Lovely blog, RSS please.

There's... something at https://boydkane.com/index.xml I guessed the URL based on the Quartz docs. It seems to work but only has a few items from https://boydkane.com/essays/

Thanks for bringing that to my attention, I think I fixed the feed to include everything? By default quartz only does 10 posts.

Re: Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI

#438

Post by beyarkay »

5- wrote: post #92
meonkeys wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's... something at https://boydkane.com/index.xml I guessed the URL based on the Quartz docs. It seems to work but only has a few items from https://boydkane.com/essays/

the author (either of the blog or its software) would do well to consult https://www.petefreitag.com/blog/rss-autodiscovery/

consider it consulted! Autodiscovery should work when I publish changes (in a few hours)

Re: Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI

#439

Post by beyarkay »

SalientBlue wrote: post #9
alganet wrote: post #5

> here are some example ideas that are perfectly true when applied to regular software Hm, I'm listening, let's see. > Software vulnerabilities are caused by mistakes in the code That's not exactly true. In regular software, the code can be fine and you can still end up with vulnerabilities. The platform in which the code is deployed could be vulnerable, or the way it is installed make it vulnerable, and so on. > Bug…

You should read the footnote marked [1] after "a note for technical folk" at the beginning of the article. He is very consciously making sweeping generalizations about how software works in order to make things intelligible to non-technical readers.

Bless you for having reading comprehension

Re: Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI

#440

Post by beyarkay »

alganet wrote: post #5

> here are some example ideas that are perfectly true when applied to regular software Hm, I'm listening, let's see. > Software vulnerabilities are caused by mistakes in the code That's not exactly true. In regular software, the code can be fine and you can still end up with vulnerabilities. The platform in which the code is deployed could be vulnerable, or the way it is installed make it vulnerable, and so on. > Bug…

> Ok, I'm starting to feel this is a troll post. This guy can't be serious.

Did you read the footnote about writing regression tests to catch bugs before they come back in production?

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