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A new Google model is nearly perfect on automated handwriting recognition

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Re: A new Google model is nearly perfect on automated handwriting recognition

#91

Post by CamperBob2 »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #74
orionsbelt wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ilya Sustkever was on a podcast, saying to imagine a mystery novel where at the end it says “and the killer is: (name)”. Saying it’s just a statistical model generating the next most likely word, how can it do that in this case if it doesn’t have some understanding of all the clues, etc. A specific name is not statistically likely to appear

It can't do that without the answer to who did it being in the training data. I think the reason people keep falling for this illusion is that they can't really imagine how vast the training dataset is. In all cases where it appears to answer a question like the one you posed, it's regurgitating the answer from its training data in a way that creates an illusion of using logic to answer it.

It can't do that without the answer to who did it being in the training data.

Try it. Write a simple original mystery story, and then ask a good model to solve it.

This isn't your father's Chinese Room. It couldn't solve original brainteasers and puzzles if it were.

Re: A new Google model is nearly perfect on automated handwriting recognition

#92

Post by HDThoreaun »

neom wrote: post #87
HDThoreaun wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesnt have to be perfect to be useful. If it does a decent job then your wife reviews and edits, that will be much faster than doing the whole thing by hand. The only question is if she can stay committed to perfection. I dont see the downside of trying it unless she's worried about getting lazy.

I raised this point with her, she said there are times it would be ambiguous for both her and the model, and she thinks it would be dangerous for her to be influenced by it. I'm not a professional historical researcher so I'm not sure if her concern is valid or not.

I think there's a lot of meta thought that deserves to be done about where these new tools fit. It is easy to off handedly reject change, especially as a subject matter expert who can feel they worked so hard to do this and now theyre being replaced so the work was for nothing. I really dont want to say your wife is wrong, she almost assuredly is not. But it is important to have a curious mindset when confronted with ideas you may be biased against. Then she can rest easy knowing she is doing her best to perfect her craft, right? Otherwise she might wake up one day feeling like symbolic NLP researchers trying LLMs for the first time. Certainly a lot to consider.

Re: A new Google model is nearly perfect on automated handwriting recognition

#93

Post by sosuke »

snickerbockers wrote: post #4
throwup238 wrote: post #2

I really hope they have because I’ve also been experimenting with LLMs to automate searching through old archival handwritten documents. I’m interested in the Conquistadors and their extensive accounts of their expeditions, but holy cow reading 16th century handwritten Spanish and translating it at the same time is a nightmare, requiring a ton of expertise and inside field knowledge. It doesn’t help that they were of…

I'm skeptical that they're actually capable of making something novel. There are thousands of hobby operating systems and video game emulators on github for it to train off of so it's not particularly surprising that it can copy somebody else's homework.

Doing something novel is incredibly difficult through LLM work alone. Dreaming, hallucinating, might eventually make novel possible but it has to be backed up be rock solid base work. We aren't there yet.

The working memory it holds is still extremely small compared to what we would need for regular open ended tasks.

Yes there are outliers and I'm not being specific enough but I can't type that much right now.

Re: A new Google model is nearly perfect on automated handwriting recognition

#94

Post by famouswaffles »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #84
energy123 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Predicting the next word requires understanding, they're not separate things. If you don't know what comes after the next word, then you don't know what the next word should be. So the task implicitly forces a more long-horizon understanding of the future sequence.

> Predicting the next word requires understanding If we were talking about humans trying to predict next word, that would be true. There is no reason to suppose than an LLM is doing anything other than deep pattern prediction pursuant to, and no better than needed for, next word prediction.

There is plenty reason. This article is just one example of many. People bring it up because LLMs routinely do things we call reasoning when we see them manifest in other humans. Brushing it off as 'deep pattern prediction' is genuinely meaningless. Nobody who uses that phrase in that way can actually explain what they are talking about in a way that can be falsified. It's just vibes. It's an unfalsifiable conversation-stopper, not a real explanation. You can replace "pattern matching" with "magic" and the argument is identical because the phrase isn't actually doing anything.

A - A force is required to lift a ball

B - I see Human-N lifting a ball

C - Obviously, Human-N cannot produce forces

D - Forces are not required to lift a ball

Well sir, why are you so sure Human-N cannot produce forces? How is she lifting the ball ? Well Of course Human-N is just using s̶t̶a̶t̶i̶s̶t̶i̶c̶s̶ magic.

Re: A new Google model is nearly perfect on automated handwriting recognition

#95

Post by mmaunder »

Legend2440 wrote: post #21

What an unnecessarily wordy article. It could have been a fifth of the length. The actual point is buried under pages and pages of fluff and hyperbole.

The author is far more fascinated with themselves than with AI.

Re: A new Google model is nearly perfect on automated handwriting recognition

#96

Post by beeflet »

brulard wrote: post #88
snickerbockers wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally novel either refers to something that is new, or a certain type of literature. If the AI is generating something functionally equivalent to a program in its training set (in this case, dozens or even hundreds of such programs) then it by definition cannot be novel.

This is quite a narrow view of how the generation works. AI can extrapolate from the training set and explore new directions. It's not just cutting pieces and gluing together.

In practice, I find the ability for this new wave of AI to extrapolate very limited.

Re: A new Google model is nearly perfect on automated handwriting recognition

#98

Post by neom »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #92
neom wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I raised this point with her, she said there are times it would be ambiguous for both her and the model, and she thinks it would be dangerous for her to be influenced by it. I'm not a professional historical researcher so I'm not sure if her concern is valid or not.

I think there's a lot of meta thought that deserves to be done about where these new tools fit. It is easy to off handedly reject change, especially as a subject matter expert who can feel they worked so hard to do this and now theyre being replaced so the work was for nothing. I really dont want to say your wife is wrong, she almost assuredly is not. But it is important to have a curious mindset when confronted with…

I really appreciate your thoughtful reply. I try my best to be encouraging and educating without being preachy or condescending with my wife on this subject. I read hn, I see the posts of folks in, frankly what reads like anguish, about having a tool replace their expertise. I feel really, sad? about it. It's interesting to be confronted with it here (a place I love!) and at home (a place I love!) in quite different context. I've also never been particularly good at becoming good at something, I can't do very much, and genai is really exciting for me, I'm both drawn to and have love for experts so... This whole thing generally has been keeping me up at night a bit, because I feel anguish for the anguish.

Re: A new Google model is nearly perfect on automated handwriting recognition

#99

Post by fragmede »

scubbo wrote: post #62
fragmede wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because "Die motherfucker die motherfucker die" appeared in a song once doesn't mean it's not also death threat when someone's pointing a gun at you and saying that.

...what?

hinkley wrote:

> We got the results back. You are a horrible person. I’m serious, that’s what it says: “Horrible person.”

> We weren’t even testing for that.

joshstrange then wrote:

> If you want to listen to the line from Portal 2 it's on this page (second line in the section linked): https://theportalwiki.com/wiki/GLaDOS_voice_lines_(Portal_2)...

as if the fact that the words that hinkley wrote are from a popular video game excuses the fact that hinkley just also called zer00eyz horrible.

Re: A new Google model is nearly perfect on automated handwriting recognition

#100

Post by smusamashah »

throwup238 wrote: post #2

I really hope they have because I’ve also been experimenting with LLMs to automate searching through old archival handwritten documents. I’m interested in the Conquistadors and their extensive accounts of their expeditions, but holy cow reading 16th century handwritten Spanish and translating it at the same time is a nightmare, requiring a ton of expertise and inside field knowledge. It doesn’t help that they were of…

> Whats the kernel look like?

Those clones are all HTML/CSS, same for game clones made by Gemini.

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