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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

#111

Post by famouswaffles »

energy123 wrote: post #103
famouswaffles wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 conversati…

Anything can be euphemized. Human intelligence is atoms moving around the brain. General relativity is writing on a piece of paper.

If you want to say human and LLM intelligence are both 'deep pattern prediction' then sure, but mostly and certainly in the case I was replying to, people often just use it as a means to make an imaginary unfalsifiable distinction between what LLMs do and what the super special humans do.

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

#112

Post by [deleted] »

xx_ns wrote: post #45

Am I missing something here? Colonial merchant ledgers and 18th-century accounting practices have been extensively digitized and discussed in academic literature. The model has almost certainly seen examples where these calculations are broken down or explained. It could be interpolating from similar training examples rather than "reasoning."

[deleted]

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

#113

Post by charcircuit »

efitz wrote: post #12

I haven’t seen this new google model but now must try it out. I will say that other frontier models are starting to surprise me with their reasoning/understanding- I really have a hard time making (or believing) the argument that they are just predicting the next word. I’ve been using Claude Code heavily since April; Sonnet 4.5 frequently surprises me. Two days ago I told the AI to read all the documentation from my…

It's trying to maximize a reward function. It's not just predicting the next word.

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

#114

Post by mikestorrent »

testaccount28 wrote: post #42
jstummbillig wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remain confused but still somewhat interested as to a definition of "novel", given how often this idea is wielded in the AI context. How is everyone so good at identifying "novel"? For example, I can't wrap my head around how a) a human could come up with a piece of writing that inarguably reads "novel" writing, while b) an AI could be guaranteed to not be able to do the same, under the same standard.

why would you admit on the internet that you fail the reverse turing test?

Didn't some fake AI country song just get on the top 100? How novel is novel? A lot of human artists aren't producing anything _novel_.

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

#115

Post by red75prime »

pinnochio wrote: post #85
Workaccount2 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Understanding" is just a trap to get wrapped up in. A word with no definition and no test to prove it. Whether or not the model are "understanding" is ultimately immaterial, as their ability to do things is all that matters.

If they can't do things that require understanding, it's material, bub. And just because you have no understanding of what "understanding" means, doesn't mean nobody does.

> doesn't mean nobody does

If it's not a functional understating that allows to replicate functionality of understanding, is it the real understanding?

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

#116

Post by famouswaffles »

beeflet wrote: post #106
famouswaffles wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Here's a thought experiment: if modern machine learning systems existed in the early 20th century, would they have been able to produce an equivalent to the theory of relativity? How about advance our understanding of the universe? Teach us about flight dynamics and take us into space? Invent the Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, transistors? Only a small percentage of humanity are/were capable of doing any…

Were they the best of the best? or were they just at the right place and time to be exposed to a novel idea? I am skeptical of this claim that you need a 140IQ to make scientific breakthroughs, because you don't need a 140IQ to understand special relativity. It is a matter of motivation and exposure to new information. The vast majority of the population doesn't benefit from working in some niche field of physics in…

>Were they the best of the best? or were they just at the right place and time to be exposed to a novel idea?

It's not an "or" but an "and". Being at the right place and time is a necessary precondition, but it's not sufficient. Newton stood on the shoulders of giants like Kepler and Galileo, and Einstein built upon the work of Maxwell and Lorentz. The key question is, why did they see the next step when so many of their brilliant contemporaries, who had the exact same information and were in similar positions, did not? That's what separates the exceptional from the rest.

>I am skeptical of this claim that you need a 140IQ to make scientific breakthroughs, because you don't need a 140IQ to understand special relativity.

There is a pretty massive gap between understanding a revolutionary idea and originating it. It's the difference between being the first person to summit Everest without a map, and a tourist who takes a helicopter to the top to enjoy the view. One requires genius and immense effort; the other requires following instructions. Today, we have a century of explanations, analogies, and refined mathematics that make relativity understandable. Einstein had none of that.

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

#117

Post by muixoozie »

colordrops wrote: post #75
muixoozie wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dunno if you're right, but I'd like to point out that I've been reading comments like these about every model since GPT 3. It's just starting to seem more likely to me to be a cognitive bias than not.

Why would you assume cognitive bias? Any evidence? These things are indeed very expensive to run, and are often run at a loss. Wouldn't quantization or other tuning be just as reasonable of an answer as cognitive bias? It's not like we are talking about reptilian aliens running the whitehouse.

I'm just pointing out a personal observation. Completely anecdotal. FWIW, I don't strongly believe this. I have at least noticed a selection bias (maybe) in myself too as recently as yesterday after GPT 5.1 was released. I asked codex to do a simple change (less than 50LOC) and it made a unrelated change, an early return statement, breaking a very simple state machine that goes from waiting -> evaluate -> done. However, I have to remind myself how often LLMs make dumb mistakes despite often seeming impressive.

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

#118

Post by red75prime »

jumploops wrote: post #50

This is exciting news, as I have some elegantly scribed family diaries from the 1800s that I can barely read (: With that said, the writing here is a bit hyperbolic, as the advances seem like standard improvements, rather than a huge leap or final solution.

Statistics in the article has a low number of samples to make definitive conclusion, but expert-level WER looks like a huge leap.

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

#119

Post by QuadmasterXLII »

jstummbillig wrote: post #40
snickerbockers wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I remain confused but still somewhat interested as to a definition of "novel", given how often this idea is wielded in the AI context. How is everyone so good at identifying "novel"? For example, I can't wrap my head around how a) a human could come up with a piece of writing that inarguably reads "novel" writing, while b) an AI could be guaranteed to not be able to do the same, under the same standard.

A system of humans creates bona fide novel writing. We don’t know which human is responsible for the novelty in homoerotic fanfiction of the Odyssey, but it wasn’t a lizard. LLMs don’t have this system-of-thinkers bootstrapping effect yet, or if they do it requires an absolutely enormous boost to get going

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

#120

Post by viftodi »

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…

You are right to be skeptical.

There are plenty of so called windows(or other) web 'os' clones.

There were a couple of these posted on HN actually this very year.

Here is one example I google dthat was also on HN : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44088777

This is not an OS as in emulating a kernel in javascript or wasm, this is making a web app that looks like the desktop of an OS.

I have seen plenty such projects, some mimick windows UI entirely, you xan find them via google.

So this was definitely in the training data, and is not as impressive as the blog post or the twitter thread make it to be.

The scary thing is the replies in the twitter thread have no critical thinking at all and are impressed beyond belief, they think it coded a whole kernel, os, made an interpeter for it, ported games etc.

I think this is the reason why some people are so impressed by AI, when you can only judge an app visually or only how you intetcat with it and don't have the depth of knowledge to understand, for such people it works all the way.land AI seems magical beyond comprehension.

But all this is only superficial IMHO.

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