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A new AI winter is coming?

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Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#51

Post by seaucre »

tarr11 wrote: post #7

This has convinced many non-programmers that they can program, but the results are consistently disastrous, because it still requires genuine expertise to spot the hallucinations. I've been programming for 30+ years and now a people manager. Claude Code has enabled me to code again and I'm several times more productive than I ever was as an IC in the 2000s and 2010s. I suspect this person hasn't really tried the most…

I have a journalist friend with 0 coding experience who has used ChatGPT to help them build tools to scrape data for their work. They run the code, report the errors, repeat, until something usable results. An agent would do an even better job. Current LLMs are pretty good at spotting their own hallucinations if they're given the ability to execute code.

The author seems to have a bias. The truth is that we _do not know_ what is going to happen. It's still too early to judge the economic impact of current technology - companies need time to understand how to use this technology. And, research is still making progress. Scaling of the current paradigms (e.g. reasoning RL) could make the technology more useful/reliable. The enormous amount of investment could yield further breakthroughs. Or.. not! Given the uncertainty, one should be both appropriately invested and diversified.

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#52

Post by DrewADesign »

Barathkanna wrote: post #37

Interesting take. His argument is basically that LLMs have hit their architectural ceiling and the industry is running on hype and unsustainable economics. I’m not fully convinced, but the points about rising costs and diminishing returns are worth paying attention to. The gap between what these models can actually do and what they’re marketed as might become a real problem if progress slows.

I think the unsustainably cheap consumer-facing AI products are the spoonful of sugar getting us to swallow a technology that will almost entirely be used to make agents that justify mass layoffs.

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#53

Post by goncharom »

gishh wrote: post #21
stanfordkid wrote: post #16

This article uses the computational complexity hammer way too hard, discounts huge progress in every field of AI outside of the hot trend of transformers and LLMs. Nobody is saying the future of AI is autoregressive and this article pretty much ignores any of the research that has been posted here around diffusion based text generation or how it can be combined with autoregressive methods… discounts multi-modal model…

> something fundamental has changed that enables a computer to pretty effectively understand natural language. You understand how the tech works right? It's statistics and tokens. The computer understands nothing. Creating "understanding" would be a breakthrough. Edit: I wasn't trying to be a jerk. I sincerely wasn't. I don't "understand" how LLMs "understand" anything. I'd be super pumped to learn that bit. I don't…

Every time I see comments like these I think about this research from anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/research/mapping-mind-language-mod...

LLMs activate similar neurons for similar concepts not only across languages, but also across input types. I’d like to know if you’d consider that as a good representation of “understanding” and if not, how would you define it?

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#54

Post by abroszka33 »

I agree, I have over 20 years of software engineering experience and after vibe coding/engineering/architecting (or whatever you want to call it) for a couple months, I also don't see the technology progressing further. LLMs are more or less the same as 6 months ago, incremental improvements, but no meaningful progress. And what we have is just bad. I can use it because I know the exact code I want generated and I will just re-prompt if I don't get what I want, but I'm unconvinced that this is faster than a good search engine and writing code myself.

I think I will keep using it while it's cheap, but once I have to pay the real costs of training/running a flagship modell I think I will quit. It's too expensive as it is for what it does.

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#55

Post by binary132 »

what a curious coincidence that a soft-hard AI landing would happen to begin at the exact same time as the US government launches a Totally Not a Bailout Strategic Investment Plan Bro I Promise. who could have predicted this?

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#56

Post by [deleted] »

tarr11 wrote: post #7

This has convinced many non-programmers that they can program, but the results are consistently disastrous, because it still requires genuine expertise to spot the hallucinations. I've been programming for 30+ years and now a people manager. Claude Code has enabled me to code again and I'm several times more productive than I ever was as an IC in the 2000s and 2010s. I suspect this person hasn't really tried the most…

[deleted]

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#57

Post by dangus »

john61 wrote: post #49
stanfordkid wrote: post #16

This article uses the computational complexity hammer way too hard, discounts huge progress in every field of AI outside of the hot trend of transformers and LLMs. Nobody is saying the future of AI is autoregressive and this article pretty much ignores any of the research that has been posted here around diffusion based text generation or how it can be combined with autoregressive methods… discounts multi-modal model…

> The argument that computational complexity has something to do with this could have merit but the article certainly doesn’t give indication as to why. OP says it is because that predicting the next token can be correct or not, but it always looks plausible because that is what it calculates. Therefore it is dangerous and can not be fixed because it is how it works in essence.

I just want to point out a random anecdote.

Literally yesterday ChatGPT hallucinated an entire feature of a mod for a video game I am playing including making up a fake console command.

It just straight up doesn’t exist, it just seemed like a relatively plausible thing to exist.

This is still happening. It never stopped happening. I don’t even see a real slowdown in how often it happens.

It sometimes feels like the only thing saving LLMs are when they’re forced to tap into a better system like running a search engine query.

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#58

Post by famouswaffles »

cmiles8 wrote: post #31

LLMs are an amazing advancement. The tech side of things is very impressive. Credit where credit is due. Where the current wave all falls apart is on the financials. None of that makes any sense and there’s no obvious path forward. Folks say handwavy things like “oh they’ll just sell ads” but even a cursory analysis shows that math doesn’t ad up relative to the sums of money being invested at the moment. Tech wise I’…

>Folks say handwavy things like “oh they’ll just sell ads” but even a cursory analysis shows that math doesn’t ad up relative to the sums of money being invested at the moment.

Ok, so I think there's 2 things here that people get mixed on.

First, Inference of the current state of the art is Cheap now. There's no 2 ways about it. Statements from Google, Altman as well as costs of 3rd parties selling tokens of top tier open source models paint a pretty good picture. Ads would be enough to make Open AI a profitable company selling current SOTA LLMs to consumers.

Here's the other thing that mixes things up. Right now, Open AI is not just trying to be 'a profitable company'. They're not just trying to stay where they are and build a regular business off it. They are trying to build and serve 'AGI', or as they define it, 'highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work'. They believe that, to build and serve this machine to hundreds of millions would require costs order(s) of magnitudes greater.

In service of that purpose is where all the 'insane' levels of money is moving to. They don't need hundreds of billions of dollars in data centers to stay afloat or be profitable.

If they manage to build this machine, then those costs don't matter, and if things are not working out midway, they can just drop the quest. They will still have an insanely useful product that is already used by hundreds of millions every week, as well as the margins and unit economics to actually make money off of it.

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#59

Post by coffeecoders »

I am of a belief that upcoming winter will look more like normalization than collapse.

The reason is hype deflation and technical stagnation don't have to arrive together. Once people stop promising AGI by Christmas and clamp down on infinite growth + infinite GPU spend, things will start to look more normal.

At this point, it feels more like the financing story was the shaky part not the tech or the workflows. LLMs’ve changed workflows in a way that’s very hard to unwind now.

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#60

Post by 0xdeadbeefbabe »

Lambdanaut wrote: post #42
gishh wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> something fundamental has changed that enables a computer to pretty effectively understand natural language. You understand how the tech works right? It's statistics and tokens. The computer understands nothing. Creating "understanding" would be a breakthrough. Edit: I wasn't trying to be a jerk. I sincerely wasn't. I don't "understand" how LLMs "understand" anything. I'd be super pumped to learn that bit. I don't…

You understand how the brain works right? It's probability distributions mapped to sodium ion channels. The human understands nothing.

I've heard that this human brain is rigged to find what it wants to find.
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