Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A new AI winter is coming?

taranis.ie

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 301 posts

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#61

Post by edwin2 »

I think the author is onto something. but (s)he didn’t highlight that there are some scenarios where factual accuracy is unimportant, or maybe even a detractor.

for example, fictional stories. If you want to be entertained and it doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, there’s no downsides to “hallucinations”. you could argue that stories ARE hallucinations.

another example is advertisements. what matters is how people perceive them, not what’s actually true.

or, content for a political campaign.

the more i think about it, genAI really is a perfect match for social media companies

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#62

Post by HardCodedBias »

Groxx wrote: post #50
baseballdork wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At big tech over 40% of checked in code is LLM generated. At smaller companies the proportion is larger. I have a really hard time believing that stat without any context, is there a source for this?

from what I've seen in a several-thousand-eng company: LLMs generally produce vastly more code than is necessary, so they quickly out-pace human coders. they could easily be producing half or more of all of the code even if only 10% of the teams use it. particularly because huge changes often get approved with just a "lgtm", and LLM-coding teams also often use/trust LLMs for reviews. but they do that while making the…

Measuring the value is very difficult. However there are proxies (of varying quality) which are measured, and they are showing that AI code is clearly better than copy-pasted code (which used to be the #1 source of lines of code) and at least as "good" (again, I can't get into the metrics) as human code.

Hopefully one of the major companies will release a comprehensive report to the public, but they seem to guard these metrics.

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#63

Post by gishh »

LatencyKills wrote: post #48
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…

As someone who was an engineer on the original Copilot team, yes I understand how tech works. You don’t know how your own mind “understands” something. No one on the planet can even describe how human understanding works. Yes, LLMs are vast statistical engines but that doesn’t mean something interesting isn’t going on. At this point I’d argue that humans “hallucinate” and/or provide wrong answers far more often than…

> I expect to see responses like yours on Reddit, not HN.

I suppose that says something about both of us.

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#64

Post by swalsh »

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’…

Hard disagree, I'm in the process of deploying several AI solutions in Healthcare. We have a process a nurse usually spends about an hour on, and costs $40-$70 depending on if they are offshore and a few other factors. Our AI can match it at a few dollars often less. A nuse still reviews the output, but its way less time. The economics of those tokens is great. We have another solution that just finds money, $10-$30 in tokens can find hundreds of thousands of dollars. The tech isn't perfect (that's why we have a human in the loop still) but its more than good enough to do useful work, and the use cases are valuable.

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#65

Post by andy99 »

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…

I agree with everything you wrote, the technology is unbelievable and 6 years ago, maybe even 3.1 years would have been considered magic.

A steel man argument for why winter might be coming is all the dumb stuff companies are pushing AI for. On one hand (and I believe this) we argue it’s the most consequential technology in generations. On the other, everybody is using it for nonsense like helping you write an email that makes you sound like an empty suit, or providing a summary you didn’t ask for.

There’s still a ton of product work to cross whatever that valleys called between concept and product, and if that doesn’t happen, money is going to start disappearing. The valuation isn’t justified by the dumb stuff we do with it, it needs PMF.

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#66

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#67

Post by xnx »

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’…

Don't confuse OpenAI financials with Google financials. OpenAI could fold and Google would be fine.

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#68

Post by cess11 »

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…

GOFAI was also a paradigm shift, regardless of that winter. For example, banks started automating assessments of creditworthiness.

What we didn't get was what had been expected, namely things like expert systems that were actual experts, so called 'general intelligence' and war waged through 'blackboard systems'.

We've had voice controlled electronics for a long time. On the other hand, machine vision applications have improved massively in certain niches, and also allowed for new forms of intense tyranny and surveillance where errors are actually considered a feature rather than a bug since they erode civil liberties and human rights but are still broadly accepted because 'computer says'.

While you could likely argue "leaps and bounds with novel methods utilizing AI for chemistry, computational geometry, biology etc." by downplaying the first part or clarifying that it is mainly an expectation, I think most people are going to, for the foreseeable future, keep seeing "AI" as more or less synonymous with synthetic infantile chatbot personalities that substitute for human contact.

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#69

Post by bitwize »

dangus wrote: post #57
john61 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 o…

[flagged]

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#70

Post by cmiles8 »

famouswaffles wrote: post #58
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…

If OpenAI was the only company doing this that argument might sort of make sense.

The problem is they have real competition now and that market now looks like an expensive race to an undifferentiated bottom.

If someone truly invents AGI and it’s not easily copied by others then I agree it’s a whole new ballgame.

The reality is that years into this we seem to be hitting a limit to what LLMs can do with only marginal improvements with each release. On that path this get ugly fast.

Post reply on HN