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A new AI winter is coming?

taranis.ie

81–90 of 301 posts

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#81
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…

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?

If i could understand what the brain scans actually meant, I would consider it a good representation. I don't think we know yet what they mean. I saw some headline the other day about a person with "low brain activity" and said person was in complete denial about it, I would be too.

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#82

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 wi…

Yet, the real cost of inference for a given model complexity is dropping.

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#83
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

many value/productivity metrics in use are just "Lines Of Code" in a trenchcoat. a game which LLMs are fantastic at playing.

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#84
post #74
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think they were referring to the costs of training and hosting the models. You're counting the cost of what you're buying, but the people selling it to you are in the red.

Correct

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#85

The poster is right. LLMs are Gish Gallop machines that produce convincing sounding output. People have figured it out by now. Generative "AI" will fail, other forms may continue, though it it would be interesting to hear from experts in other fields how much fraud there is. There are tons of material science "AI" startups, it is hard to believe they all deliver.

>produce convincing sounding output

Well, correctness(though not only correctness) sounds convincing, the most convincing even, and ought to be information-theory-wise cheaper to generate than a fabrication, I think.

So if this assumption holds, the current tech might have some ceiling left if we just continue to pour resources down the hole.

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#86
post #78
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There is no difference between "hallucination" and "soberness", it's just a database you can't trust. The response to your query might not be what you needed, similar to interacting with an RDBMS and mistyping a table name and getting data from another table or misremembering which tables exist and getting an error. We would not call such faults "hallucinations", and shouldn't when the database is a pile of eldritch…

This seems unnecessarily pedantic. We know how the system works, we just use "hallucination" colloquially when the system produces wrong output.

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#87

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.

And surveil and rat on us, sometimes incorrectly.

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#88

I am simply stunned at the negativity. Yes, there is hype. But if you actually filter it out, instead of (over) reacting to it in either direction, progress has been phenomenal and the fact there is visible progress in many areas, including LLMs, in the order of months demonstrates no walls. Visible progress doesn’t mean astounding progress. But any tech that is improving year to year is moving at a good speed. Huge…

Yeah after reading the intro lines I noped out of this garbage blog (?). Maybe it's their SEO strategy to write the flat-out untrue incendiary stuff like "the technology is essentially a failure" - If that's the case, I don't have time for this.

Maybe they actually think this way, then, I certainly have time for this.

what I have time for? virtual bonding with fello HN ppl :)

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#89
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 i…

As far as Consumer LLMs go, they don't really have competition. Well they do, but it's more Google vs Bing than Android vs Apple. 2nd place is a very very distant 2nd and almost all growth and usage is still being funneled to Open AI. Even if it's 'easily copied', getting there first could prove extremely valuable.

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#90
post #69
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

Responding with "skill issue" in a discussion is itself a skill issue. Maybe invest in some conversational skills and learn to be constructive rather than parroting a useless meme.
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