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A new AI winter is coming?

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Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#121

Post by [deleted] »

asah wrote: post #43
chomp wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For toy and low effort coding it works fantastic. I can smash out changes and PRs fantastically quick, and they’re mostly correct. However, certain problem domains and tough problems cause it to spin its wheels worse than a junior programmer. Especially if some of the back and forth troubleshooting goes longer than one context compaction. Then it can forget the context of what it’s tried in the past, and goes back to…

That was true six months ago - the latest versions are much better at memory and adherence, and my senior engineer friends are adopting LLMs quickly for all sorts of advanced development.

[deleted]

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#122

Post by wussboy »

gdulli wrote: post #73
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. We should factor in that messaging that's seamless and undisclosed in conversational LLM output will be a lot more valuable that what we think of as advertising today.

But will also completely poison the well, reducing over-all trust and usage.

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#123

Post by anthonypasq »

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…

is this supposed to be some kind of mic drop?

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#124

Post by johnfn »

I’m fascinated by people who say that LLMs have failed in practice.

Last week, when I was on PTO, I used AI to to a full redesign of a music community website I run. I touched about 40k lines of code in a week. The redesign is shipped and everyone is using it. AI let me go about 5-10x faster than if I would have done this by hand. (In fact, I have tried doing this in the past, so I really do have an apples to apples comparison for velocity. AI enabled it happening at all: I’ve tried a few other times in the past but never been able to squeeze it into a week.)

The cited 40% inaccuracy rate doesn’t track for me at all. Claude basically one-shot anything I asked for, to the point that the bottleneck was mostly thinking of what I should ask it to do next.

At this point, saying AI has failed feels like denying reality.

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#125

Post by orwin »

rnxrx wrote: post #97
deadbabe wrote: post #2

Modern LLMs could be like the equivalent of those steam powered toys the Romans had in their time. Steam tech went through a long winter before finally being fully utilized for the Industrial Revolution. We’ll probably never see the true AI revolution in our lifetime, only glimpses of what could be, through toys like LLMs. What we should underscore though, is that even if there is a new AI winter, the world isn’t goi…

The development of steam technology is a great metaphor. The basic understanding of steam as a thing that could yield some kind of mechanical force almost certainly predated even the Romans. That said, it was the synthesis of other technologies with these basic concepts that started yielding really interesting results. Put another way, the advent of industrialized steam power wasn't so much about steam per se, but ra…

Its mostly metallurgy. The fact that we became so much better and precise at metallurgy enabled us to make use of steam machines. Of course a lot of stuff helped (Glassmaking, whale oil immediatly come to mind) but mostly, metallurgy.

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#126

Post by pwndByDeath »

observationist wrote: post #98
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 don't understand how the tech works, then. LLMs aren't as good as humans at understanding, but it's not just statistics. The stochastic parrot meme is wrong. The networks create symbolic representations in training, with huge multidimensional correlations between patterns in the data, whether its temporal or semantic. The models "understand" concepts like emotions, text, physics, arbitrary social rules and phenom…

You appear to be a proper alchemist, but you can't support an argument of understanding if there is no definition of understanding that isn't circular. If you want to believe the friendly voice really understands you, we have a word for that, faith. The skeptic sees the interactions with a chatbot as a statistical game that shows how uninteresting (e.g. predictable) humans and our stupid language are. There are useful gimmicks coming out like natural language processing, for low risk applications, but this form of AI pseudoscience isn't going to survive, but it will take some time for research to catch up to understanding how to describe the falsehoods of contemporary AI toys

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#127

Post by phantasmish »

frotaur wrote: post #35
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…

It astonishes me how people can make categorical judgements on things as hard to define as 'understanding'. I would say that, except for the observable and testable performance, what else can you say about understanding? It is a fact that LLMs are getting better at many tasks. From their performance, they seem to have an understanding of say python. The mechanistic way this understanding arises is different than huma…

To be fair, it can be hard to define “chair” to the satisfaction of an unsympathetic judge.

“Do chairs exist?”:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fXW-QjBsruE

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#128

Post by injidup »

Most “AI is rubbish” takes treat it as an open-loop system: prompt → code → judgment. That’s not how development works. Even humans can’t read a spec, dump code, and ship it. Real work is closed-loop: test, compare to spec, refine, repeat. AI shines in that iterative feedback cycle, which is where these critiques miss the point.

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#129

Post by Sevii »

Nevermark wrote: post #76

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…

We're getting improvements coming out month by month. No reasonable person would look at a technology improving at this frequency and write a blog post about how we've hit the ceiling.

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#130

Post by anthonypasq »

cmiles8 wrote: post #84
zzbzq wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

wrong. OpenAI is literally the only AI company with horrific financials. You think google is actually bleeding money on AI? they are funding it all with cash flow and still have monster margins.
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