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Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"

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Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"

#71

Post by MadDemon »

avaer wrote: post #43
MadDemon wrote: post #17

LLMs and their capabilities are very impressive and definitely useful. The productivity gains often seem to be smaller than intuitively expected though. For example, using ChatGPT to get a response to a random question like "How do I do XYZ" is much more convenient than googling it, but the time savings are often not that relevant for your overall productivity. Before LLMs you were usually already able to find the in…

The difference is LLMs let you "run Google" on your own data with copy paste. Which you could not do before. If you're using ChatGPT like you use Google then I agree with you. But IMO comparing ChatGPT to Google means you haven't had the "aha" moment yet. As a concrete example, a lot of my work these days involves asking ChatGPT to produce me an obscure micro-app to process my custom data. Which it usually does and r…

It's great for you that you were able to create this app that wouldn't otherwise exist, but does that app dramatically increase your overall productivity? And can you imagine that a significant chunk of the population would experience a similar productivity boost? I'm not saying that there is no productivity gain, but big tech has promised MASSIVE productivity gains. I just feel like the productivity gains are more modest for now, similar to other technologies. Maybe one day AGI comes along and changes everything, but I feel like we'll need a few more break throughs before that.

Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"

#72

Post by linuxftw »

sjajshha wrote: post #65
linuxftw wrote: post #53

Things AI is already better at than (many/most) humans: Customer service (chat, phone), writing software, writing docs about software, computer graphics (animation, images), driving cars. There are plenty of uses for AI. Right now, the industry is heavily spending on training new models, improving performance of existing software and hardware, and trying to create niche products. Power usage for inference will drop d…

> Customer service (chat, phone) Only because companies have been cutting costs for decades here. This is not a good argument for AI. > writing software If you mean typing characters quickly, yes. Otherwise, there’s still a lot of employed devs, with many AI companies hiring. > writing docs about software The most useful docs are there because they contain info you cannot determine from the code. AI is not able to do…

[flagged]

Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"

#73

Post by throwthrowuknow »

whazor wrote: post #7
tony-vlcek wrote: post #3

> We will quickly lose even the social permission to take something like energy [...] A way to drum up sense of urgency without mentioning that it's the patience of the investors (and _not_ the public) that will be the limiting factor here?

This looks more like an attempt of gaining scarce electricity. If a country/state has to choice of giving power to data center A or B, it makes sense for Satya to make statements about how only Microsoft provides the most AI value

They don’t need to choose, just let them build their own power generation capacity.

What the hell is going on in this type of argument anyways? Utilities are normally private businesses so what does the state have to do with it?

Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"

#75

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

MadDemon wrote: post #17

LLMs and their capabilities are very impressive and definitely useful. The productivity gains often seem to be smaller than intuitively expected though. For example, using ChatGPT to get a response to a random question like "How do I do XYZ" is much more convenient than googling it, but the time savings are often not that relevant for your overall productivity. Before LLMs you were usually already able to find the in…

> For example, using ChatGPT to get a response to a random question like "How do I do XYZ" is much more convenient than googling it

More convenient than traditional search? Maybe. Quicker than traditional search? Maybe not.

Asking random questions is exactly where you run into time-wasting hallucinations since the models don't seem to be very good at deciding when to use a search tool and when just to rely on their training data.

For example, just now I was asking Gemini how to fix a bunch of Ubuntu/Xfce annoyances after a major upgrade, and it was a very mixed bag. One example: the default date and time display is in an unreadably small "date stacked over time" format (using a few pixel high font so this fits into the menu bar), and Gemini's advice was to enable the "Display date and time on single line" option ... but there is no such option (it just hallucinated it), and it also hallucinated a bunch of other suggestions until I finally figured out what you need to do is to configure it to display "Time only" rather than "Data and Time", then change the "Time" format to display both data and time! Just to experiment, I then told Gemini about this fix and amusingly the response was basically "Good to know - this'll be useful for anyone reading this later"!

More examples, from yesterday (these are not rare exceptions):

1) I asked Gemini (generally considered one of the smartest models - better than ChatGPT, and rapidly taking away market share from it - 20% shift in last month or so) to look at the GitHub codebase for an Anthropic optimization challenge, to summarize and discuss etc, and it appeared to have looked at the codebase until I got more into the weeds and was questioning it where it got certain details from (what file), and it became apparent it had some (search based?) knowledge of the problem, but seemingly hadn't actually looked at it (wasn't able to?).

2) I was asking Gemini about chemically fingerprinting (via impurities, isotopes) roman silver coins to the mines that produced the silver, and it confidently (as always) comes up with a bunch of academic references that it claimed made the connection, but none or references (which did at least exist) actually contained what it claimed (just partial information), and when I pointed this out it just kept throwing out different references.

So, it's convenient to be able to chat with your "search engine" to drill down and clarify, etc, but a big time waste if a lot of it is hallucination.

Search vs Chat has anyways really become a difference without a difference since Google now gives you the "AI Overview" (a diving off point into "AI Mode"), or you can just click on "AI Mode" in the first place - which is Gemini.

Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"

#76

Post by JanneVee »

They have made huge investments into hardware so everyone is getting more expensive hardware, and now begging everyone else to make their investments worthwhile. Don't mind that they are driving up prices for hardware and requiring new hardware for Windows 11 upgrades. I'm suspecting that we don't have enough memory manufacturing capacity in the world to do both AI datacenters and replace all hardware that they made obsolete with their forced upgrade. AI didn't turn everyone into paperclips but it turned everyone to memory and AI processors in datacenters that can't be powered or has no useful economic utility.

Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"

#77

Post by taude »

lazide wrote: post #69
skybrian wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using ChatGPT and phrasing it like a search seems like a better way? “Can you find documentation about an API that does X?”

It will often literally just make up the documentation. If you ask for a link, it may hallucinate the link. And unlike a search engine where someone had to previously think of, and then make some page with the fake content on it, it will happily make it up on the fly so you'll end up with a new/unique bit of fake documentation/url! At that point, you would have been way better off just... using a search engine?

how is it hallucinating links? The links are direct links to the webpage that they vectorized or whatever as input to the LLM query. In fact, on almost all LLM responses DuckDuckGo and Google, the links are right there as sited sources that you click on (i know because I'm almost always clicking on the source link to read the original details, and not the made up one

Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"

#78

Post by Gazoche »

Evangelists keep insisting that healthcare is one of the things that AI will revolutionize in the coming years, but I just don't get it. To me it's not even clear what they mean by "AI" in this context (and I'm not convinced it's clear to them either).

If they mean "machine learning", then sure there are application in cancer detection and the like, but development there has been moving at a steady pace for decades and has nothing to do with the current hype wave of GenAI, so there's no reason to assume it's suddenly going to go exponential. I used to work in that field and I'm confident it's not going to change overnight: progress there is slow not because of the models, but because data is sparse and noisy, labels are even sparser and noisier, deployment procedures are rigid and legal compliance is a nightmare.

If they mean "generative AI", then how is that supposed to work exactly? Asking LLMs for medical diagnosis is no better than asking "the Internet at large". They only return the most statistically likely output given their training corpus (that corpus being the Internet as a whole), so it's more likely your diagnosis will be based on a random Reddit comment that the LLMs has ingested somewhere, than an actual medical paper.

The only plausible applications I can think of are tasks such as summarizing papers, acting as augmented search engines for datasets and papers, or maybe automating some menial administrative tasks. Useful, for sure, but not revolutionary.

Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"

#79

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

coffeefirst wrote: post #67
reilly3000 wrote: post #27

I get it. A stunning indictment of our times… but there is something useful AI could be doing that MS has dropped the ball on: personal finance management. I should be able to have copilot grab all my transactions, build me budgets, show me what if scenarios, raise concerns, and help me meet my goals. It should be able to work in Excel where I can see and steer it. The math should be validated with several checks and…

I have a personal budget app and every so often I try and get the latest model to compare my data against the statements and find any discrepancies. Every time it hallucinates visits to Starbucks. I never go to Starbucks, it’s just a probable finding given the words in the question. This should work. I want it to work. But until it can do this correctly all analysis capabilities should be suspect.

Maybe it's the model you are using.

Even a year ago I had success with Claude giving it a photo of my credit card bill and asking it to give me repeating category subtotals, and it flawlessly OCR'd it and wrote a Python program to do as asked, giving me the output.

I'd imagine if you asked it to do a comparison to something else it'd also write code to do it, so get it right (and certainly would if you explicity asked).

Re: Satya Nadella: "We need to find something useful for AI"

#80

Post by skybrian »

lazide wrote: post #69
skybrian wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using ChatGPT and phrasing it like a search seems like a better way? “Can you find documentation about an API that does X?”

It will often literally just make up the documentation. If you ask for a link, it may hallucinate the link. And unlike a search engine where someone had to previously think of, and then make some page with the fake content on it, it will happily make it up on the fly so you'll end up with a new/unique bit of fake documentation/url! At that point, you would have been way better off just... using a search engine?

I haven't seen this happen in ChatGPT thinking mode. It actually does a bunch of web searches and links to the results.
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