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ML promises to be profoundly weird
331–340 of 641 posts
Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does a literal book nerd profit megacorporations when they bring up books to you? While burning through a household worth of energy in the process? Also, I’d like to talk with such book nerd because they’d have opinions on books, potentially if I brought up something I have read we could exchange thoughts about it, they could make recommendations for me based on their complex experiences instead of statistics from Re…
Megacorporations making profit is not some evil that needs to be stopped. The economy is not zero sum.
> The economy is not zero sum.
This is true.
But it's not always positive sum, either.
> Megacorporations making profit is not some evil that needs to be stopped.
Externalities are a thing. It's not about the profit per se, but about how (a) the making of that profit might negatively impact others, and (b) the deployment of that profit in pursuit of rent-seeking and other antisocial behavior in order to insure its continued existence might also negatively impact others.
Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird
#333There is a whole giant essay I probably need to write at some point, but I can't help but see parallels between today and the Industrial Revolution. Prior to the industrial revolution, the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant. We simply weren't efficient enough to fully exploit it. That meant that it was fine for things like property and the commons to be poorly defined. If all of us can go hunting in the woo…
> We have copyright and intellecual property law already, of course, but those were designed presuming a human might try to profit from the intellectual labor of others. With AI, we're in the industrial era of the digital world. Now a single corporation can train an AI using someone's copyrighted work and in return profit off the knowledge over and over again at industrial scale.
The idea that copyright simply doesn't apply to AI has more to do with AI companies deciding that they're not going to comply with those laws than the design of the laws. Also a very successful lobby against enforcement by positioning AI as a strategic necessity.
Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I also came here to be one of those People In The Comments the author refers to. Transformers are not magical. They are just a huge improvement over other architectures at the time such as LSTMs and RNNs and even CNNs. They allowed us to throw more and more compute at the problem of next token prediction. And we’ve been riding that horse ever since. Another big advancement that deserves mentioning is “reasoning”…
Transformers' greatest improvement over RNN/LSTM was to enable better parallelization of large-scale training. This is what enabled language models to become "large". But when controlling for overall size, more RNN/LSTM-like approaches seem to be more efficient, as seen e.g. in state space models. The transformer architecture does add some notable capabilities in accounting for long-range dependencies and "needle in…
With modern training techniques, RNNs (not just linear SSMs, potentially even vanilla LSTMs) can scale just as well as transformers or even better when it comes to enormous context lengths. Dot-product attention has better performance in a number of domains however (especially for exact retrieval) so the best architectures are likely to remain hybrid for now.
Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird
#335There is a whole giant essay I probably need to write at some point, but I can't help but see parallels between today and the Industrial Revolution. Prior to the industrial revolution, the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant. We simply weren't efficient enough to fully exploit it. That meant that it was fine for things like property and the commons to be poorly defined. If all of us can go hunting in the woo…
>This completely unpends the tenuous balance between creators and consumers. Why would a writer put an article online if ChatGPT will slurp it up and regurgitate it back to users without anyone ever even finding the original article? Who will contribute to the digital common when rapacious AI companies are constantly harvesting it? Why would anyone plant seeds on someone else's farm?
I have been thinking about this. I was pretty amendment a few months ago that AI is going to make a lot of thing worse for everyone because of the externalities of the technology (Data Center Creep, lock in of models, ect) and it probably still will. But then someone suggested to me that I use Claude Code to upgrade my SSG site to the new version because I had been sitting on my ass as the years went by, missing deadline by deadline. I just couldn't put my self into gear to upgrade it. It was massively out of date 10 years plus and I knew it was going to be a nightmare to deal with the problems. I probably was making it more harder than it really was in my head.
So I purchase Claude Code pro and the thing upgrade my site pretty well. There were things it missed because I didn't know the problems existed in the first place until the upgrade was complete, but I had a working updated site in less than an hour. If I had done this myself it would have taking me days/weeks.
So at that point I realized something. Its a tool that can handle good amount of tasks I throw at it as long as I am specific. I think the problem with most people is they expect it to respond like a human. Thats not going to happen, IMHO. Maybe some day it will be more than what it is but right now its just a tool. I don't care what anyone says about AGI and the likes. Its not going to happen with the current iteration (the pattern recognition type) We are going to need more than that if we want to simulate a human brain..
The point is. And I know this is not going to be received very well, mostly because this tech is in the hands of people that are gatekeeping it, is that maybe someday we might reach a point where all of humanities knowledge is put into these things and we can use them to better our lives. Maybe at some point we don't need to hold onto or hoard things as if its the only way we can make a living? And instead we can build things just for the sake of creating it and improve humanity in the process? Obviously the commercial model of these things is not great, that is going to have to be dealt with, but I can see a future where we might be able to fix a lot of humanities problems with this technology as more and more good people put it to use for things that help humanity.
Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
At what point do we look at 'Industrial Society and its Future' and go from "yeah that'll never happen", "ok some parts of it are happening", to ...? I swear tech folks are the most obtuse people on the planet.
I think it's completely normal. Whenever automation comes knocking, people are inclined to think it's going to flatline conveniently before their job is at risk. LLMs can code now? Cool, they can't code well though can they? Oh they can code pretty well now? Cool, coding was never the hard part of SWE anyway, it's [thing we have no reason to think AI can't beat 99% of humans at at some point], etc I think SWE as a ma…
I don't think you understand. Frankly, AI is a failure if all it does is replace coders. AI needs (given its current investment levels) to conquer all forms of knowledge work. This is an example of tech/industry needing to impose itself on society, rather than society needing it.
Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird
#337There is a whole giant essay I probably need to write at some point, but I can't help but see parallels between today and the Industrial Revolution. Prior to the industrial revolution, the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant. We simply weren't efficient enough to fully exploit it. That meant that it was fine for things like property and the commons to be poorly defined. If all of us can go hunting in the woo…
> Prior to the industrial revolution, the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant. The opposite is true. Central Europe was almost devoid of trees. Food was scarce as arable land bore little fruit without fertiliser. Society was Malthusian until the Industrial Revolution.
Not really Malthusian. Agricultural societies had adapted to keep the population stable during normal times and bounce back in a generation or two after bad times. Those cultural adaptations stopped working when childhood mortality declined.
Useful land was a scarce resource in more civilized regions, while labor was cheap. Given enough land, subsistence farmers could easily feed themselves outside particularly bad years. But much of the land belonged to local elites, and commoners had to work that land to fund the pursuits of the elites.
Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird
#338There is a whole giant essay I probably need to write at some point, but I can't help but see parallels between today and the Industrial Revolution. Prior to the industrial revolution, the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant. We simply weren't efficient enough to fully exploit it. That meant that it was fine for things like property and the commons to be poorly defined. If all of us can go hunting in the woo…
>Prior to the industrial revolution, the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant.
>We had to invent giant legal systems in order to determine who has the right to do that and who doesn't.
Excuse me? The industrial revolution was like 300 years ago. We had laws before that.
Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird
#339I hesitate to tamper with an internet master's title, but "The Future of Everything is Lies, I Guess" doesn't really summarize what in fact is a balanced, informed overview which (to me at least) is above the median for one of these thought pieces. Since it's also baity and the HN guidelines ask for such titles to be rewritten, I've taken the license. In such cases we always try to find a phrase from the article itse…
Changing the title was a good call.
The article has a good take on the "lie" problem. We know about the hallucination problem, which remains serious. The "lie" problem mentioned is that if you ask an LLM why it said or did something, it has no information of how it got a result. So it processes the "why" as a new query, and produces a plausible explanation. Since that explanation is created without reference to the internals of how the previous query was processed, it may be totally wrong. That seems to be the type of "lie" the author is worried about in this essay.
(Yes, humans do that too.)
Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that they hallucinate sometimes. I agree they bullshit sometimes. But the extent is way overblown. They basically don't bullshit ever under the constraints of 1. 2-3 pages of text context 2. GPT-5.4 thinking I don't think the spirit of the original article (not your comments to be fair) captured this, hence the challenge. I believe we are on the same page here.
> I don't think the spirit of the original article (not your comments to be fair) captured this, hence the challenge. I believe we are on the same page here. No. GPT-5 has a 40% hallucination rate [0] on SimpleQA [1] without web searching. The SimpleQA questions meet your criteria of "2-3 pages of text content. Unless 5.4 + web searching erases that (I bet it doesn't!) these are bullshit machines. [0]: https://arxiv.…
Specifically in the case where it can use tools - no it doesn't hallucinate. Which is why you are struggling to find counterexamples.