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Karpathy’s Pelican

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Re: Karpathy’s Pelican

#121
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously, what is the deal with Pip! I was experimenting with childrens' fiction more than a year ago and 9 times out of 10 you'd get a character named Pip unless you were specific in the prompt not to do so.

I recently saw a study on this actually. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26492

I saw that, tested it in Qwen. Elias Thorne, on the first run, as a clockmaker too.

Re: Karpathy’s Pelican

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I very much doubt that. We now have nearly-perfect AI image generation and it hasn't really changed the nature of human expression. I don't see my friends getting wildly creative. I mostly see it used for spammy blogs, spammy books, and cringeworthy corporate marketing - basically, a negative signal, rather than "ooh, AI image, I'm in for a treat". Is your experience different? If not, what changes with moving images…

I'm mostly seeing the impact of GenAI images in everydays life for example in the small posters small associations or individuals usually attach on streets to promote some small local event. We went from just text created with PowerPoint and maybe some stock image just a Google search away to now images depicting the topic closely. But yeah, it's not like a revolution. And this personal media thing, yeah maybe for te…

I yearn for the old days of bad photoshop/wordart/powerpoint flyers.

They were visually bad but honest and sometimes soulful or playful.

The AI slop that's everywhere now looks superficially more professional but it's very busy, samey, unnatural and it really turns me off.

Re: Karpathy’s Pelican

#123
post #99

I really dislike this AI programming thing of “Mr LLM, go slam your face into the problem until there’s no problem left, then call me back”. (Not sure if it’s a recent trend or a fundamental nature.) It always brings to my mind some words from Rich Hickey: I think we’re in this world I’d like to call “guardrail programming”. It’s really sad: we’re like, “I can make change because I have tests!”. Who does that? Who dr…

> I don’t think I really have a point to make here, other than it just feels like someone’s released a bunch of carnival bumper cars onto the highways.

I like the analogy.

I guess this is why we got this before cars sold without steering wheels: literal guardrails on the literal roads are somewhat more expensive, especially for the people who keep bouncing off them on the way to their destination.

Also, where the guardrails are absent: oh look, felonies. https://www.google.com/search?q=ai+hacks+company&tbm=nws

Re: Karpathy’s Pelican

#124
This has started to feel a bit like the beginning of railroads and then the steampunk fiction of "let's just build railroads to everywhere". We don't need it and there's no use for it.

As with painting, after a while there's nothing really new to paint, we genuinely need 0 new software. We need to fix our broken physical world, our social lives, our kids and what's left of our democracies.

This software crap is done, leave it to the nerds.

Re: Karpathy’s Pelican

#125
Benchmarks like the pelican thing are about correlation with “how good the model is”. Better models produce better pelicans.

It’s a useful benchmark (aside from being “cute”) because of its simplicity, both in how many output tokens it takes (though I understand some models think a lot now to do it) and how easily one can subjectively judge. It’s this efficient as a benchmark of performance.

Making a long video takes way more tokens, and presumably is a lot tougher to easily compare. swillison has a presentation that’s pelicans from 2023-present (roughly) showing the progression. Imagine “lord of the rings videos from 2026-2029” or whatever, it would take a long time to watch and be harder to judge, and probably just end up being a comparison of screenshots anyway.

TLDR I feel like the post misunderstands the role of the pelican thing though if find it very hard to believe he really doesn’t understand, so maybe I’m missing something.

Re: Karpathy’s Pelican

#126
It would be better to ask model to render segmented 3d, with placeholders, like magenta is water, blue is sky, green is grass, purple is Frodo's face, etc, then pass the result through img2img model to properly "render" it.

Re: Karpathy’s Pelican

#127

It's difficult to think in exponentials. But this demonstrates we're a couple orders of magnitude away from generating 1:1 hyper-personalized entertainment and media for individuals, rather than the masses.

I very much doubt that. We now have nearly-perfect AI image generation and it hasn't really changed the nature of human expression. I don't see my friends getting wildly creative. I mostly see it used for spammy blogs, spammy books, and cringeworthy corporate marketing - basically, a negative signal, rather than "ooh, AI image, I'm in for a treat". Is your experience different? If not, what changes with moving images…

> We now have nearly-perfect AI image generation

No, we don't. It's quite good, but it's nowhere near perfect. For example, you can see: https://genai-showdown.specr.net/ or others that highlight how far from perfection we still are.

> and it hasn't really changed the nature of human expression.

It sure has changed our discourse. Look at hackernews, where people just can't help themselves to engage in ragebait and flamewar comment threads about llm generated accusations. We've got half the people convinced that looking at ai content is like consuming food.

I'd venture a guess that it's too early to determine how this technology will change expression. A good analog would be photography, which caused a similar meltdown in the arts at the time.

> I don't see my friends getting wildly creative.

Maybe you don't have creative (enough) friends.

Re: Karpathy’s Pelican

#128
post #119

I'm pretty tired of the "Y made this game in Z tokens" all over the internet last week. They look impressive, and it's cool that it's even possible, but they're useless as games. None of them are any fun. They're like the most boring variant of basic controllers you can imagine. None have any cool mechanics. None have any tweaks made from hours and hours of testing. All have the same cel-shader.

Right, but the new phenomena is that we've lost a signal. Used to be if a game looked that good it probably had time spent on the game part too.

And you could almost always tell a "game construction kit" game from a real one, couldn't you? Whatever was missing from those is always missing from these, and it seems just as rare that the game will reach much beyond its origins.

Whenever I think about AI games I find myself thinking about Tiny Wings, Flappy Bird and Angry Birds. Three simple, elegant games.

It is easy to see what makes Tiny Wings so completely loveable — it has a sculpted, adorable, perfect charm with a cleverly inverted game mechanic that has a calibrated level of exasperation and reward.

But why were Flappy Bird and Angry Birds, very basic games with very old game mechanics, so charming?

It seems equally impossible to imagine an AI coming up with a game with the quality of any of them, even with maximised creativity. But explaining why for Flappy Bird seems quite difficult, especially when you consider it uses some stolen visuals!

Re: Karpathy’s Pelican

#129
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs currently have 0 imagination, I have strong doubts that will be solved any time soon even if they continue to become superhuman at everything else. They just have the creative instincts of a 50 year old accountant.

> They just have the creative instincts of a 50 year old accountant That's oddly specific and it'd really hurt my cousins feelings :)

Especially since the whole AI IPO concept seems at least somewhat predicated on creative accounting! ;-)

Re: Karpathy’s Pelican

#130
post #61

I'm pretty tired of the "Y made this game in Z tokens" all over the internet last week. They look impressive, and it's cool that it's even possible, but they're useless as games. None of them are any fun. They're like the most boring variant of basic controllers you can imagine. None have any cool mechanics. None have any tweaks made from hours and hours of testing. All have the same cel-shader.

LLMs are bad at creative work and I don’t see them improving any time soon. Try asking an agent to write a story about raccoons. It will almost certainly involve either stealing food or raiding trash with a 50% chance of having a character named Pip. If a location is mentioned, it’ll be Elm Street. I guess this is the average story and, similarly, the average game is boring and predictable

Heh, tried it and got a story about raiding trash starring Pip. But yep, I'm well aware of this problem as well. /r/sillytavernAI is a sub dedicated to trying to coax LLMs into good creative writing but it's kinda impossible to do consistently.
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