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Fable and the end of the free lunch

dbreunig.com

221–230 of 268 posts

Re: Fable and the end of the free lunch

#221
post #165
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was using ChatGPT voice during cooking to reflect on variations of a dishes i was preparing for years. It was so amazing to get advices and reflect that it struck me : I could use this model forever - it’s clever enough to help me tons and do lot of work for me - even if ai would stop evolving I would love it

this is how i felt about opus 4.6 i still use it it's just faster and does enough to be super helpful. i've used these later anthropic ones a few times but the word salad and slowness feels like it just opens the door to building shit that just stacks and adds on itself. if deepseek and stuff are 4.6 caliber i literally don't know why im here i should probably just go sign up for openrouter at this point

the jump from 4.7-4.8 to 5 is so bad in terms of the word salad

i just get fatigued from it, am I holding it wrong or something?

sometimes it's fine but the constant RLHFisms like the constant "worth flagging" and stuff is getting really old

Re: Fable and the end of the free lunch

#222
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you making a serious argument that superhuman intelligence is a plausible outcome of training LLMs on everything humanity knows so far? Or are you making the generic assertion that AGI is theoretically possible via means other than emulating the human brain? Because the latter is a strawman (nobody has asserted anything to the contrary), and I have seen no evidence at all to support the former.

> training LLMs on everything humanity knows so far? That's not all of what we are doing for at least a year, possibly few. LLMs are trained increasingly on generated inputs. Soon human sourced material is going to be rounding error in the process of training.

To clarify: We are not training LLMs on any information that humanity does not already have access to.

Re: Fable and the end of the free lunch

#223
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Sometimes I wonder who the long term financial winners will be from the ai boom. It might be ram / gpu manufacturers. Or whoever cracks putting LLMs on asics.

IMO many are still missing a big part of the picture. We're looking at the potential for a massive scale level of automation of [x], which happens to be a huge part of the economy, and people are wondering which player in [x] is going to be the biggest winner. I think the historically precedented answer is none of them. When the Industrial Revolution came along it did create 'super farms' relative to the past through…

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Re: Fable and the end of the free lunch

#224
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you making a serious argument that superhuman intelligence is a plausible outcome of training LLMs on everything humanity knows so far? Or are you making the generic assertion that AGI is theoretically possible via means other than emulating the human brain? Because the latter is a strawman (nobody has asserted anything to the contrary), and I have seen no evidence at all to support the former.

Are you making a serious argument that superhuman intelligence is a plausible outcome of training LLMs on everything humanity knows so far? Are you making a serious argument that it's not? Because you'll need to explain leading-edge mathematics advances that have come from LLMs, among other things.

Superhuman intelligence? Really? These leading-edge advances indicate intelligence beyond the level of humanity?

Re: Fable and the end of the free lunch

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even with a harness, models don't reach out for new information they don't know about. For some tech, I have to have a local model draft a plan, then I have to adjust the plan to update it with the new API and references for where to find it. Even if I include that updated information in the prompt for the plan, the model says "what the user says is wrong, they probably meant this instead" and goes off in its own dir…

You are basically saying that some models (your local one, which is it?) in some setups (the API you mentioned) can fail to use fresh information if that conflicts with strong training priors. I agree:) BUT That's a bad model. My opinion is that for exactly this case we need to use RAGs/ APIs/ some retrieval mechanisms. It's silly to train them on stuff that changes every week/month I don't learn APIs by heart, I loo…

For starters, it's not just APIs. Like I pointed out with the C example, programming language syntax and semantics also evolve over time.

But also, LLMs' use of RAG to keep track of API evolution is limited. You can see this if you watch an agent at work using a well-known library that has a high rate of breaking changes such as Polars or Guava. There's a huge amount of churn on repeatedly writing code that works with an older version of the API and then diagnosing and fixing the resulting compile- or run-time errors. It can burn through quite a lot of tokens, which drives up usage costs.

I agree that, all else being equal, using language model training to bake knowledge that's easy to look up into the system is kind of silly and inefficient. That's actually been one of my top complaints about hawking these LLMs as a sort of general-purpose AI. But the fact of the matter is that's fairly fundamental to how they work, and RAG is arguably just a hack on top of the basic design to paper over this limitation. RAG's limits become pretty easy to see when working in knowledge domains that aren't very publicly accessible, and therefore produce little text that would have been incorporated into the models' training corpora. It can be a bit of a, "Ignore that man behind the curtain!" experience.

And no I'm not just talking about local models. I've seen it happen with recent GPT-5 and Claude Opus series models, too.

Re: Fable and the end of the free lunch

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I’m trying to move to open Chinese models — because I will be able to use them forever, while the older Claude models which I genuinely enjoyed writing short stories with have now been deleted, replaced with hypothetically cleverer models which produce text everyone hates.

What about censorship? > I will be able to use them forever Where will you run them when powerful enough GPU and RAM are only sold to hyperscalers?

I dislike all censorship, but US models are much more censored, I often find myself using Chinese models to get answers I want.

Now, of course I’d prefer no censoring, but I live in the world we live in.

I’m working in the assumption that (like today) there will always be somehow on openrouter, or similar, who will host a model I want to run.

Re: Fable and the end of the free lunch

#227
post #172
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was using ChatGPT voice during cooking to reflect on variations of a dishes i was preparing for years. It was so amazing to get advices and reflect that it struck me : I could use this model forever - it’s clever enough to help me tons and do lot of work for me - even if ai would stop evolving I would love it

As long as these models constantly keep switching up things like the temperatures at which a steak will be medium rare or at which temperature to season cast iron, you will never be able to trust them for cooking. My mother ruined a nice waterfowl for Christmas by listening to Gemini. And this is inherent to how LLMs work.

But how would that be different if she wrecked it following some other online recipe?

Re: Fable and the end of the free lunch

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's going to be the shareholders of the first companies to crack AGI, and make human brains fully irrelevant economically. With the trillions of dollars that's going in through both investment and users, it's going to happen. I don't believe the human brain has fundamental magic that will make this impossible.

> It's going to be the shareholders of the first companies to crack AGI, and make human brains fully irrelevant economically. What makes you think if one or two AI labs can do this that the rest (including open model providers) won't be able to follow the same path a few weeks/months later? Even if you believe in the "Singularity", and believe it is coming soon, I still don't see any reason to believe the Singularity…

Because a month later is a month of recursive self improvement at the speed of light. Once a lab catches up, the first lab will be TWO months ahead, then a year ahead, then forever ahead. After a few months of this the differences in absolute terms will be enormous.

Re: Fable and the end of the free lunch

#229
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a huge amount of research into embodied AI (and, also, people seem to be a lot more ok with manufacturing bullets than pulling triggers).

You did not read much about history, did you? Or law. If you embed AI into a gun ... you just created a bomb. It is still you who killed whoever it kills.

Who is going to enforce that law against you, the owner of a massive army of drones?

Re: Fable and the end of the free lunch

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blazing fast...but terrible. Put Sol on silicon but will still need access to the internet...so it will be somewhat slow anyway

It's terrible because it's Llama 3.1 8B. It's such a crappy model because HC1 was a relatively low budget proof of concept. The team that built is working on a better implementation.

Not sure its that to be honest. It seems like maybe its not installed correctly or is like GPT-1/GPT-2 quality? I asked it who is [famous actress] and it started talking about some random person from Mexico with a completely different name. The speed is intoxicating but i'd like for it to actually answer based on what I asked. Thats why I think something might be wrong in implementation on this site.

Edit: I went back and retested it. It revealed that its data is from July 2021 which explains partially why It couldn't talk about the actress I asked about (she exploded in popularity in 2026 but was still a professional actress in 2021 so idk). I then went and asked questions about a very popular actress and movie in 2010. It got it much better but still hallucinated a ton of details about her.

I guess I didn't fully understand what you were saying. Sorry about that! I look forward to their next releases because upon thinking about what I experienced here, I am super excited to see this progress further!

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