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Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes

dank.systems

141–150 of 642 posts

Re: Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes

#141
post #73

The premise in the very first point seems off: > the frontier labs are priced according to the narrative that they have produced or will in the very near future produce a fully automated drop-in replacement for most knowledge workers... Even assuming this is how the AI companies are being valued (they're not), the numbers are off. The "value" of most knowledge workers -- based on what enterprises currently pay for th…

> The "value" of most knowledge workers -- based on what enterprises currently pay for them -- is $50 - 70 trillion annually.

What do you mean? The sum of ALL US salaries is $13.4 Trillion per year. According to google $65T is the sum of ALL salaries Globally (not just knowledge workers). It's not reasonable to assume AI is a drop-in-replacement for any job yet (perhaps bottom tier customer support from oversees?).

> So if their hypothetical revenues are double-digit trillions and valuations are some multiple of that

So you're sort of premising here than more than 16% or 1/6 of all the world's jobs get replaced by AI. Hopefully you can understand that's both not the current AI capability and also would be a terrible (unprecedented?) economic shock.

Re: Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes

#142
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm stating that certain folks are trying to use the software-generating product as an AGI/ASI and then complaining when it doesn't play chess very well. People are holding it wrong, deliberately or not. Some are inventing bad faith measures so they can claim AI sucks.

I agree w/ this perspective. An agent with a harness that can run programs can solve a lot more than one without the harness. The AI system includes the harness, and it's not clear to me that AGI requires more than LLMs + code generation & execution are capable of.

So AI is AGI in fields where code can't solve anything?

Is code omnipotent, I have been in software all my life and I would hard agree here.

Sure stuff LLMs can do with being good at parts of code reproduction is incredible. And honestly it's the new way to do a lot of things but I have not see an iota of proof that it can scale across the board.

For instance Maths is just code with different symbols and slightly less universally legible concepts.

AI is the best invention at figuring out or walking the search space and directionally doing logically computation over general software adjacent stuff.

But that's it, I am certain a bunch of companies will make a lot of money despite no AGI.

I think people either don't understand AGI or don't understand how real world works.

Until an LLM can bow it's head take responsibility for mistakes made and ensure they aren't repeated again with 100% confidence to the leadership it's inarguably a tool a rather questionable one at that.

Re: Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes

#143
post #115

> the frontier labs are priced according to the narrative that they have produced or will in the very near future produce a fully automated drop-in replacement for most knowledge workers That's a reason to be bearish about AI companies, not LLMs. But is it even true? OpenAI and Anthropic have each reported ~50 billion in revenue with ~900 billion valuations. That's a high ratio but I'm not sure if follows that the on…

I looked at the math and I think it's true. Remember revenue is just sales, not profit. These labs are shooting for > $1T valuations, which traditionally means your PROFIT is at least 1/20th or 1/30th of that (so let's say minimum 30B$/year PROFIT).

These companies however are LOSING money (anthropic tries to make it sound like it's profit by deviating from accepted accounting principles) and subsidizing these models. When accounting for all the engineering salaries, training, GPUs, etc, what's their best-case realistic margin three years out, 10%?

So to we'd need a scenario where companies are spending a collective 300B annually on AI (believable) but ALSO that these companies jack up their margins WITHOUT companies switching to the cheaper open-source models (even when there's a $300B incentive to do so).

Re: Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI bros: the LLM beats humans at solving Navier-Stokes and some old cypher. We are close to AGI Also AI bros: LLM can’t beat an avg chess player. But that doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t count

The fact that LLMs can play chess at any level is a strong indication we are in AGI.

Can they if they frequently make illegal moves?

Re: Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like an LLM potentially could learn that way if each practice game it participated in was added to its training data.

Yes, this is essentially how AlphaGo and AlphaZero algorithms work to train superhuman Go/chess/shogi agents. It’s an elegant algorithm that is analogous to how humans learn games.

Well except AlphaZero played 44 million chess games in that time (and actually played with a 44 core computer). So I'd like to point out that the human is still just a few orders of magnitude more efficient.

Re: Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes

#146

"are priced according to the narrative that they have produced or will in the very near future produce a fully automated drop-in replacement for most knowledge workers, " No, they're really not. They're priced in a way that would imply AI will be universal form of compute, alongside traditional deterministic systems - which it will be. And that they will capture most of that ... which they won't. The Frontier Labs ar…

ai has a >10% chance of causing human extinction, according to anthropic big heads. if that's true, you are wrong. if that's false, anthropic is dishonest. why trust a dishonest company to be worth anything?

I think that the AI people believe in their own nonsense a bit.

Like - the guy on TV talking about 'AI will destroy everything' ... I don't think he's lying.

I think they are like we here on HN and Reddit and a bit caught up in our own thoughts.

If AI were unleashed, in raw form today, it could cause havoc.

Bad. Maybe very bad but I think we'd get over it.

It would probably trigger a recession (because we are in a bubble - it would pop it), and people would 'blame the AI' for sure.

But it would be a bit dot-com ish kind of recession.

The amplifiers would be geopolitical instability.

Re: Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so prove it! get a public repo out there, have it play against some open source engines also I think the operative letter in AGI is the G - and if the G is short for 'variably competent savant-like hyperfocus on certain kinds of software coding and not any other general skill' then its not really G at all, is it?

I suck at chess. Are you saying I can't be intelligent?

is that what I'm saying? or am I talking about AGI? perhaps there's some irony here to be explored when it comes to basic reading comprehension gaps

Re: Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except all these LLMs were already trained with hundreds of chess book and game databases and they still suck

Contrary to popular belief, you need a lot of training on something for an LLM to be good and consistent with it. People think that if one mention exists in the training set, then the LLM is perfect at it.

Not one mention. Hundreds of books, articles and databases of games.

Re: Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except all these LLMs were already trained with hundreds of chess book and game databases and they still suck

If all you do is read chess books, you'll be a shit player. Training and practice is what it takes to be great.

Oh right. But if all you do is reading programming books you are an amazing programmer? Where is all the training and practice LLMs did to become so good at coding?

Re: Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>LLM can’t beat an avg chess player. Why should that matter?

If something has general intelligence it should be able to read the rules of a game and follow them. Therefore an artificial general intelligence (AGI) should be able to do this. So we have a situation where very powerful and influential people are saying we will have AGI in 6 months (if we don’t already), yet the facts on the ground are so clearly pointing in the opposite direction.

I would bet a lot of money that Astra can follow the rules of chess (perhaps if repeated within the context window). Also, this is a different argument than what I responded to.
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