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Generative AI is overrated, long live old-school AI

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Re: Generative AI is overrated, long live old-school AI

#101

Post by peter_retief »

kenjackson wrote: post #46
peter_retief wrote: post #15

"So has generative AI been overhyped? Not exactly. Having generative models capable of delivering value is an exciting development. For the first time, people can interact with AI systems that don’t just automate but create an activity of which only humans were previously capable." Good answer but I feel that most users/people do not understand the difference between generative and predictive machine learning and tha…

IMO, it has been underhyped. We're seeing things with LLMs that a decade ago I'd say was multiple decades out, if not more. We're just years into generative approaches. And I think we'll more combinations of methods used in the future. The goal of AI has never been to build an all knowing perfect system. It has also never been to replicate the way the human brain works. But its been to build an artificial system that…

I am very excited about the possibilities of AI/ML but am concerned as to how it is been sold to the public.

Re: Generative AI is overrated, long live old-school AI

#102

Post by nico »

seydor wrote: post #81
nico wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> model for the truth? Without sensing/experiencing the world, there is no truth. The only truth we can ever truly know, is the present moment. Even our memories of things that we “know” that happened, we perceive them in the now. Language doesn’t have a truth. You can make up anything you want with language. So the only “truth” you could teach an LLM, is your own description of it. But these LLMs are trained on thou…

It can be exact and self-consistent, you can teach the rules of mathematics . There are some things that are provably unprovable but thats a known fact.

You can still express contradiction in math.

The rules don’t determine the interpretation.

An LLM will pretty much always respect the rules of language, but it can use them to tell you completely fake stuff.

Re: Generative AI is overrated, long live old-school AI

#103

Post by pstorm »

nico wrote: post #40
JohnFen wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spot on. I work with deep learning systems in industrial control, and generative models are simply ill-suited for this sort of work. Wrong tool for the job. But neither the traditional nor generative models are "AI" in the sense that normal people think when they hear "AI".

To me what’s exciting about Chat/GPT type of tech, is that they can be the “coordinators” of other models. Imagine asking an AI assistant to perform a certain industrial control task. The assistant, instead of executing the task “itself”, could figure out which model/system should perform the task and have it do it. Then even monitor the task and check it’s completion.

You are getting a surprising amount of backlash from this, but I think you are right. There may be better tools for the job, but general tools tend to win out as they get "good enough"

Re: Generative AI is overrated, long live old-school AI

#104

Post by teruakohatu »

sterlind wrote: post #63
version_five wrote: post #7

Seems like the person who wrote the blog works in "classical" deep learning. So do I, so here's the fairest take I can come up with: "AI" has for recent memory been a marketing term anyway. Deep learning and variations have had a good run at being what people mean when they refer to AI, probably overweighting towards big convolution based computer vision models. Now, "AI" in people's minds means generative models. Th…

do people actually use SVMs anymore? like, regression, sure - because it's a tool to measure how well a hypothesis (polynomial function) matches the data (points.) and CNNs are still foundational in computer vision. but the first and last time I heard of SVMs was in college, by professors who were weirdly dismissive of these newfangled deep neural networks, and enamored by the "kernel trick." but aren't SVMs basicall…

> do people actually use SVMs anymore?

Yes they are. They allow for non-linear decision boundaries and more dimensions than rows of data, which for many other ML methods is a problem.

Linear regression, logistic regression, SVM and CART decision trees are all still very popular in the real world where data is hard to come by.

Re: Generative AI is overrated, long live old-school AI

#105

Post by visarga »

seydor wrote: post #16

I m not sure it's overrated, but the concerns are very real. We love the model because it speaks our language as if it's "one of us", but this may be deceiving, and the complete lack of model for truth is disturbing. Making silly poems is fun but the real uses are in medicine and biology, fields that are so complex that they are probably impenetrable to the human mind. Can Reinforcement learning alone create a model…

In exact domains you can often validate the model with numerical simulations, or use the simulations for reinforcement learning or evolution. The model can learn from outcomes, not only from humans. In biology it is necessary to validate experimentally, like any other drug or procedure.

Re: Generative AI is overrated, long live old-school AI

#106

Post by pstorm »

whatshisface wrote: post #93
nico wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, maybe you can use a shell script, but now the AI assistant can write it based on your verbal/text description, and then the assistant can also run it for you after you’ve checked it. What your are saying is: “why use the washing machine, if I my clothes are even cleaner when I wash them myself - I also spend less detergent and less water”. You are free to keep doing your laundry by hand. But I bet most people p…

I think you're fighting an uphill battle because of what you picked to defend here - shell scripts are very easy to write, and I have a hard time imagining a future where someone tells an LLM, "Write me a shell script that runs run_control.py with the speed argument set to one hundred." to get, "./run_control.py --speed 100"

That's a trivial example, sure. Think of saying "make this image more red, flip it vertically, then crop the bottom 25%, and finally output it with 80% compression as a jpg". That would take 15 minutes to figure out how to write that with imagick, or just have an LLM do it for you.

Re: Generative AI is overrated, long live old-school AI

#107

Post by sharemywin »

whatshisface wrote: post #93
nico wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, maybe you can use a shell script, but now the AI assistant can write it based on your verbal/text description, and then the assistant can also run it for you after you’ve checked it. What your are saying is: “why use the washing machine, if I my clothes are even cleaner when I wash them myself - I also spend less detergent and less water”. You are free to keep doing your laundry by hand. But I bet most people p…

I think you're fighting an uphill battle because of what you picked to defend here - shell scripts are very easy to write, and I have a hard time imagining a future where someone tells an LLM, "Write me a shell script that runs run_control.py with the speed argument set to one hundred." to get, "./run_control.py --speed 100"

I've been doing similar things all the time lately.

write me a function in python that ...

I've always forgot the syntax for alot of functions/libraries etc.

Also, I haven't really written lot of python until recently.

Re: Generative AI is overrated, long live old-school AI

#108

Post by xwdv »

com2kid wrote: post #85
xwdv wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spare me the shitty analogies. We write shell scripts because it’s cheap, fast, and the behavior is very predictable. Like it or not, an AI’s behavior is a black box and can’t be “proven” to execute exactly the same every time for the scenarios you are targeting. A shell script will do exactly what it has been written to do every time, unless tampered with. And if changes need to be made, it can be done quickly witho…

> A shell script will do exactly what it has been written to do every time, unless tampered with. Or unless some magic environment variable changes, or one of the runtime dependencies changes, or it is run on a different operating system, or permissions aren't setup right, or one of its tasks errors out. Shell scripts are digital duct tape, the vast majority of shell scripts do not come close to being reliable softwa…

AI proponents are missing the point. Anything you write to make an AI produce something is basically code. Docs are code.

You don’t have to feed a developer code or docs, you can give them a high level idea and they’ll figure it out on their own if you want.

Re: Generative AI is overrated, long live old-school AI

#109

Post by visarga »

nico wrote: post #45
seydor wrote: post #16

I m not sure it's overrated, but the concerns are very real. We love the model because it speaks our language as if it's "one of us", but this may be deceiving, and the complete lack of model for truth is disturbing. Making silly poems is fun but the real uses are in medicine and biology, fields that are so complex that they are probably impenetrable to the human mind. Can Reinforcement learning alone create a model…

> model for the truth? Without sensing/experiencing the world, there is no truth. The only truth we can ever truly know, is the present moment. Even our memories of things that we “know” that happened, we perceive them in the now. Language doesn’t have a truth. You can make up anything you want with language. So the only “truth” you could teach an LLM, is your own description of it. But these LLMs are trained on thou…

There is a paper showing you can infer when the model is telling the truth by finding a direction in activation space that satisfies logical consistency properties, such as that a statement and its negation have opposite truth values. Apparently we can detect even when the model is being deceitful.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.03827

Another approach - a model can learn the distribution - is this fact known or not in the training set, how many times does it appear, is the distribution unimodal (agreement) or multi-modal (disagreement or just high variance). Knowing this a model can adjust its responses accordingly, for example by presenting multiple possibilities or avoiding to hallucinate when there is no information.

Re: Generative AI is overrated, long live old-school AI

#110

Post by throw__away7391 »

whatshisface wrote: post #93
nico wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, maybe you can use a shell script, but now the AI assistant can write it based on your verbal/text description, and then the assistant can also run it for you after you’ve checked it. What your are saying is: “why use the washing machine, if I my clothes are even cleaner when I wash them myself - I also spend less detergent and less water”. You are free to keep doing your laundry by hand. But I bet most people p…

I think you're fighting an uphill battle because of what you picked to defend here - shell scripts are very easy to write, and I have a hard time imagining a future where someone tells an LLM, "Write me a shell script that runs run_control.py with the speed argument set to one hundred." to get, "./run_control.py --speed 100"

Not to weigh in on any other aspect of this discussion, but when you say:

> I have a hard time imagining a future where someone tells an LLM, "Write me a shell script that runs run_control.py with the speed argument set to one hundred."

I'll point out that we already live in a world where single lines of pure function code are distributed as an NPM packages or API calls.

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