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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

#151

Post by burnished »

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.

What do you imagine this would do that existing automation does not?

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

#152

Post by kneebonian »

orangecat wrote: post #146
efitz wrote: post #141

I think that 100% of the actually useful use cases for generative AI could be described in two words: “supervised autocomplete”.

That's not wrong, but an ideal autocompleter is a near-omniscient superintelligence. "The optimal approach to curing Alzheimer's is ______". "The proof of the Riemann hypothesis is as follows: ______". "The best way for me to improve my life is _______".

I think the big difference is just being an Autocompleter is less concerned with generating something that is truthful, as in reflects the real world as we understand it described by physics, vs simply spitting out something that sounds good.

Although we do have a litmus test in asking it "What is the meaning of life the universe and everything?"

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

#153

Post by Hermitian909 »

version_five wrote: post #48
nico wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is just wrong. Also, even if a LLM could do that, so could a shell script, without the risks involved in using "AI" for it, or for now the ridiculous external dependence that would involve. I wonder if in 10 years people will be stuck debugging Rube-Goldberg machines composed of LLM api calls doing stuff that if-statements can do, probably cobbled together with actual if-statements

LLMs are already taking over these sorts of systems in industry.

There are lots of systems where you're taking some information about a user and making a best guess at what action the system should take. Even without a need for super high accuracy these rule systems can get surprisingly complex and adding in new possible decisions can be tricky to maintain. In LLM world you just maintain a collection of possible actions and let the LLM map user inputs to those.

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

#154

Post by njarboe »

JohnFen wrote: post #13
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…

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".

The term "AI" was corrupted as described. People now use the term "artificial general intelligence" (AGI) to refer to what used to be called AI.

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

#155

Post by njarboe »

xwdv wrote: post #71
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…

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…

Correct. So are humans.

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

#156

Post by Tanjreeve »

burbankio wrote: post #28
fnordpiglet wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI has been marketing term since the day it was coined. It means literally nothing, which means it can mean anything.

As the old joke goes, "AI" is anything that doesn't work yet. Once an "AI" system becomes reliable, we quickly take it for granted and it no longer seems impressive or interesting. It's just a database. Or an image classifier. Or a chatbot.

I'd argue a database is possibly as far from an AI as you get. Indexing and data structures and storage systems that go into them are very deterministic data structures you can model out and roughly know the behaviour of before writing a single line of code. Image classifiers and Chatbots you don't know what you're getting out till you train it and deploy it.

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

#157

Post by dereg »

jedberg wrote: post #92
arrow7000 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this exactly how GANs work already?

Yes. But from I've seen no one has applied it to the latest Generative AIs.

I’m pretty sure Anthropic’s Claude is doing that.

https://scale.com/blog/chatgpt-vs-claude

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

#158

Post by [deleted] »

JohnFen wrote: post #140
echelon wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels achievable in five years.

It always feels achievable in five years. People were saying exactly this 30 years ago. Sooner or later it may (or may not) be a true statement, but it's awfully hard for me to say that it's any different right now than it has been before.

[deleted]

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

#159

Post by PartiallyTyped »

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…

You can make up any reality that you want, just consume these first and don’t ask me where I found them.

In all seriousness though, what you are asking is whether an objective reality exists which is not a settled debate. There is also the whole solipsism thing though many disregard as a valid view of the world because it can be used to justify anything and is not a particularly interesting position.

Of course there is also the whole local realism thing with QM and of course the whole relativity thing and time flowing at different speeds destroying a universal “now”.

Then there is the whole issue with our senses being fallible and our brains hallucinating reality in a manner that is as confident as GPT3.5 is when making up facts.

In fact, it’s all just information and information doesn’t need a medium.

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

#160

Post by echelon »

JohnFen wrote: post #140
echelon wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels achievable in five years.

It always feels achievable in five years. People were saying exactly this 30 years ago. Sooner or later it may (or may not) be a true statement, but it's awfully hard for me to say that it's any different right now than it has been before.

What's different is that each subtask now feels like a weekend hackathon. Plus a bunch of engineering to ensure high quality results and build the appropriate UI/UX for human drivers.

You could solve 5% of cases now and over five years drive it up beyond 100% (where you're getting new customers and startups that had never even tried the previous methods).

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