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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

#161

Post by nostromo123 »

nico wrote: post #62
JohnFen wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how the likes of ChatGPT could accomplish that even in theory, but I won't say it's not possible at some point in the future. Gpt itself, perhaps, someday.

Already ChatSpot is doing it. Their system is essentially a ChatGPT-enhanced Hubspot management system using chatux. ChatSpot can understand your commands and then perform actions in the system for you, for example add a lead, change their contact info, write a blog post, publish it, add an image… Edit: but if you connected it with physical actions, it could control your house, maybe check your smart refrigerator, or…

None of this is "industrial control task", aka "real work".

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

#162

Post by earthboundkid »

theLiminator wrote: post #145
01100011 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It still feels like there's a place for these rule based systems(Prolog?) to at least place some constraints on the output of non-deterministic, generative AI. If nothing else, have a generative AI generate the ruleset so you have some explicit rules you can audit from time to time.

Yeah, i think one potential way to use blackbox ai in newer systems is having guardrails that are validated as safe (but perhaps non-optimal) and ensuring that the ai takes action within that sample space. Obviously this is hard problem, but might open the doors for policies (in self-driving cars, for example) to be entirely ai driven.

Obviously the solution is to get the LLM to output Prolog. Give it positive feedback if the Prolog compiles. :-)

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

#163

Post by earthboundkid »

IIAOPSW wrote: post #84
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…

Here's an alternative to a model for truth. There is no truth, only power. Suppose we completely abandon logical semantics and instead focused on social semantics. Instead of the usual boolean True/False variables and logic relations, we'll have people valued variables and like/dislike relations. I system entirely for reasoning about the amount of pull and persuasion is present without ever circuiting down to any gro…

RLHF is basically just applying social power to the machine. It’s used for good (ChatGPT won’t help you spread Nazi memes) and hegemony (ChatGPT won’t help you overthrow capitalism).

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

#164

Post by cma »

sterlind wrote: post #73
gautamdivgi wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t most of the mathematics of AI old, as in really old? Regression, both linear and logistic are from the mid 1800s to early 1900s. Neural networks, at least the basics are from around 1950. What has really changed is the engineering, the data volume and the number of fields we can apply the mathematics to. The math itself (or what is the basis of AI) is really old.

backpropagation didn't get solved until the '80s, weirdly. before then people were using genetic algorithms to train neural networks. and it was only in the last decade that the vanishing gradients problem was tamed. my impression is that ML researchers were stumbling along in the mathematical dark, until they hit a combination (deep neural nets trained via stochastic gradient descent with ReLU activation) that worke…

> and it was only in the last decade that the vanishing gradients problem was tamed.

One of the big pieces was Schmidhuber's lab's highway nets, done ~30 years ago, but just didn't land until a more limited version was rediscovered.

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

#165

Post by gweinberg »

kneebonian wrote: post #152
orangecat wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?"

Yes, exactly. An autocompleter is saying what the next words probably would be, not what it should be. It's like a chess program that tries to find the most likely move that a huan would make in the position rather than the best move.

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

#166

Post by xwdv »

echelon wrote: post #160
JohnFen wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

What software do people envision themselves creating with these AI slaves?

More shitty CRUD apps? Which get easier and easier to pump out everyday with the growing numbers of frameworks, libraries, copying and pasting snippets from stack overflow?

Or will AI really write all the code for all our critical systems, operating systems, financial markets, planes, factories, vehicles, spacecraft? And will they do it so confidently and accurately that humans can safely just forget how to code?

Sure, perhaps. But by then AI will also be so advanced and independent in its problem solving that it will have no need to listen to human prompts.

I don’t really see the point in that.

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

#167

Post by digitalsushi »

pstorm wrote: post #103
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.

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"

mediocre is acceptable for most things. i'd rather have 1000 free photos from my wedding than 32 perfect ones. i still ended up with more than 32 perfect ones.

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

#168

Post by atleastoptimal »

ulrikhansen54 wrote: post #8
jasfi wrote: post #5

[flagged]

There's about ~10% point improvement left (i.e, from 80% to 90%) before it starts to stagnate. We've seen the same with predictive models benchmarked on ImageNet et. al.

> ~10% point improvement left

Do you have any source for that number. What even quantifies a percentage in a generative model. Closeness to human ability?

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

#169

Post by nico »

nostromo123 wrote: post #161
nico wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Already ChatSpot is doing it. Their system is essentially a ChatGPT-enhanced Hubspot management system using chatux. ChatSpot can understand your commands and then perform actions in the system for you, for example add a lead, change their contact info, write a blog post, publish it, add an image… Edit: but if you connected it with physical actions, it could control your house, maybe check your smart refrigerator, or…

None of this is "industrial control task", aka "real work".

Well, it might be coming soon, check out the video here: https://say-can.github.io/

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

#170

Post by nico »

burnished wrote: post #151
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.

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

Perform tasks that humans do now, but at scale, automatically.

We are going to be able to automate everything and anything with the proper feedback loops.

For example, you could have an app that writes itself, deploys itself, tests itself, receives feedback, updates itself based on the feedback, writes additional tests, does CI/CD.

At that point you will be just creating and directing. Or you can choose whatever you actually want to execute.

And then if those same kind of processes are given access to physical tools, they could do all of our manufacturing, design and build their own machines and infrastructure.

We could essentially collaborate with our systems in the most amazingly seamless way.

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