Live data from Hacker News

Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

thealgorithmicbridge.com

171–180 of 243 posts

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#171

I can't speak intelligently about how close AGI really is (I do not believe it is but I guess someone somehow somewhere might come up with a brilliant idea that nobody thought of so far and voila). However I'm flabbergasted by the lack of attention to so-called "hallucinations" (which is a misleading, I mean marketing, term and we should be talking about errors or inaccuracies). The problem is that we don't really kn…

I guess a counter, is that we don't need to understand how they work to produce a useful output.

They are a magical black box magic 8 ball, that more likely than not gives you the right answer. Maybe people can explain the black box, and make the magic 8 ball more accurate.

But at the end of the day, with a very complex system it will always be some level of black box unreliable magic 8 ball.

So the question then is how do you build an reliable system from unreliable components. Because llms directly are unreliable.

The answer to this is agents, ie feedback loops between multiple llm calls, which in isolation are unreliable, but in aggregate approach reliability.

At the end of the day the bet on agents is a bet that the model companies will not get a model that will magically be 100% correct on the first try.

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#172
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Related to your point: if these tools are close to having super-human intelligence, and they make humans so much more productive, why aren't we seeing improvements at a much faster rate than we are now? Why aren't inherent problems like hallucination already solved, or at least less of an issue? Surely the smartest researchers and engineers money can buy would be dogfooding, no? This is the main point that proves to…

> It can generate data that mimics anything humans have produced... No, it can generate data that mimics anything humans have put on the WWW

The frontier model developers have licensed access to a huge volume of training data which isn't available on the public WWW.

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#173
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could see 2040 or so being very likely. Not off transformers though.

via what paradigm then? What out there gives high enough confidence to set a date like that?

While we don’t know an enormous amount about the brain, we do know a pretty good bit about individual neurons, and I think it’s a good guess, given current science, to say that a solidly accurate simulation of a large number of neurons would lead to a kind of intelligence loosely analogous to that found in animals. I’d completely understand if you disagree, but I consider it a good guess.

If that’s the case, then the gulf between current techniques and what’s needed seems knowable. A means of approximating continuous time between neuron firing, time-series recognition in inputs, learning behavior on inputs prior to actual neuron firing (akin to behavior of dendrites), etc. are all missing functionalities in current techniques. Some or all of these missing parts of biological neuron behavior might be needed to approximate animal intelligence, but I think it’s a good guess that these are the parts that are missing.

AI currently has enormous amounts of money being dumped into it on techniques that are lacking for what we want to achieve with it. As they falter more and more, there will be an enormous financial interest in creating new, more effective techniques, and the most obvious place to look for inspiration will be biology. That’s why I think it’s likely to happen in the next few decades; the hardware should be there in terms of raw compute, there’s an obvious place to look for new ideas, and there’s a ton of financial interest in it.

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#175

I can't speak intelligently about how close AGI really is (I do not believe it is but I guess someone somehow somewhere might come up with a brilliant idea that nobody thought of so far and voila). However I'm flabbergasted by the lack of attention to so-called "hallucinations" (which is a misleading, I mean marketing, term and we should be talking about errors or inaccuracies). The problem is that we don't really kn…

You can get use out of a hammer without understanding how the strong force works. You can get use out of an LLM without understanding how every node works.

You can get injured by using a hammer without understanding how it works.

You can damage a company by using a spreadsheet and not understanding how it works.

In your personal opinion, what are the things you should know before using an LLM?

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that is indeed the 'we', but I think more people are knowledgeable than is obvious. I'm not an aerodynamicist, and I know about those guys, so they can't be infinitely obscure. I imagine every French person knows about Bleriot at least.

I'm an avgeek with a MSc in engineering. I vaguely recall the name Bleriot from physics, although I have no clue what he actually did. I have never even heard the names Busemann, Prandtl, or Whitcomb.

I find this super surprising, because even I who don't do aerodynamics I still know about thes guys.

Bleriot was a french aviation pioneer and not a physicist. He built the first monoplane. Busemann was an aerodynamicist who invented wing sweep and also did important work on supersonic flight. Prandtl is known for research on lift distribution over wings, wingtip vortices, induced drag and he basically invented much of the theory about wings. Whitcomb gave his name to the Whitcomb area rule, although Otto Frenzl had come up with it earlier during WWII.

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#177
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly.. even if we had an AGI superintelligence, and it came up with a solution to global warming, we'd still have right-wingnuts that stands in the way of any kind of progress. And the story is practically the same for every other problem it could solve - people are still the problem .

[flagged]

Except none of what you wrote is true. Republicans again and again are arrested for pedophilia. Sorry, but the right is the party of pedophilia, not the left. "Pizzagate" was a complete haox, but it seems like you believe in hoaxes?

"MAGA Republican Resigns After Being Charged With Soliciting Sex From a Minor"

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/maga-rep...

"Republican State lawmaker used online name referencing Joe Biden to exchange child sex abuse material, feds say"

https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/state-lawmaker-used-onl...

"Houston man pardoned by Trump arrested on child sex charge"

https://www.texastribune.org/2025/02/06/arrest-trump-pardon-...

"The crimes include plotting murder of FBI agents, child sexual assault, possession of child sexual abuse material and reckless homicide while driving drunk"

https://www.citizensforethics.org/reports-investigations/cre...

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#178
post #8

Observe what the AI companies are doing, not what they are saying. If they would expect to achieve AGI soon, their behaviour would be completely different. Why bother developing chatbots or doing sales, when you will be operating AGI in a few short years? Surely, all resources should go towards that goal, as it is supposed to usher the humanity into a new prosperous age (somehow).

> Why bother developing chatbots Maybe it is the reverse? It is not them offering a product, it is the users offering their interaction data. Data which might be harvested for further training of the real deal, which is not the product. Think about it: They (companies like OpenAI) have created a broad and diverse user base which without a second thought feeds them with up-to-date info about everything happening in th…

that possibility makes me feel weird about paying a subscription... they should pay me!

or the best models should be free to use. if it's free to use then I think I can live with it

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#179
post #8

Observe what the AI companies are doing, not what they are saying. If they would expect to achieve AGI soon, their behaviour would be completely different. Why bother developing chatbots or doing sales, when you will be operating AGI in a few short years? Surely, all resources should go towards that goal, as it is supposed to usher the humanity into a new prosperous age (somehow).

> Why bother developing chatbots Maybe it is the reverse? It is not them offering a product, it is the users offering their interaction data. Data which might be harvested for further training of the real deal, which is not the product. Think about it: They (companies like OpenAI) have created a broad and diverse user base which without a second thought feeds them with up-to-date info about everything happening in th…

> No one in the history of mankind ever had such a holistic view, almost gods eye.

I distinctly remember search engines 30 years ago having a "live searches" page (with optional "include adult searches" mode)

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#180

I can't speak intelligently about how close AGI really is (I do not believe it is but I guess someone somehow somewhere might come up with a brilliant idea that nobody thought of so far and voila). However I'm flabbergasted by the lack of attention to so-called "hallucinations" (which is a misleading, I mean marketing, term and we should be talking about errors or inaccuracies). The problem is that we don't really kn…

You can get use out of a hammer without understanding how the strong force works. You can get use out of an LLM without understanding how every node works.

Hammer is not a perfect analogy because of how simple it is, but sure let's go with it.

Imagine that occasionally when getting in contact with the nail it shatters to bits, or goes through the nail as it were liquid, or blows up, or does something else completely unexpected. Wouldn't you want to fix it? And sure, it might require deep understanding of the nature of the materials and forces involved.

That's what I'd do.

Post reply on HN