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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

#181

Post by DonHopkins »

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

You're totally undermining your own argument by using "shell script" instead of "python script".

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

#182

Post by DonHopkins »

tough wrote: post #120
pstorm wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I had to try, seems reasonable, haven't tested the code As an AI language model, I do not have direct access to image editing software, but I can provide you with a shell script that could achieve the described image manipulation using ImageMagick, assuming it is installed on your system. Here's an example shell script that you could use as a starting point: bash Copy code #!/bin/bash # Set the input image filename i…

This is a prime example of what I mean by my remark above that the original commenter was totally undermining their own argument by using "shell script" instead of "python script".

Shell scripts can't create intermediate bitmap images in memory and operate on them with normal drawing and filtering apis like opencv, without lossily serializing and deserializing them as jpg files, or even operate on json structures directly.

It would be a much stronger argument if your example used python and opencv or any other normal library, instead of incredibly inefficient and hard to write and maintain invocations to full blown unix commands run in separate processes instead of direct library calls to manipulate in-memory images.

There's no reason "AI" code generation has to use the worst possible language and technique to generate code to solve a problem.

It's like having a food replicator from Star Trek: TNG, and asking it to make you rancid dog food instead of lobster.

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

#183

Post by DonHopkins »

furyofantares wrote: post #138
whatshisface wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

> shell scripts are very easy to write I've been a developer for a long-ass time, though I don't have super frequent occasion where I find it worthwhile to write a shell script. It comes up occasionally. In the past 2 weeks I've "written" 4 of them via ChatGPT for 1-off cases I'd have definitely found easier to just perform manually. It's been incredible how much easier it was to just get a working script from a desc…

Why, given the power and flexibility of ChatGPT, would anyone in their right mind ask it to write a shell script instead of a Python script?

Whose time and effort do they think they're saving by bringing more shell scripts into existence, anyway?

Shell scripts are objectively and vastly worse than equivalent Python scripts along all dimensions.

It's like having a food replicator from Star Trek: TNG, and asking it to make you rancid dog food instead of lobster.

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

#184

Post by fakedang »

JohnFen wrote: post #44
fakedang wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious about your work, because I worked on something similar during my grad school. What kind of applications in industry do you use deep learning systems for? Process control?

Yes, process control. It's used in coordination with vision systems to analyze work pieces, determine the best way of processing them, and direct other machinery how to do that processing.

That's cool. If you don't mind me asking, would you have any shallow level stuff that I could read on about this? Even a website or a blog post would be great.

In my grad school, we were working on something similar - using computer vision to analyze reactor flows to then change process variables. The results would be fed back into the system for RL. Too bad the project sorta froze after I graduated.

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

#185

Post by JohnFen »

fakedang wrote: post #184
JohnFen wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, process control. It's used in coordination with vision systems to analyze work pieces, determine the best way of processing them, and direct other machinery how to do that processing.

That's cool. If you don't mind me asking, would you have any shallow level stuff that I could read on about this? Even a website or a blog post would be great. In my grad school, we were working on something similar - using computer vision to analyze reactor flows to then change process variables. The results would be fed back into the system for RL. Too bad the project sorta froze after I graduated.

Your grad school project sounds very similar, yes, although we work with discrete objects rather than fluids. Fluid dynamics is much, much more complicated.

We actually use more than one neural network for this. The software is designed so the NN component is a plugin. The reason we do this is because some types of neural nets work better for some tasks than others.

Most (but not all) of our nets are convolutional.

Since you've already done some work with this sort of thing, I'm unsure about what level of overview would be of value to you, but this looks reasonable for a technically competent person who is new to the topic:

https://towardsdatascience.com/a-comprehensive-guide-to-conv...

As with all neural nets, the "secret sauce" isn't the code, it's the training.

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

#186

Post by ashes-of-sol »

xwdv wrote: post #108
com2kid wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

[dead]

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

#187

Post by ashes-of-sol »

fulafel wrote: post #125
tough wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to try, seems reasonable, haven't tested the code As an AI language model, I do not have direct access to image editing software, but I can provide you with a shell script that could achieve the described image manipulation using ImageMagick, assuming it is installed on your system. Here's an example shell script that you could use as a starting point: bash Copy code #!/bin/bash # Set the input image filename i…

This has lots of lossy encode/decode cycles that will accumulate artifacts. Good anecdote.

[dead]

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

#188

Post by JohnFen »

njarboe wrote: post #154
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".

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.

I was talking about what the average person thinks when they hear "AI". The average person has never even heard the term "AGI".

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

#189

Post by com2kid »

xwdv wrote: post #127
echelon wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That code will eventually fall away. The big thing everyone in this single thread is missing is that AI is a metaheuristic. I wouldn't expect to use AI to run_script.py. That's easy. I'd expect it to look at the business signals and do the work of an intern. To look at metrics and adjust some parameters or notify some people. To quickly come up with and prototype novel ways to glue new things together. To solve brand…

To do the work of an intern an AI must go on Jira, read a ticket, then find the appropriate repositories where code needs to be modified, write tests for its modification, submit for code review, respond to feedback in code review, deploy its changes. It’s not there yet.

> To do the work of an intern an AI must go on Jira, read a ticket, then find the appropriate repositories where code needs to be modified,

The problem is Jira workflows are designed for reporting results to upper management.

If the cost savings / productivity benefits[1] are there, new workflows will appear.

[1] Then again there are huge productivity benefits to be gained by simplifying existing Jira workflows, yet such steps are not taken.

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

#190

Post by furyofantares »

DonHopkins wrote: post #183
furyofantares wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> shell scripts are very easy to write I've been a developer for a long-ass time, though I don't have super frequent occasion where I find it worthwhile to write a shell script. It comes up occasionally. In the past 2 weeks I've "written" 4 of them via ChatGPT for 1-off cases I'd have definitely found easier to just perform manually. It's been incredible how much easier it was to just get a working script from a desc…

Why, given the power and flexibility of ChatGPT, would anyone in their right mind ask it to write a shell script instead of a Python script? Whose time and effort do they think they're saving by bringing more shell scripts into existence, anyway? Shell scripts are objectively and vastly worse than equivalent Python scripts along all dimensions. It's like having a food replicator from Star Trek: TNG, and asking it to…

I threw most of these scripts away after using them once, plus it was under a minute to get them working, so maybe I'll try a python script next time.
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