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Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

thealgorithmicbridge.com

181–190 of 243 posts

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What is wing sweep, what is induced drag, what is the area rule?

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#182

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…

LLM hallucinations aren't errors.

LLMs generate text based on weights in a model, and some of it happens to be correct statements about the world. Doesn't mean the rest is generated incorrectly.

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#183

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…

THAT. This is what I don't get. Instead of fixing a complex system let's build more complex system based on it knowing that it might not always work.

When you have a complex system that does not always work correctly, you start disassembling it to simpler and simpler components until you find the one - or maybe several - that are not working as designed, you fix whatever you found wrong with them, put the complex system together again, test it to make sure your fix worked, and you're done. That's how I debug complex cloud-based/microservices-infected software systems, that's how they test software/hardware systems found in aircraft/rockets and whatever else. That's such a fundamental principle to me.

If LLM is a black box by definition and there's no way to make it consistently work correctly, what is it good for?..

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#184
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).

> it is supposed to usher the humanity into a new prosperous age (somehow).

More like usher in climate catastrophe way ahead of schedule. AI-driven data center build outs are a major source of new energy use, and this trend is only intensifying. Dangerously irresponsible marketing cloaks the impact of these companies on our future.

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#185

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…

LLM hallucinations aren't errors. LLMs generate text based on weights in a model, and some of it happens to be correct statements about the world. Doesn't mean the rest is generated incorrectly.

You know the difference between verification and validation?

You're describing a lack of errors in verification (working as designed/built, equations correct).

GP is describing an error in validation (not doing what we want / require / expect).

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#186
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel I could argue the counterpoint. Hijacking the pathways of the human brain that leads to addictive behaviour has the potential to utterly ruins peoples lives. And so talking about it, if you have good intentions, seems like a thing anyone with the heart in the right place would. Take VEO3 and YouTube integration as an example: Google made VEO3 and YouTube has shorts and are aware of the data that shows addictiv…

The fact is that not all people exhibit the described behavior. So the actions of corporations cannot be considered unambiguously bad. For example, it will help to cleanse the human gene pool of genes responsible for addictive behavior.

I never suggested they were unambiguously bad, I meant to propose that it is a valid concern to talk about.

In addition, with your argument, should you not legalize all drugs in the quest for maximising profits to a select few shareholders?

AFAIK, the workings of addiction is not fully known, I.e. it’s not only those with dopaminergetic dispositions that get ”caught”. Upbringing, socioeconomic factors and mental health are also variables. Reducing it down to genes I fear is reductionist.

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

THAT. This is what I don't get. Instead of fixing a complex system let's build more complex system based on it knowing that it might not always work. When you have a complex system that does not always work correctly, you start disassembling it to simpler and simpler components until you find the one - or maybe several - that are not working as designed, you fix whatever you found wrong with them, put the complex sys…

> If LLM is a black box by definition and there's no way to make it consistently work correctly, what is it good for?..

many things are unpredictable on the real world. Most of the machines we make are built upon layers of redundancies to make imperfect systems stable and predictable. this is no different.

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#188
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…

> 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? Hallucination does seem to be much less of an issue now. I…

I just tried asking ChatGPT on how to "force PhotoSync to not upload images to a B2 bucket that are already uploaded previously", and all it could do is hallucinate options that don't exist and webpages that are irrelevant. This is with the latest model and all the reasoning and researching applied, and across multiple messages in multiple chats. So no, hallucination is still a huge problem.

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#189
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…

> 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? Hallucination does seem to be much less of an issue now. I…

You don’t hear about it anymore because it’s not worth talking about anymore. Everyone implicitly understands they are liable to make up nonsense.

Re: Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately

#190

Also, AGI is not just around the corner. We need artificial comprehension for that, and we don't even have a theory how comprehension works. Comprehension is the fusing of separate elements into new functional wholes, dynamically abstracting observations, evaluating them for plausibility, and reconstituting the whole - and all instantaneously, for security purposes, of every sense constantly. We have no technology th…

> We need artificial comprehension for that, and we don't even have a theory how comprehension works.

Not sure we need it. The counter example is the LLM itself. We had absolutely zero idea that the attention heads would bring such benefits down the road.

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