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What it feels like to work in AI right now

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Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#191

LLM sizes have been increasing 10X every year for the last few years. Source is NVidia. That pace is staggering. GPT4’s lead is temporary and it’s a shiny ball distraction from doing dev on your own projects rather than being a user on someone else’s. Get to it and get over it. There are plenty of breakthroughs to be had.

The work being done to make these LLMs possible to run locally is terribly important. The same needs to happen for training. The most urgent breakthrough we need is distributed training algorithms that allow training to be done in the style of Seti@Home or even more cooperatively.

Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#192
post #166

Not sure why any researcher wants to go into this … other than for money. None of them will get credit for it, the big shots from 40 years ago will. Better to work against the grain rather than as part of a herd.

If I were going into it now I’d definitely look for things not in the hype spotlight. There is no way you’ll even get near the front of the thundering LLM herd no matter how good you are, and if you are there you will just get trampled faster. Your work will just be assimilated and only the owners of these huge models will see upside.

In other words you are just making other people rich, and without even the stability or pacing of normal employment.

I have never seen anything like this level of hype. The tech is cool but the reality in the trenches must be gross.

Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#193

From my perspective it’s just _confusing_ to work in AI right now. We have some massive models that are doing some really neat stuff, and apparently hundreds of millions of people are using them—but I keep wondering: to do _what_, exactly? I’m not asking what the models can do, I’m asking what people want the models to do every day, all the time. I’ve been shown some neat pictures people made that they thought were c…

I use it for APIs. Specifically, I use it to help think about how I should architect my APIs, as well as how I should implement them. I can ask ChatGPT to do both things for me. Even if it's somewhat wrong, it still gives me a good enough direction to go on.

Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#194
This sub and blog post are all talking about ChatGPT which is no doubt amazing and far ahead of the curve. However I would also point to Metas new vision model:

SAM (Segment Anything): it is so far beyond any other vision model, I actually believe vision will be solved in a few years now. People don’t realize that there was an industry of publishing paper with incremental improvements in small datasets in CVPR that has been completely invalidated by this paper. I’ve seen engineers in Cruise segmentation team, say Metas new model seems to work better than the in house models they developed and that they should build on top of this. I’ve worked in Tesla Autopilot before and saw it hit a mannequin because we never had mannequin in our dataset before ( we might have had it in the data but it was not a part of our ontology for the network to predict). One approach to mitigate this was OpenAI’s clip that used the English Language as classification labels but Meta’s SAM is so much better where it detects objects without need to specify language. It just understands scenes and objects, at a fundamental level, it can detect anything in a picture if you prompt it right. Honestly it feels a lot like GPT1 which was also ignored by most. If you prompt it right you can get it to segment anything in an image, but prompting it right requires human input. However I can imagine the third or fourth version, with some RL sprinkled in just working zero-shot on complete pixel understanding of any image in the world. This was one of the holy grail of computer vision, that we are seeing solved right in front of our eyes

Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People really don't seem to understand just how far ahead OAI is in its reasoning abilities ( https://crfm.stanford.edu/helm/v0.2.2/?group=reasoning ) Maybe PaLM is near there (it's not evaluated on that page) but nothing else even comes close at all

The level of denial people are willing to sink into regarding how good GPT-4 is compared to everything else is truly crazy. Not a single other project is an order of magnitude close to the quantitative and qualitative (actual experiential results, not just benchmarks) results that GPT-4 brings.

I've had decent success with Open Assistant, an open source model. I'd say it's within the order of magnitude of ChatGPT, given the prompts I'm looking at, including reasoning prompts. This, I believe, is due to the overwhelmingly clean data that OA have managed to acquire through human volunteers.

Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think ultimately tech will result in humans being like the rest of animals - completely unable to participate in the economy. This will only start to happen once AGI is reached though which might only be a decade away or less.

I suspect there will be essentially three different economies - Digital Human-experiences, and hybrid. AGI will focus primarily on problems that can be mostly solved within digital worlds where it can cycle incredibly fast. Building software, finance, paperwork, etc, etc It will eventually evolve to design, control, and operate physical systems, but will need humans to intervene and fix systems (hybrid). The human ec…

Yes I could see that happening, assuming the AIs don’t manage to outwit humans and subvert power and take over.

However, even if humans remain dominant (political power-wise), eventually there will probably be fake humans/cyborgs, like Cylons in Battle Star Galactica, that can do everything humans can but better. And also provide human-level experiences. Impossible to know how long this will take though.

Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% this -- a Google search requires multiple input queries, refinement, and scrolling a list of possible answers that are really just links to other web sites. The ChatGPT experience is far superior to this, for the average consumer and getting close for the power user. It's a better way to ask the Internet what it knows with a more natural interface that everyone already knows how to use -- real natural language.…

> The ChatGPT experience is far superior Now it is. Google used to be good too, until ads started looking like search results, and then the first page became entirely ads. In the future, when you ask ChatGPT to help you write your resume, it will try to upsell you a premium account in linked in. It will withhold its best resume advice only for LinkedIn premium users after all. You think Clips was bad? You’ve seen not…

Yep, Bing already has ads now inside its chat answers.

Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If something makes everything take half as much effort but removes your ability to earn an income (or slashes it more than twice) then it decreases your standard of living despite substantially increasing it for many others.

You are assuming everything else stays static. Maybe if this happens, the ability to do everything in as half as much time will increase competition in a lot of areas bringing prices down and increasing your purchasing power.

That’s not what’s happening in the US. Too much concentration of wealth (not just tech), leading to almost 3rd world country health outcomes, education levels plummeting and unaffordability to live.

Will backfire at one point if it continues.

Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#199
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human nature, not just tech

Is it though? I remember feeling much more positive about society roughly 20 years ago.

You were also twenty years younger, surely youthful naïveté plays a role in how you felt about society. And regardless, your feeling about society doesn't necessarily correspond to how society actually is.

Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#200

From my perspective it’s just _confusing_ to work in AI right now. We have some massive models that are doing some really neat stuff, and apparently hundreds of millions of people are using them—but I keep wondering: to do _what_, exactly? I’m not asking what the models can do, I’m asking what people want the models to do every day, all the time. I’ve been shown some neat pictures people made that they thought were c…

>I’ve seen “write a snippet of code” demos. I've used this part of ChatGPT before. Incredibly useful for getting the syntax of some library that you're going to use once in your life, then never again. Had a sysadmin mate do something similar to generate a simple Chrome plugin for internal use at his work. That alone justifies the price for ChatGPT Plus, IMO.

I used it to knock up a browser extension tonight. My knowledge of JS is basically non-existent. It definitely paid for itself this month.
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