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This time, it feels different

nadh.in

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Re: This time, it feels different

#191

Post by cyber_kinetist »

cubefox wrote: post #65
300bps wrote: post #34

imagine what better, faster, more “intelligent” systems to follow in the wake of what exists today would be capable of doing Is this a given? Sure it will continue to improve but by how much? 200% or 2%? That’s the question. Anyone could’ve measured my height when I was 14 and predicted that I would be 35 feet tall today. But human bodies have limits. What are the limits of LLMs? It’s somewhere between ChatGPT-4 and…

We are talking about AI here. LLMs are obviously just an intermediate technology. For example, the next "big" model, Google's Gemini, will be multimodal, it will be able to handle other data types besides text. The next step is probably robotics.

I’m a bit more skeptical about robotics though, the human body is a complex marvel of nature and no software will replace the fact that it’s hard to build hardware with the capability of a living musculoskeletal system.

Re: This time, it feels different

#192

Post by throwuwu »

coffeebeqn wrote: post #47
throwuwu wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, these support agents are paid small hourly wages and do the same thing 1000 times a day while dealing with rude or irate customers. Automating their jobs to either eliminate them or change their role to that of bot supervisor will be much better for everyone.

Well you need a handful of supervisors and the rest are laid off. It’s easy to say these jobs being eliminated is good when it’s not your job

We shouldn’t keep jobs around just to keep people employed. This kind of insane careerism is probably what’s responsible for the current climate of regulations that makes it difficult for many people to find new work and for companies to open more positions. Changing jobs is a good thing, you would think someone on HN would know that.

Re: This time, it feels different

#193

Post by dwaltrip »

somewhereoutth wrote: post #175
dwaltrip wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> probabilistic word salad generator > Exactly no progress has been made in understanding or creating real intelligence in any meaningful sense Strong words… The thing has understanding. It may be alien and imperfect, with strange failure modes and quirks. But it has significant understanding of the real world. At this point, there are countless compelling examples demonstrating this. The only way the model could so…

But it is being given only those texts, not the circumstances. All that is can do is associate and surface patterns in the texts - very complex though those patterns may be. It should not be surprising that those patterns are recognizable, and even that they appear 'real', as they are derived from text about our world. However there cannot be any understanding beyond that, just as with the shadows on the wall of Plat…

Are you arguing the humans are not merely looking at the shadows on the cave wall but LLMs are? Or that the shadows that the LLMs sees are fundamentally different / worse than ours?

> All that is can do is associate and surface patterns in the texts - very complex though those patterns may be

One of the more interesting ideas I’ve heard is that text contains embedded world models that are far richer that we previously imagined. We missed this because it is something we take entirely for granted and couldn’t imagine it any other way, like a fish who doesn’t realize they are swimming in “water”. This seems like a very plausible explanation for the performance of gpt-4 and the like.

Re: This time, it feels different

#194

Post by ai-punter »

oxfordmale wrote: post #172
divan wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLM are mathematical models that, given your question, return a sequence of words based on a very complex probability model. How is this different from how humans respond? Our model could be just some orders of magnitude more complex. Or do you think there some _fundamentally_ different things are going on in the human brain?

You know what a book is and can reason about it. As a human you can provide answers that go beyond the knowledge you have ingested. For example, if you ask ChatGPT if books can be fluorescent it says no. However, as an adult you know someone somewhere has made a book with fluorescent images, as it is a cool thing. You are combining knowledge from two different fields (books + fluorescence) and establishing the likeli…

lol, really?

Me: Can books be fluorescent?

GPT-4: While the term "fluorescent" is typically used to describe substances that can absorb light and then re-emit it, often at a different wavelength, there's no inherent reason why a book couldn't be made with fluorescent properties.

This could be achieved by using fluorescent ink, dyes, or paints on the cover or the pages, or by incorporating fluorescent fibers into the paper itself. When exposed to ultraviolet light (often called "black light"), these materials would glow. This might be used for aesthetic reasons, for practical reasons like aiding reading in low-light conditions, or for interactive elements in children's books or art books.

It's important to note that this is not a common feature for most books, as it would increase production costs and might not be appealing or necessary for all readers or all types of books. Also, long-term exposure to ultraviolet light can be damaging to many types of paper and ink, which could reduce the lifespan of the book.

As of my knowledge cutoff in September 2021, I don't have any specific examples of fluorescent books, but that doesn't mean they don't exist or couldn't be created.

Re: This time, it feels different

#195

Post by ukuina »

fzeroracer wrote: post #138

> It just repeats patterns > It is just a glorified probabilistic text generator. > It is just a “stochastic parrot”. > It “hallucinates”. > It is not “intelligent” the way humans are. > It does not actually “think” like humans. > It will never get human qualities like humour.[4] > It is snake oil and is no different from any other technology that has come before. > If it causes job losses, new jobs will emerge, like…

Some (many?) of those statements have been empirically proven false, like understanding humor. Multi-modal LLMs can explain why certain images are funny, for example.

Re: This time, it feels different

#196

Post by ukuina »

petesergeant wrote: post #31

If everything stood still with nothing more than GPT-4 we are a few years ago from realising the disruption of just that alone

This is very true. There is so much reinvention of processes happening behind the scenes around GPT4 as an API. These advancements will take a few quarters to show impact.

Re: This time, it feels different

#197

Post by Izkata »

nologic01 wrote: post #120

Geez people. Please learn to identify hypes, but most importantly the causes of hypes. LLM is fundamentally information processing technology. Not the path to AGI, not an emerging sentience. The reason "this time" feels so amazing is that the unwashed masses suddenly got access to new information processing technology in a context where their tools been stagnant for decades . Not because it was not possible, but beca…

> Not because it was not possible, but because there was no money in it.

When one of the earlier GPT models was released, didn't they straight-up say "none of us expected it to work this well"?

I think it really was closer to "not possible" than "no money" - but more like "no one thought it was possible".

Re: This time, it feels different

#198

Post by ukuina »

doctor_eval wrote: post #32
random78965 wrote: post #8

The haiku at the end is not a haiku, technically. As a non-business person, I imagine that folks would typically want some correctness guarantees, which seem near-impossible with today's LLMs. What kind of business use-cases do they enable? Probably a failure of imagination on my part, but I can't think of many tasks that can be done consistently well by AI that can't also be done with simpler software.

I’m both a business person and an engineer. I recently did a short workshop where a marketing guy took us through using GPT and Midjourney to iterate through new business ideas. In the 4 hours of the workshop, a bunch of mostly non developer people generated about 500 business ideas using GPT, took the top ideas, and turned them into business pitches. A couple of people in the room thought the idea their promoting ca…

How does Midjourney factor into business idea generation?

Re: This time, it feels different

#199

Post by Izkata »

retrac wrote: post #155
nologic01 wrote: post #120

Geez people. Please learn to identify hypes, but most importantly the causes of hypes. LLM is fundamentally information processing technology. Not the path to AGI, not an emerging sentience. The reason "this time" feels so amazing is that the unwashed masses suddenly got access to new information processing technology in a context where their tools been stagnant for decades . Not because it was not possible, but beca…

We have spent the last seventy or more years working on machine translation. All the way back in the 1950s, big money went into it. Decades of hard work, mathematical models of human language, all manner of study, enormous bilingual corpuses of text with phonetic annotation, programmed in general-knowledge databases, fuzzy reasoning algorithms. The amount of work put into it is quite staggering, in hindsight. I remem…

> It is the same story in many other areas. Chess, Go? They learn to play chess and go better than any AI designed specifically to do so.

Take GP's "stagnant for decades" with tech and turn it into "stagnant for centuries" with these. When it first started I remember professional Go players talking about just how big a shakeup it was.

Re: This time, it feels different

#200

Post by cubefox »

cyber_kinetist wrote: post #191
cubefox wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are talking about AI here. LLMs are obviously just an intermediate technology. For example, the next "big" model, Google's Gemini, will be multimodal, it will be able to handle other data types besides text. The next step is probably robotics.

I’m a bit more skeptical about robotics though, the human body is a complex marvel of nature and no software will replace the fact that it’s hard to build hardware with the capability of a living musculoskeletal system.

If a Boston Dynamics robot had human level intelligence, it could already do a lot. Their limbs are probably not capable of the agility of humans, but humans also don't have the agility of many animals, which hasn't stopped us.
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