I’m not sure I understand a definition of AI that doesn’t include the ability to generate things.
The point is that AI is more than just generating more of the same data it was trained on.
Generative AI is overrated, long live old-school AI
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Re: Generative AI is overrated, long live old-school AI
#22I’m not sure I understand a definition of AI that doesn’t include the ability to generate things.
> I’m not sure I understand a definition of AI that doesn’t include the ability to generate things.
It depends how you define "generate." For example, is software that controls a robot arm generating anything? I guess it's generating the movements of the arm. But when people use the term "generative" with regards to machine learning models right now, they generally mean content—e.g. text or images for consumption.
Re: Generative AI is overrated, long live old-school AI
#23When the generative model is autoregressive (autocomplete), it can easily be used as a predictor. All of the state of the art language models are tested against multiple choice exams and other types of prediction tasks. In fact, it's how they are trained...masking - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/mpnet-combines... For example: "Multiple-choice questions in 57 subjects (professional & academic)" - https…
Being good at standardized tests isn't really a good measure.
What happens with completely new questions from totally different subject. The generative model will produce nonsense.
Re: Generative AI is overrated, long live old-school AI
#24[flagged]
> People are excited because there's so much room to improve
That is hype due to OpenAI's excellent marketing and it is clearly overrated. Microsoft essentially has acquired OpenAI and is using AI safety and competition excuses to close source everything and sell their AI snake-oil.
> these are still early days.
Neural networks is not an early concept and LLMs still share the same eternal problems as neural networks. Neither is the way that they have been trained on which still hasn't changed for a decade. Even so, that explains the lack of transparent reasoning and more sophistry that it generates all for more data, more GPUs to incinerate the planet to produce a black box 'AI' model that can easily get confused due to adversarial attacks.
Re: Generative AI is overrated, long live old-school AI
#25I'm working on an old-school AI personal project right now. I don't know how long that lasts. The generative stuff is more and more tempting. It rewards the horrible micromanager in me like nothing else.
Re: Generative AI is overrated, long live old-school AI
#26The author might be missing the fact that generative models can be used for "old-school" prediction tasks, with quite outstanding results. Their power does not only lie in their ability to _generate_ new data, but to _model_ existing data.
The biggest issue with using them in this way is how alien the failure modes are.
Interpretable models with transparent loss functions are easy to grok.
How LLMs might fail on a classic task is (afaict right now) difficult to predict.
Re: Generative AI is overrated, long live old-school AI
#27"So has generative AI been overhyped? Not exactly. Having generative models capable of delivering value is an exciting development. For the first time, people can interact with AI systems that don’t just automate but create an activity of which only humans were previously capable." Good answer but I feel that most users/people do not understand the difference between generative and predictive machine learning and tha…
I think the issue is more with people marketing/talking about them as "AI". When I think AI I think of something like Skynet. I would assume something like Skynet would be good at chess, able to generate new text, and synthesize new images. I think when shown novel algorithms that can do those things and told by the people selling the algorithms that they are "AI", it's hard to disagree since they quack like an AI so it's easy to accept that these are the same "artificial intelligence" concept in our brains which we previously only had examples of from fiction.
Basically I think it's overhyped by the use of the term "AI" and how easy we are to accept it generally. Some aspect of them being generative models could have been the term used to market/describe them, but instead a much broader term is used.
Re: Generative AI is overrated, long live old-school AI
#28Seems like the person who wrote the blog works in "classical" deep learning. So do I, so here's the fairest take I can come up with: "AI" has for recent memory been a marketing term anyway. Deep learning and variations have had a good run at being what people mean when they refer to AI, probably overweighting towards big convolution based computer vision models. Now, "AI" in people's minds means generative models. Th…
AI has been marketing term since the day it was coined. It means literally nothing, which means it can mean anything.
As the old joke goes, "AI" is anything that doesn't work yet.
Once an "AI" system becomes reliable, we quickly take it for granted and it no longer seems impressive or interesting. It's just a database. Or an image classifier. Or a chatbot.
Re: Generative AI is overrated, long live old-school AI
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
AI has been marketing term since the day it was coined. It means literally nothing, which means it can mean anything.
As the old joke goes, "AI" is anything that doesn't work yet. Once an "AI" system becomes reliable, we quickly take it for granted and it no longer seems impressive or interesting. It's just a database. Or an image classifier. Or a chatbot.
Magic is just science we don’t understand yet.
Re: Generative AI is overrated, long live old-school AI
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
By stagnate, you mean beating humankind at the task, right? :)
It's funny to me we look at GPT4 scoring high on all these tests and think it's worth anything when educators and a lot of us here have been lamenting the standardized tests since Bush made it a preeminent feature of our country's education system. They are not a good measure of intelligence. They measure how well you can take a test.
> They are not a good measure of intelligence. They measure how well you can take a test.
The tests aren't trying to measure intelligence, but rather whether you've learned the material.