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Sweatshop Data Is Over

mechanize.work

21–27 of 27 posts

Re: Sweatshop Data Is Over

#21

I am quite happy that this post argues in favor of subject-matter expertise. Until recently I worked at a national lab. I had many people (both leadership and colleagues) tell me that they need fewer if any subject-matter experts like myself because ML/AI can handle a lot of those tasks now. To that effect, lab leadership was directing most of the hiring (both internal and external) towards ML/AI positions. I obvious…

This all reminds me of this really interesting book "The Inevitable" by kevin kelly.

It had a fascinating look into the future, and in this case one insight in particular.

It basically said that in the future, answers would be cheap and plentiful, and questions would be valuable.

With AI I think this will become more true every day.

Maybe AI can answer anything, but won't we still need people to ask the right questions?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inevitable_(book)

Re: Sweatshop Data Is Over

#22
post #21

I am quite happy that this post argues in favor of subject-matter expertise. Until recently I worked at a national lab. I had many people (both leadership and colleagues) tell me that they need fewer if any subject-matter experts like myself because ML/AI can handle a lot of those tasks now. To that effect, lab leadership was directing most of the hiring (both internal and external) towards ML/AI positions. I obvious…

This all reminds me of this really interesting book "The Inevitable" by kevin kelly. It had a fascinating look into the future, and in this case one insight in particular. It basically said that in the future, answers would be cheap and plentiful, and questions would be valuable. With AI I think this will become more true every day. Maybe AI can answer anything, but won't we still need people to ask the right questio…

I agree that the ability to ask the right questions is a rare skill. I had a supervisor once with that ability. I tried to learn as much as I could about that from him.

That said, I think ultimately there are some questions that have no answers regardless of how we try to answer them. For chaotic systems, even small uncertainties in the inputs result in large differences in the outputs. In that sense, we can always ask questions, but our questions sometimes can never be precise enough to get meaningful answers. That statement is hard to wrap your head around without taking a course in chaos theory.

Re: Sweatshop Data Is Over

#23
post #7

It's kind of reassuring that the old adage "garbage in, garbage out" still applies in the age of LLMs...

Hillariously, less people going to write any quality papers after LLM's prevent the microbloggers from making any financial gain from writing.

Anyways, good time for society.

Re: Sweatshop Data Is Over

#24
> For example, to train an AI to fully assume the role of an infrastructure engineer, we need RL environments that comprehensively test what’s required to build and maintain robust systems.

Or we could just, you know, not do that at all.

Re: Sweatshop Data Is Over

#25

> This meant that while Google was playing games, OpenAI was able to seize the opportunity of a lifetime. What you train on matters. Very weird reasoning. Without AlphaGo, AlphaZero, there's probably no GPT ? Each were a stepping stone weren't they?

>Very weird reasoning. Without AlphaGo, AlphaZero, there's probably no GPT ? Each were a stepping stone weren't they? Right but wrong. Alphago and AlphaZero are built using very different techniques than GPT type LLMs. Google created Transformers which leads much more directly to GPTs, RLHF is the other piece which was basically created inside OpenAI by Paul Cristiano.

Yep, I looked it up a few hours after, different branches in the evolution of ML. Still weird to dismiss AlphaZero as just "playing games".

Re: Sweatshop Data Is Over

#26
post #21

I am quite happy that this post argues in favor of subject-matter expertise. Until recently I worked at a national lab. I had many people (both leadership and colleagues) tell me that they need fewer if any subject-matter experts like myself because ML/AI can handle a lot of those tasks now. To that effect, lab leadership was directing most of the hiring (both internal and external) towards ML/AI positions. I obvious…

This all reminds me of this really interesting book "The Inevitable" by kevin kelly. It had a fascinating look into the future, and in this case one insight in particular. It basically said that in the future, answers would be cheap and plentiful, and questions would be valuable. With AI I think this will become more true every day. Maybe AI can answer anything, but won't we still need people to ask the right questio…

> This all reminds me of this really interesting book "The Inevitable" by kevin kelly.

I'm fine with a bit of speculative fiction, but I prefer it to be less dystopian than "The Inevitable". Got any good solarpunk recommendations?

Re: Sweatshop Data Is Over

#27
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This all reminds me of this really interesting book "The Inevitable" by kevin kelly. It had a fascinating look into the future, and in this case one insight in particular. It basically said that in the future, answers would be cheap and plentiful, and questions would be valuable. With AI I think this will become more true every day. Maybe AI can answer anything, but won't we still need people to ask the right questio…

I agree that the ability to ask the right questions is a rare skill. I had a supervisor once with that ability. I tried to learn as much as I could about that from him. That said, I think ultimately there are some questions that have no answers regardless of how we try to answer them. For chaotic systems, even small uncertainties in the inputs result in large differences in the outputs. In that sense, we can always a…

Aaron Swartz
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