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AI in my plasma physics research didn’t go the way I expected

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Re: AI in my plasma physics research didn’t go the way I expected

#211

Post by sanderjd »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #177
sanderjd wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is always divided on "how much is the currently hype-y technology real vs just hype". I've seen this over and over again and been on different sides of the question on different technologies at different times. To me, this is same as it ever was!

I basically agree, but want to point out two major differences to other "hype-y" topics that existed in the past that in my opinion make the whole AI discussions on HN a little bit more controversial than other older hype discussions: 1. The whole investment volume (and thus hope and expectations) into AI is much larger than into other hype topics. 2. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, was president of YCombinator, the c…

On (1): Investment volume relative to what? To me, it looks like a very similar pattern of investors crowding into the currently hot thing, trying to get a piece of the winners of the power law.

On (2): I'm honestly not sure I think this is making a big difference at all. Not much of the commentary here is driven by YC stuff, because most of the audience here has no direct entwinement with YC.

Re: AI in my plasma physics research didn’t go the way I expected

#212

Post by mountainb »

Flamentono2 wrote: post #58
simianparrot wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s why it keeps looking exactly like NFT’s and crypto hype cycles to me: Yes the technology has legitimate uses, but the promises of groundbreaking use cases that will change the world are obviously not materialising and to anyone that understands the tech it can’t. It’s people making money off hype until it dies and move on to the next scam-with-some-use.

We already have breakthroughs. Benchmark results which have been unheard of before ML. Alone language translation got so much better, voice syntesis, voice transcription. All my meetings now are searchable and i can ask 'ai' to summarize my meetings in a relative accurate way impossible before that. Alphafold made a breakthrough in protein folding. Image and Video generation can now do unbelievable things. Realtime v…

One one hand, maybe it's good to have better searchable records, even if it's hard to quantify the benefit.

On the other hand, now all your meetings produce reams of computer searchable records subject to discovery in civil and criminal litigation, possibly leading to far worse liability than would have been possible in a mostly email based business.

Re: AI in my plasma physics research didn’t go the way I expected

#213

Post by vunderba »

AngryData wrote: post #147
AstralStorm wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh they're not even close in availability as cars, much harder to operate, much more expensive and tend to fall out of the sky. Thank you for providing an example that directly maps to usefulness of ANN in most research though.

Helicopters don't just fall out of the sky, atleast not any different than planes fall out of the sky, they can auto-rotate to the ground without engine power.

True but even lowering collective and letting autorotation take over you still hit the ground REALLY hard - enough to sustain injuries to your back and neck in some cases.

Glide ratios in GA (like highwing cessnas) is much more forgiving assuming you can find a place to put down.

Re: AI in my plasma physics research didn’t go the way I expected

#214

Post by jgalt212 »

strogonoff wrote: post #48
plasticeagle wrote: post #25

Does anybody else find it peculiar that the majority of these articles about AI say things like "of course I don't doubt that AI will lead to major discoveries", and then go on to explain how they aren't useful in any field whatsoever? Where are the AI-driven breakthroughs? Or even the AI-driven incremental improvements? Do they exist anywhere? Or are we just using AI to remix existing general knowledge, while making…

There is rarely a constructive discussion around the term “AI”. You can’t say anything useful about what it might lead to or how useful it might be, because it is purely a marketing term that does not have a specific meaning (neither do both of the words in its abbreviation). Interesting discussions tend to avoid “AI” in favour of specific terms such as “ML”, “LLM”, “GAN”, “stable diffusion”, “chatbot”, “image genera…

> There is rarely a constructive discussion around the term “AI”.

You hit the nail on the head there. AI, in its broadest terms, exists at the epicenter of hype and emotions.

Re: AI in my plasma physics research didn’t go the way I expected

#215

Post by nyarlathotep_ »

plasticeagle wrote: post #25

Does anybody else find it peculiar that the majority of these articles about AI say things like "of course I don't doubt that AI will lead to major discoveries", and then go on to explain how they aren't useful in any field whatsoever? Where are the AI-driven breakthroughs? Or even the AI-driven incremental improvements? Do they exist anywhere? Or are we just using AI to remix existing general knowledge, while making…

> say things like "of course I don't doubt that AI will lead to major discoveries", and then go on to explain how they aren't useful in any field whatsoever?

This is "paying the toll", otherwise one will be accused of being a "luddite."

Re: AI in my plasma physics research didn’t go the way I expected

#216

Post by th0ma5 »

Flamentono2 wrote: post #168
whyowhy3484939 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We finally have a system which encodes not just basic things but high level concepts That's the thing I'm trying to convey: it's in fact not encoding anything you'll recognize and if it is, it's certainly not "concepts" as you understand them. Not saying it cannot correlate text that includes what you call "high level concepts" or do what you imagine to be useful work in that general direction. Again not making cla…

I do understand it but i also think that the current LLMs are the first step to it. GPT-3 started proper investment into this topic, there was not enough research done in this direction and now it is. People like Yann LeCun already analyse different approaches/architecture but they still use the infrastructure of LLMs (ML/GPUs) and potentially the data. I never said that LLM is the breaktrhough in consesnes. But you…

I mean, you're not even wrong ! Most all of these large models are based on the idea that if you put all of the representations that we can of the world into a big pile that you can tease out some kind of meaning. There's not even really a cohesive theory as to that, and surely no testable way to prove that it's true. It certainly seems like you can make a system that behaves as if it could be like that, and I think that's what you're picking up on. But it's actually probably something else and something far shorter of that.

Re: AI in my plasma physics research didn’t go the way I expected

#217

Post by [deleted] »

dirtyhippiefree wrote: post #185
literalAardvark wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even more relvant, AlphaEvolve is real. Could easily be brick 1 of self-improvement and the start of the banana zone.

I’m with gthompson512 Sounds like a routine Bill Hicks might have come up with if he was still with us. He hated obfuscation.

[deleted]

Re: AI in my plasma physics research didn’t go the way I expected

#218

Post by giantrobot »

rickdeckard wrote: post #154
strogonoff wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is rarely a constructive discussion around the term “AI”. You can’t say anything useful about what it might lead to or how useful it might be, because it is purely a marketing term that does not have a specific meaning (neither do both of the words in its abbreviation). Interesting discussions tend to avoid “AI” in favour of specific terms such as “ML”, “LLM”, “GAN”, “stable diffusion”, “chatbot”, “image genera…

It's not even that certain sub-industries prefer "AI", it's the umbrella term a company can use in Marketing for virtually any automated process that provides a seemingly subjective result. Case in point: For a decade the implementation of cameras went through development, testing and tuning of Auto Exposure, Auto Focus and Auto White-Balance ("AAA") engines as well as image post-processing. These engines ran on a Im…

> One company started with "AI assisted Camera" to promote the process everyone was doing all-along.

Before the "AI" labeling more advanced image processing was often called "computational photography". At least in the world of smartphone cameras. Because they have tiny image sensors and lenses smartphone cameras need to do a lot of work to get a decent image out of any environment that doesn't have perfect lighting. The processing is more traditional computer vision.

There's not legitimate generative AI features being peddled like editing people out of (or into) photos. But most of the image processing pipelines haven't fundamentally changed but not have AI labeling to please marketers and upper management.

Re: AI in my plasma physics research didn’t go the way I expected

#219

Post by giantrobot »

Closi wrote: post #169
roenxi wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, the strong predictions about AI are using a vague term because the tech often doesn't exist yet. There isn't a chatbot right now that I feel confident can out-perform me at systems design but I'm pretty certain something that can is coming. Odds are also good that in 2-4 years there will be new hotness to replace LLMs that are much more functional (maybe MLLMs, maybe called something else). We can start to pred…

Totally agree. Also the term 'LLM' is more about the mechanics of the thing than what the user gets. LLM is the technology, but some sort of automated artificial intelligence is what people are generally buying. As an example, when people use ChatGPT and get an image back, most don't think "oh, so the LLM called out to a diffusion API?" - they just think "oh chat GPT can give me an image if I give it a prompt". Altho…

> Although again, the term is entirely abused to the extent that washing machines can contain 'AI'.

I remember when the exciting term in appliances was "fuzzy logic". As a technology it was just adding some sensors beyond simple timers and thermostats to control things like run time and temperatures of automated washers.

Re: AI in my plasma physics research didn’t go the way I expected

#220

Post by ranie93 »

nancyminusone wrote: post #193
Flamentono2 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm following LLMs, AI/ML for a few years now and not just on a high level. There is not a single system out there today which can do what claude can do. I stil see it for what it is: A technology i can communicate/use with natural language and get a very diverse of tasks done. From writing/generating code, to svgs, to emails, translation etc. etc. etc. Its a paradigma shift for the whole world literaly. We finally h…

LLMs are great at tasks that involve written language. If your task does not involve written language, they suck. That's the main limitation. No matter how hard you push, AI is not a 'do everything machine' which is how it's being hyped.

Can "everything" be mapped to a written language task (i.e. described)?
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