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A new AI winter is coming?

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Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#211

Post by anthonypasq »

dragonwriter wrote: post #142
anthonypasq wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wrong. OpenAI is literally the only AI company with horrific financials. You think google is actually bleeding money on AI? they are funding it all with cash flow and still have monster margins.

OpenAI may be the worst, but I am pretty sure Anthropic is still bleeding money on AI, and I would expect a bunch of smaller dedicated AI firms are too; Google is the main firm with competitive commercial models at the high end across multiple domains that is funding AI efforts largely from its own operations (and even there, AI isn’t self sufficient, its just an internal rather than an external subsidy.)

Dario has said many times over that each model is profitable if viewed as a product that had development costs and operational costs just like any other product from any other business ever.

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#212

Post by edwin2 »

skydhash wrote: post #105
edwin2 wrote: post #61

I think the author is onto something. but (s)he didn’t highlight that there are some scenarios where factual accuracy is unimportant, or maybe even a detractor. for example, fictional stories. If you want to be entertained and it doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, there’s no downsides to “hallucinations”. you could argue that stories ARE hallucinations. another example is advertisements. what matters is how people p…

Have you ever see how much work is spent on writing a novel? Even a short one? Character and world building are not easy and require very logical reasoning even if the premise are imaginary. You can say something is humans then give it three hands in the next sentence.

i see your point and you’ve changed my mind.

also, i’d like to hear your story about the human with three hands

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#213

Post by lnenad »

bloppe wrote: post #148
baq wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> maybe even 3.1 years would have been considered magic I vividly remember sitting there for literally hours talking to a computer on launch day, it was a very short night. This feeling of living in the future has not left me since, it's got quieter, but it's still there. It's still magic after those three years, perhaps even more so. It wasn't supposed to work this well for decades! and yet.

I think you're missing the point of "AI winter". It's not about how good the products are now. It's about how quickly the products are improving and creating the potential for profit. That's what drives investment. 3 things we know about the AI revolution in 2025: - LLMs are amazing, but they have reached a plateau. AGI is not within reach. - LLM investment has sacrificed many hundreds of billions of dollars, much of…

> 3 things we know about the AI revolution in 2025:

> - LLMs are amazing, but they have reached a plateau. AGI is not within reach.

Source/citation?

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#214

Post by bunderbunder »

I've run into what I think might be an even bigger problem with the "just keep reading/outputting the next token" design: there's no going backwards.

This means that LLMs don't do well with input where text that comes later in the input alters how text that came earlier should be interpreted. Which is really quite common in practice.

Humans like to do things where you start with a dump of information, and then ask questions about it afterward. If a human reader didn't remember something pertinent to the question, they can go back and re-read now that they know what they're looking for. An LLM can't do that by itself. You can paper over that limitation with hacks, but they're hacky and unreliable.

Humans also correct misunderstandings and resolve ambiguities after the fact. LLMs have a really hard time with this. Once one way of interpreting some text has already made it into the LLM's context vectors, it can be surprisingly difficult for subsequent text to significantly alter that interpretation.

It's these sorts of aggravating failure modes stemming from a fundamental feature of the algorithm that seem to always produce the next AI winter. Because they tend to mean the same thing: research has gone down (and then, quote often, massively over-invested in) yet another blind alley that doesn't put us on a short easy path to AGI any more than the previous 75 years' worth of breakthroughs have. And getting out of it is going to involve not only fixing that one problem, but also a huge reset on some substantial portion of whatever tools and techniques were built up to paper over the previous algorithm's limitations in an effort to generate positive ROI on all that massive over-investment.

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#215

Post by Nevermark »

lm28469 wrote: post #159
Nevermark wrote: post #76

I am simply stunned at the negativity. Yes, there is hype. But if you actually filter it out, instead of (over) reacting to it in either direction, progress has been phenomenal and the fact there is visible progress in many areas, including LLMs, in the order of months demonstrates no walls. Visible progress doesn’t mean astounding progress. But any tech that is improving year to year is moving at a good speed. Huge…

There was value in leaded gas and asbestos insulation too, nobody denies that. You're blind to all the negative side effects, AI generated slop ads, engagement traps, political propaganda, scams, &c. The amount of pollution is incredible, search engines are dead, blogs are dead, YouTube is dead, social medias are dead, it's virtually impossible to find non slop content, the ratio is probably already 50:1 by now And t…

> You're blind to all the negative side effects

I didn't comment on negative effects one way or the other.

Most of the problems you point out are enabled and motivated by conflict of interest business models. I.e. surveillance that enables and incentivizes targeted ads, targeted manipulation, and addictive media.

Parasitical, privacy violating and dark pattern business models are like bad security. We can't afford them any more. AI is going to make that already very clear point clearer and clearer ... until maybe people wake up and legislate those types of businesses away.

Blaming AI (for those kinds of problems) won't achieve anything. As with any tool, AI is just getting more effective. Might as well blame faster processors too.

And it gives the actual culprits, the people who profit from poison, a pass and cover.

Profitable, scalable, conflicts of interest are poison.

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#216

Post by bunderbunder »

bloppe wrote: post #148
baq wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> maybe even 3.1 years would have been considered magic I vividly remember sitting there for literally hours talking to a computer on launch day, it was a very short night. This feeling of living in the future has not left me since, it's got quieter, but it's still there. It's still magic after those three years, perhaps even more so. It wasn't supposed to work this well for decades! and yet.

I think you're missing the point of "AI winter". It's not about how good the products are now. It's about how quickly the products are improving and creating the potential for profit. That's what drives investment. 3 things we know about the AI revolution in 2025: - LLMs are amazing, but they have reached a plateau. AGI is not within reach. - LLM investment has sacrificed many hundreds of billions of dollars, much of…

Agreed. I am coming to suspect that there are approximately 2 positions on this subject: there are people who have previously weathered an AI winter and can therefore easily see the writing on the wall, and there are people who maybe don't quite understand the phenomenon being described by the term "AI winter".

It's not about how good or useful or potentially lucrative the technology is. Every previous catalyst for an AI winter has eventually become pervasive, changed the world, and made some people a lot of money. Every single one. And I do mean pervasive. If you could poof just one of them out of existence, my cell phone would become noticeably less useful.

What it's really about is how hype cycles interact with funding for basic research.

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#217

Post by francophil »

lnenad wrote: post #213
bloppe wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're missing the point of "AI winter". It's not about how good the products are now. It's about how quickly the products are improving and creating the potential for profit. That's what drives investment. 3 things we know about the AI revolution in 2025: - LLMs are amazing, but they have reached a plateau. AGI is not within reach. - LLM investment has sacrificed many hundreds of billions of dollars, much of…

> 3 things we know about the AI revolution in 2025: > - LLMs are amazing, but they have reached a plateau. AGI is not within reach. Source/citation?

Shouldn't you be looking for a job? - Dad

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#218

Post by socrateswasone »

LatencyKills wrote: post #48
gishh wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> something fundamental has changed that enables a computer to pretty effectively understand natural language. You understand how the tech works right? It's statistics and tokens. The computer understands nothing. Creating "understanding" would be a breakthrough. Edit: I wasn't trying to be a jerk. I sincerely wasn't. I don't "understand" how LLMs "understand" anything. I'd be super pumped to learn that bit. I don't…

As someone who was an engineer on the original Copilot team, yes I understand how tech works. You don’t know how your own mind “understands” something. No one on the planet can even describe how human understanding works. Yes, LLMs are vast statistical engines but that doesn’t mean something interesting isn’t going on. At this point I’d argue that humans “hallucinate” and/or provide wrong answers far more often than…

[dead]

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#219

Post by hombre_fatal »

int_19h wrote: post #200
hombre_fatal wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it can work well even if you don't know what you are doing (or don't look at the impl). For example, build a TUI or GUI with Claude Code while only giving it feedback on the UX/QA side. I've done it many times despite 20 years of software experience. -- Some stuff just doesn't justify me spending my time credentializing in the impl. Hallucinations that lead to code that doesn't work just get fixed. Most code I wr…

> Hallucinations that lead to code that doesn't work just get fixed How about hallucinations that lead to code that doesn't work outside of the specific conditions that happen to be true in your dev environment? Or, even more subtly, hallucinations that lead to code which works but has critical security vulnerabilities?

Replace "hallucination" with "oversight" or "ignorance" and you have the same issue when a human writes the code.

A lot of that will come to the prompter's own foresight much like the vigilance of a beginner developer where they know they are working on a part of the system that is particularly sensitive to get right.

That said, only a subset of software needs an authentication solution or has zero tolerance to some codepath having a bug. Those don't apply to almost all of the apps/TUIs/GUIs I've built over the last few months.

If you have to restrict the domain to those cases for LLMs to be "disastrous", then I'll grant that for this convo.

What about everything else?

Re: A new AI winter is coming?

#220

Post by singularity2001 »

bloppe wrote: post #148
baq wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> maybe even 3.1 years would have been considered magic I vividly remember sitting there for literally hours talking to a computer on launch day, it was a very short night. This feeling of living in the future has not left me since, it's got quieter, but it's still there. It's still magic after those three years, perhaps even more so. It wasn't supposed to work this well for decades! and yet.

I think you're missing the point of "AI winter". It's not about how good the products are now. It's about how quickly the products are improving and creating the potential for profit. That's what drives investment. 3 things we know about the AI revolution in 2025: - LLMs are amazing, but they have reached a plateau. AGI is not within reach. - LLM investment has sacrificed many hundreds of billions of dollars, much of…

>> "LLMs have reached a plateau."

you should look at benchmarks such as ARC which went from "needs 10 years, currently at 0%" to almost solved within the least year. Also there is a revolution happening in math which the layman might be missing.

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