Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Being “Confidently Wrong” is holding AI back

promptql.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 274 posts

Re: Being “Confidently Wrong” is holding AI back

#231

Post by ninetyninenine »

NoGravitas wrote: post #213
ninetyninenine wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not massively underplaying it imo. AI hype is real. This is revolutionary technology that humanity has never seen before. But it happened at a time where hype can be delivered at a magnitude never before seen by humanity as well to a degree of volume that is completely unnatural by any standard set previously by hype machines created by humanity. Not even landing on the moon has inundated people with as much hyp…

> Like when someone says the only thing stopping LLMs is hallucinations… that is literally the last gap. What you are missing here is that the "hallucinations" you don't like and the "results" you do like are, in terms of the underlying process, exactly the same thing. They are not an aberration you can remove. Producing these kinds of results without "hallucinations" is going to require fundamentally different techn…

That's not true. There is we just need to find it.

Humans have a condition called schizophrenia where we literally are incapable of differentiating hallucination and reality. What that capability is, is something we need to find out and discover for both ourselves and LLMs.

For example: Mathematically speaking it's possible to know how far away an inferenced point is away from a cluster of real world data. That delta when fed back into the neural network can allow the LLM to know how speculative a response is. From there we can feed the response back into itself for refinement.

Re: Being “Confidently Wrong” is holding AI back

#232

Post by ninetyninenine »

NoGravitas wrote: post #214
ninetyninenine wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. The experts in the field are past this argument. People have moved on. It is clear to everyone who builds LLMs that the AI is intelligent. The algorithm was autocomplete, but we are finding as an autocomplete bot is basically autocompleting things with humanity changing intelligent content. Your opinion is a minority now and not shared by people on the forefront of building these things. Your holding onto the ini…

IOW, the realistic position is not held by the majority of people whose paychecks depend on it being wrong. I'm shocked.

When I say experts. I refer to academia.

You're shocked because you hallucinated an assumption of something I never claimed.

Hallucinations? Does that sound similar to something?

Re: Being “Confidently Wrong” is holding AI back

#233

Post by ninetyninenine »

wila wrote: post #207
kilpikaarna wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is clear to everyone who builds LLMs that the AI is intelligent. So presumably we have a solid, generally-agreed-upon definition on intelligence now? > autocompleting things with humanity changing intelligent content. What does this even mean?

that you're arguing with an LLM :)

he's not.

Re: Being “Confidently Wrong” is holding AI back

#234

Post by mrguyorama »

gavinray wrote: post #75
traceroute66 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AI-fanbois will quickly tell you that you are misusing the context or your prompt is "wrong". But I've had it consistently happens to me on tiny contexts (e.g. I've had to spend time trying - and failing - to get it to fix a mess it was making with a straightforward 200-ish line bash script). And its also very frequently happened to me when I've been very careful with my prompts (e.g. explicitly telling it to use…

I'd be curious if you could share some poor-performing prompts. I would be willing to record myself using them across paid models with custom instructions and see if the output is still garbage.

This is just the new version of "works on my machine". Oh, I was able to contrive a correct answer from my prompt because the random number generator smiled upon me today.

That's not useful.

Re: Being “Confidently Wrong” is holding AI back

#236

Post by ninetyninenine »

indigoabstract wrote: post #119
ninetyninenine wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not massively underplaying it imo. AI hype is real. This is revolutionary technology that humanity has never seen before. But it happened at a time where hype can be delivered at a magnitude never before seen by humanity as well to a degree of volume that is completely unnatural by any standard set previously by hype machines created by humanity. Not even landing on the moon has inundated people with as much hyp…

I think you would have really enjoyed living in the '50s, when the future was bright and colonizing Mars was basically a solved problem. What we got instead is a bunch of wisecracking programmers who like to remind everyone of the 90–90 rule, or the last 10 percent.

Mars wasn't part of the 90-90 rule genius. If you know your history, it's mainly because political interest was lost. Technologically sending someone to mars is 100000000x more feasible than agi simply because the technology and theory exists such that we can do it.

AGI is part of the last 10 percent rule. But like that's the entire issue. 90% is still 90% progress. That is massive. And the hype surrounding LLMs has made people forget how far 90% is. People are going, "LLMs are retarded because it has the IQ of a 5 year old". They don't realize how even getting it to the level of a 5 year old was impossible for decades and decades.

Re: Being “Confidently Wrong” is holding AI back

#237

Post by esafak »

hodgehog11 wrote: post #161
esafak wrote: post #114

Bayesian models solve this problem but they occupy model capacity which practitioners have traditionally preferred to devote to improving point estimates.

I've always found this perspective remarkably misguided. Prediction performance is not everything; it can be extraordinarily powerful to have uncertainty estimates as well.

A lot of machine learning practitioners don't have the statistical sophistication to appreciate this, and as ML becomes increasingly "democratized" I expect the situation will worsen.

Re: Being “Confidently Wrong” is holding AI back

#238

Post by mrguyorama »

NoGravitas wrote: post #214
ninetyninenine wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. The experts in the field are past this argument. People have moved on. It is clear to everyone who builds LLMs that the AI is intelligent. The algorithm was autocomplete, but we are finding as an autocomplete bot is basically autocompleting things with humanity changing intelligent content. Your opinion is a minority now and not shared by people on the forefront of building these things. Your holding onto the ini…

IOW, the realistic position is not held by the majority of people whose paychecks depend on it being wrong. I'm shocked.

Also people tend to use "Expert" wrong in the AI world. No, your programmer who has ten years experience integrating and deploying ML models is not an "AI Expert", they are programmers with expertise with some libraries. Building a system that integrates with ffmpeg for media conversion does not make you a "Video compression expert".

Go check out anthropic's careers page and see just how few positions even require a formal training in statistics.

Meanwhile I don't see a lot of real statisticians who are that hyped about LLMs. More importantly, it feels like there aren't even that many scientists at the AI companies.

Your average programmer does not have nearly the "question your assumptions and test your beliefs" training that an actual scientist has, which is funny since nearly every bug in code is caused by an assumption you shouldn't have made and should have tested.

Re: Being “Confidently Wrong” is holding AI back

#239

Post by mrguyorama »

Dilettante_ wrote: post #218
procaryote wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also that no companies involved seem to be making a profit, have a reasonable vision to make a profit, or even revenue in the same ballpark as costs. Except nvidia perhaps

But that's not so unusual these days, no? I'm not terribly knowledgeable in the field, but don't Amazon, Netflix, Uber and such work on this kind of funding structure?

Uh no, Netflix runs a real business with real fundamentals and do things like invest in their content creation pipeline to provide their customers a better reason to stay, and their price to consumers is set by their costs and desired profit margin, and they have run a pretty straightforward business since the very beginning.

Uber successfully turned a war chest into a partial monopoly of all ride hailing for significant chunks of the world. That was the clear plan from the start, and was always meant to own the market so they could extract whatever rent they want.

Amazon reinvested heavily while competition floundered in order to literally own the market, and has spent every second since squeezing the market, their partners, everyone in the chain to extract ever more money from it.

None of those are even close to buying absurdly overpriced hardware from a monopoly and reselling access to that hardware for less than it costs to run and doing huge PR sweeps about how what you are building might kill everyone so we should obviously give them trillions in government dollars because if an American company isn't the one to kill everyone than we have failed.

"Not terribly knowledgeable in the field"?

Post reply on HN