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What we know about LLMs

willthompson.name

31–40 of 173 posts

Re: What we know about LLMs

#31
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you used an llm as an application developer? The hard tech for generative ai will be commodified. The products built on top will not.

As an enthusiast delving in for the pure pleasure of it I see a future ahead where as a programmer, I will have an array of options to use LLM's in hybrid systems. I'm not looking for an AGI, rather a mixture of experts that I can remix as I see fit, each one tuned for a subset of 'intelligence' that can be wielded with relative precision as part of a larger system that combines traditional programming with the new a…

It does feel a bit like the internet era just before the Netscape IPO. I'm looking forward to the pets.com of AI.

Maybe openai will go the way of Netscape and make it all FOSS eventually. That'd be nice.

Re: What we know about LLMs

#32

Given a set of instructions, an instruction fine-tuned/aligned LLM is able (conditional on size and training quality) to reason through a set of steps to produce a desired output. This is plainly wrong. The model's growing size makes it better at guessing the outcome of a reasoning task, but little to no actual reasoning is performed. It's trivial to prove this as well, as LLMs will still fail miserably at (larger) m…

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Re: What we know about LLMs

#33

ChatGPT was announced November, 2022 - 8 months ago. Time flies. Question for HN: Where are we in the hype cycle on this? We can run shitty clones slowly on Raspberry Pi's and your phone. The educational implementations demonstrate the basics in under a thousand lines of brisk C. Great. At some point you have to wonder... well, so what? Not one killer app has emerged. I for one am eager to be all hip and open minded…

I think 8 months is a little short for the utility of a new tech to be fully realized and utilized. I'm pretty sure there were still horses on the roads long after 8 months after the Model T first went on sale.

Horse numbers peaked around 1915. Model T released 1908.

Still plenty around until at least 1930.

http://www.americanequestrian.com/pdf/US-Equine-Demographics...

Re: What we know about LLMs

#34
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty much certain the cost of training and running large LLMs is going to come down, because it's only a matter of time before truly customized chips come out for these. GPUs really aren't that. They're massively parallel vector processors that turn out to be generally better than CPUs at running these models, but they're still not the ideal chip for running LLMs. That would be a large even more specialized par…

I feel like it took practically no time for custom ASICs for bitcoin mining to show up, as soon as it was determined there was real money involved. Given that there's already definitely real money involved here, I wonder what's holding up the custom AI ASICs?

It takes a while to design an ASIC and it hasn't been that long since the hype wave really arrived for these things. I would bet on LLM chips showing up in 2024-2025.

There's also a run on foundries right now which might delay things further. The new foundries in the US being built under the Chips act in Arizona and Ohio won't be online until probably 2025.

Re: What we know about LLMs

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About as killer as that twitter clone that was in the news for a minute after forcing people to use it and immediately losing 90% of the captive audience.. They have been losing users. Summer is here, school is out, the kids are back in reality for the moment and apparently when they aren't busy plagiarizing homework the interest is very limited.

It might not be a killer app for you, but it's a killer app for me as an engineer, and I'm definitely not alone. To give a concrete example, I used it to write and test a VSCode extension that provides autocomplete and type-checking for environment variables in 46 programming languages[1]. It was the first VSCode extension I've written and I have zero experience in the majority of those languages. The whole project t…

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Re: What we know about LLMs

#36

ChatGPT was announced November, 2022 - 8 months ago. Time flies. Question for HN: Where are we in the hype cycle on this? We can run shitty clones slowly on Raspberry Pi's and your phone. The educational implementations demonstrate the basics in under a thousand lines of brisk C. Great. At some point you have to wonder... well, so what? Not one killer app has emerged. I for one am eager to be all hip and open minded…

I personally use copilot every day and I love it. It reduces the amount of typing I have to do, gives me lots of good suggestions for solving simple problems and has made working with unfamiliar languages so much easier.

Re: What we know about LLMs

#37

ChatGPT was announced November, 2022 - 8 months ago. Time flies. Question for HN: Where are we in the hype cycle on this? We can run shitty clones slowly on Raspberry Pi's and your phone. The educational implementations demonstrate the basics in under a thousand lines of brisk C. Great. At some point you have to wonder... well, so what? Not one killer app has emerged. I for one am eager to be all hip and open minded…

> Not one killer app has emerged.

I think the microsoft gpt integration on Office is probably that app.

Ability to ask to have your email's summarised, or getting your excel sheets formulas configured with natural language, etc are increidbly useful tools to lower the floor of entry to tools that already speed up humans so much.

I don't think the use of this tools is some life redefining feature, but a friend of mine joked that in a year from now you will right a simple sentence like "write polite work email with following request: Come to the meeting, you are late" then Gpt will write the email, another gpt will send it and his GPT will sumarise it and he will reply with another gpt message instantly apologising that you will read the summary off. Leaving a trail of polite long messages that no one will even open.

Re: What we know about LLMs

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About as killer as that twitter clone that was in the news for a minute after forcing people to use it and immediately losing 90% of the captive audience.. They have been losing users. Summer is here, school is out, the kids are back in reality for the moment and apparently when they aren't busy plagiarizing homework the interest is very limited.

lol, now who’s demented? Everyone I know uses it. It even diagnosed a problem with my pool filter among dozens of other uses I find for it. I like it and use it more than Google and stack overflow now. Losing the school crowd for the summer isn’t the beginning of the end, it just means there’s a cohort that doesn’t need it as much for a few months while they’re out having fun instead of stuck inside writing papers an…

It is great that everyone you know uses it but the traffic to ChatGPT is decreasing and has been for over two months now. If pointing this fact out makes me demented consider that perhaps you are emotionally invested in this new toy/brand.

I guess we can wait and see what kind of usage trends will emerge long term. My anecdotal evidence (which is not worth much, same as yours) is that many normies tried it a few times and it was a topic of conversation but is no longer mentioned much.

Re: What we know about LLMs

#39

ChatGPT was announced November, 2022 - 8 months ago. Time flies. Question for HN: Where are we in the hype cycle on this? We can run shitty clones slowly on Raspberry Pi's and your phone. The educational implementations demonstrate the basics in under a thousand lines of brisk C. Great. At some point you have to wonder... well, so what? Not one killer app has emerged. I for one am eager to be all hip and open minded…

We shipped a major feature in our core product atop the API. It's central to our onboarding experience for new users, and works quite well at the job of "teaching" them how to use the product more effectively. It isn't magic, but this has been an inflection point in capabilities.

https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/improving-llms-production-obse...

Re: What we know about LLMs

#40

ChatGPT was announced November, 2022 - 8 months ago. Time flies. Question for HN: Where are we in the hype cycle on this? We can run shitty clones slowly on Raspberry Pi's and your phone. The educational implementations demonstrate the basics in under a thousand lines of brisk C. Great. At some point you have to wonder... well, so what? Not one killer app has emerged. I for one am eager to be all hip and open minded…

> Not one killer app has emerged. I think the microsoft gpt integration on Office is probably that app. Ability to ask to have your email's summarised, or getting your excel sheets formulas configured with natural language, etc are increidbly useful tools to lower the floor of entry to tools that already speed up humans so much. I don't think the use of this tools is some life redefining feature, but a friend of mine…

Got a good chuckle from me. I find that in quick daily back-and-forths, time saved by such a system would be negligible. In many places I've worked, the 'polite work mail' has gone out the door long ago, already at the lower bound of what is considered a proper sentence.
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