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Andrew Ng: Building Faster with AI [video]

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Re: Andrew Ng: Building Faster with AI [video]

#41
post #7

Not sure why this has drawn silence and attacks - whence the animus to Ng? His high-level assessments seem accurate, he's a reasonable champion of AI, and he speaks credibly based on advising many companies. What am I missing? (He does fall on the side of open models (as input factors): is that the threat?) He argues that landscape is changing (at least quarterly), and that services are (best) replaceable (often week…

> So: what platforms are available? I couldn't tell you, but what I can contribute to that discussion is that orchestration of AI in its current form would focus on one of two approaches: consistent output despite the non-deterministic state of LLMs, or consistent inputs that leans into the non-deterministic state of LLMs. The problem with the former (output) is that you cannot guarantee the output of an AI on a cons…

> The problem with the former (output) is that you cannot guarantee the output of an AI on a consistent basis

Do you mean you cannot guarantee the result based on a task request with a random query? Or something else? I was under the impression that LLMs are very deterministic if you provide a fixed seed for the samplers, fixed model weights, and fixed context. In cloud providers you can't guarantee this because of how they implement this (batching unrelated requests together and doing math). Now you can't guarantee the quality of the result from that and changing the seed or context can result in drastically different quality. But maybe you really mean non-deterministic but I'm curious where this non-determinism would come from.

Re: Andrew Ng: Building Faster with AI [video]

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And make it more complicated than K8s

Not possible

The platforms I've seen live on top of kubernetes so I'm afraid it is possible. nvidia-docker, all the cuda libraries and drivers, nccl, vllm,... Large scale distributed training and inference are complicated beasties and the orchestration for them is too.

Re: Andrew Ng: Building Faster with AI [video]

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's lost credibility in my eyes given that his courses essentially have a pay to play model for startups like langchain

Except they aren't pay to play unless you consider doing the work for the course the "payment". There's certainly an exchange since there is a lot of work involved, but DLAI provides a team to help design, structure and polish the course and then the team creating the course does the majority of the work creating the content, but there's no financial exchange. The DLAI team is also pretty good about ensuring the cont…

The content is a repackage of previously existing, publicly available notebooks, docs, YouTube videos. I wouldnt be surprised if the repackaging was done by AI.

Re: Andrew Ng: Building Faster with AI [video]

#44
post #7

Not sure why this has drawn silence and attacks - whence the animus to Ng? His high-level assessments seem accurate, he's a reasonable champion of AI, and he speaks credibly based on advising many companies. What am I missing? (He does fall on the side of open models (as input factors): is that the threat?) He argues that landscape is changing (at least quarterly), and that services are (best) replaceable (often week…

> So: what platforms are available? I couldn't tell you, but what I can contribute to that discussion is that orchestration of AI in its current form would focus on one of two approaches: consistent output despite the non-deterministic state of LLMs, or consistent inputs that leans into the non-deterministic state of LLMs. The problem with the former (output) is that you cannot guarantee the output of an AI on a cons…

Really valid points. I agree with the bits about “expertise in getting the computer to do what you want” being the way of the future, but he also raises really valid points about people having strong domain knowledge (a la his colleague with extensive art history knowledge being better at midjourney than him) after saying it’s okay to tell people to just let the LLM write code for you and learn to code that way. I am having a hard time with the contradictions, maybe it’s me. Not meaning to rag on Dr. Ng, just further the conversation. (Which is super interesting to me.)

EDIT: rereading and realizing I think what resonates most is we are in agreement about the antithetical aspects of the talk. I think this is the crux of the issue.

Re: Andrew Ng: Building Faster with AI [video]

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except they aren't pay to play unless you consider doing the work for the course the "payment". There's certainly an exchange since there is a lot of work involved, but DLAI provides a team to help design, structure and polish the course and then the team creating the course does the majority of the work creating the content, but there's no financial exchange. The DLAI team is also pretty good about ensuring the cont…

The content is a repackage of previously existing, publicly available notebooks, docs, YouTube videos. I wouldnt be surprised if the repackaging was done by AI.

Courses are not academic journals, dude. They're supposed to be teaching you existing knowledge.

Re: Andrew Ng: Building Faster with AI [video]

#47
post #32

My two takeaways is you build 1) Having a precise vision of what you want to achieve 2) Being able to control / steer AI towards that vision Teams that can do both of these things, especially #1 will move much faster. Even if they are wrong its better than vague ideas that get applause but not customers

Yes this! The observation that being specific versus general in the problems you want to solve is a better start-up plan is true for all startups ever, not just ones that use LLMs to solve them. Anecdotal/personal startup experiences support this strongly and I read enough on here to know that I am not alone…

Re: Andrew Ng: Building Faster with AI [video]

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except they aren't pay to play unless you consider doing the work for the course the "payment". There's certainly an exchange since there is a lot of work involved, but DLAI provides a team to help design, structure and polish the course and then the team creating the course does the majority of the work creating the content, but there's no financial exchange. The DLAI team is also pretty good about ensuring the cont…

The content is a repackage of previously existing, publicly available notebooks, docs, YouTube videos. I wouldnt be surprised if the repackaging was done by AI.

Again this is not true. I’ve known several people who have made courses for DLAI and they all put substantial time into creating the courses.
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