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Interaction Models

thinkingmachines.ai

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Re: Interaction Models

#41

Post by angiolillo »

SilverElfin wrote: post #12
babelfish wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they hire leading researchers, and leading researchers won't work for you unless they're able to publish

Which seems bizarre. Companies can’t afford to just give things away right?

> Companies can’t afford to just give things away right?

Let's say a cutting-edge young researcher is making a name for themselves in their field and earning $300k/yr at a company where they're encouraged to publish and speak. You're trying to headhunt them for a company where they'll be forbidden from sharing their work which will likely stall their career and reputation outside of that company. How much do you think you'd have to offer? $600k? $1M? $1.5M?

When faced with the choice to paying significant salaries, hiring lower-tier researchers, or just letting their people publish, many companies conclude that giving away some of their work is the best option. (And that doesn't even include the benefits of boosting the company's profile which makes it easier to attract other cutting-edge researchers.)

Re: Interaction Models

#42

Post by darajava »

I hate to say it but while this does seem very impressive and a step forward in how we interact with AI, the use-cases they present and the UX both seem unrealistic and/or unhelpful.

With the exception of the real-time translation (which seems like it should be a separate product all by itself), none of the use-cases they presented had much utility. I don't want anything to count the number animals in my stories or time a trivia quiz for me. The auto-slouch-detector, while the demo was pretty funny, just seems so dystopian and weird. AI interrupting you to scold you about taking elderly parents mountain biking instead of waiting for you to finish to scold you? No thanks.

The UX is also an issue - the model interrupting the user (even when apparently required by these strange use-cases) is jarring and makes one lose their flow. You can even see this in the demo videos that they put out - the employees/actors had to really concentrate to continue speaking as if they weren't being interrupted by a brash robotic machine. A human, when participating in this (rare) "invited interruption" has the ability to speak "under" the main speaker and I feel it's generally timed with a lot of nuance.

Even in the auto-translation demo, they ducked the human's audio but the AI steamrolled him and it would have been impossible to actually do that demo without either an incredible amount of control over one's speaking, or (more likely) muting the output. A human translator has a way of "pointing" the "output" to the intended speaker.

The very best part of this tech was presented in the first video where it shows the AI not needlessly interrupting the user. This seems to me more of an important bug fixed that the current models still (somehow) have.

Maybe a good use-case for this would be counting "um's" and the like while practising public speaking.

Re: Interaction Models

#43

Post by vessenes »

edg5000 wrote: post #40
vessenes wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Publish a Demo -> acquihire for anthropic/oAI/GOOG/META stock and cash is an understandable economic model. In this case, I feel like they built more than would be needed though — and I hope they deploy something useful, I’d love to play with it.

Purely out of curiousity, I see you are using an em dash. Did you use voice transcription or something? It looks hand-typed though. I'm confused.

I just typed two single hyphens from my iOS device. One: - two: —

Edit: when I edit this comment they have been merged in the form so I speculate this is an iOS keyboard feature.

Re: Interaction Models

#44

Post by ej88 »

darajava wrote: post #42

I hate to say it but while this does seem very impressive and a step forward in how we interact with AI, the use-cases they present and the UX both seem unrealistic and/or unhelpful. With the exception of the real-time translation (which seems like it should be a separate product all by itself), none of the use-cases they presented had much utility. I don't want anything to count the number animals in my stories or t…

An omni model seems very useful for real-time human-computer interaction, off the top of my head:

- Voice assistants

- Customer experience

- Gaming

- Meeting assistants

- Real-time coach or user assistant for using software

- Translation

- Real-time work on a computer controlled by voice (frontend / mobile dev, CAD, 3D modeling, etc)

Traditionally a lot of these use cases with LLM agents are higher latency because the model needs to wait for the speaker to finish, then decide to call a tool or respond - if they call a tool they need to process the tool result and decide if they want to call a tool or respond, etc...

Re: Interaction Models

#45

Post by JohnBizBiz »

ej88 wrote: post #44
darajava wrote: post #42

I hate to say it but while this does seem very impressive and a step forward in how we interact with AI, the use-cases they present and the UX both seem unrealistic and/or unhelpful. With the exception of the real-time translation (which seems like it should be a separate product all by itself), none of the use-cases they presented had much utility. I don't want anything to count the number animals in my stories or t…

An omni model seems very useful for real-time human-computer interaction, off the top of my head: - Voice assistants - Customer experience - Gaming - Meeting assistants - Real-time coach or user assistant for using software - Translation - Real-time work on a computer controlled by voice (frontend / mobile dev, CAD, 3D modeling, etc) Traditionally a lot of these use cases with LLM agents are higher latency because th…

[flagged]

Re: Interaction Models

#46

Post by FergusArgyll »

One of the most interesting things to me about AI is that it seems no one has a clear use for intelligence (besides for programming which has taken off)

Every demo by openai showing of their models is "tell me how tall the statue of liberty is divided by the year the inventor of steam engines was born". It's cool but it's so hard to find an actual use. As a personal answer machine I find it very useful but if someone told me 5 years ago; here's a natural language computer as smart as at least every 15 year old, it costs a few bucks per million words. I would have thought that the applications would just scream out but till this day - outside of programming (a big deal tbc) - no one has found a good use for intelligence. It's so so weird.

I guess even a company can't just automatically make more money by hiring more people but I'm still confused

Re: Interaction Models

#47

Post by niam »

edg5000 wrote: post #40
vessenes wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Publish a Demo -> acquihire for anthropic/oAI/GOOG/META stock and cash is an understandable economic model. In this case, I feel like they built more than would be needed though — and I hope they deploy something useful, I’d love to play with it.

Purely out of curiousity, I see you are using an em dash. Did you use voice transcription or something? It looks hand-typed though. I'm confused.

On the presumption that this isn't a joke: em dashes appear in LLM outputs because LLMs were trained on human text which included them organically. It's not as unordinary as memes suggest.

Re: Interaction Models

#48

Post by larodi »

swyx wrote: post #10
vessenes wrote: post #8

These videos are worth a watch. There are tons of impressive moments, but they had me at the very first one where a woman says: "I'm going to tell you a story," and then pauses for a long, luxurious sip from a cup of coffee, and the model ... does nothing, just waits. Take my money. Speaking of taking my money, what's the economic model for a company like this? They've published a fair amount about their architecture…

> They've published a fair amount about their architecture - enough that I imagine frontier labs could implement. i think the real ones know this is the tip of the iceberg? hparam tuning, data recipes, data collection, custom kernels, rl/eval infra, all immensely deep topics that would condense multiple decades of phd lifetimes to produce SOTA performance (in both senses of the word) like this. i would also calibrate…

SOTA is very much about both training on well catered corpus (having it) and also hundreds of iterations which eventually make you into… several PHDs really.

This is ML/AI. Is not calling third party APIs. If you want any SOTA in any AI area you need to design your own strategy and models. Drilling down to get there is super painful and perhaps not something a paid-for-course can teach you.

Random is everywhere and so are unexpected engineering challenges. Mastering linear algebra alongside some geometry and still knowing classic algos is the starting point.

Re: Interaction Models

#49

Post by darajava »

ej88 wrote: post #44
darajava wrote: post #42

I hate to say it but while this does seem very impressive and a step forward in how we interact with AI, the use-cases they present and the UX both seem unrealistic and/or unhelpful. With the exception of the real-time translation (which seems like it should be a separate product all by itself), none of the use-cases they presented had much utility. I don't want anything to count the number animals in my stories or t…

An omni model seems very useful for real-time human-computer interaction, off the top of my head: - Voice assistants - Customer experience - Gaming - Meeting assistants - Real-time coach or user assistant for using software - Translation - Real-time work on a computer controlled by voice (frontend / mobile dev, CAD, 3D modeling, etc) Traditionally a lot of these use cases with LLM agents are higher latency because th…

I'm not saying an omni model isn't useful for HCI - essentially my problem is that these demos seem to be highlighting the model's ability to interrupt the user (which is almost always not a good thing), it's ability to keep time (which should be a non-issue really), and it showcases these using fairly lame use-cases.

Re: Interaction Models

#50

Post by ej88 »

darajava wrote: post #49
ej88 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An omni model seems very useful for real-time human-computer interaction, off the top of my head: - Voice assistants - Customer experience - Gaming - Meeting assistants - Real-time coach or user assistant for using software - Translation - Real-time work on a computer controlled by voice (frontend / mobile dev, CAD, 3D modeling, etc) Traditionally a lot of these use cases with LLM agents are higher latency because th…

I'm not saying an omni model isn't useful for HCI - essentially my problem is that these demos seem to be highlighting the model's ability to interrupt the user (which is almost always not a good thing), it's ability to keep time (which should be a non-issue really), and it showcases these using fairly lame use-cases.

Ya, the demos were pretty contrived (feels like a running theme amongst the labs...)
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