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The Generative AI Con

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Re: The Generative AI Con

#421

Post by epistasis »

immibis wrote: post #389
epistasis wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my experience too. I think it also really accelerates learning of a new language or framework, when that language or framework is really well documented on the web. For novel programming frameworks, obviously it's a bit more challenging to get help from an LLM. One of more recent attempts at using LLM code assist was to try to fix a bug in a Swift SSH Agent's connection handling that was causing hangs. I know…

Searching is an area where LLM technology excels. It makes sense, given their structure. Of course, you have to find a company willing to spend more money on worse (for them - less ads) search, and it's won't be Google. The results aren't always accurate, but neither is Google...

Most of my LLM experience is pulling off the mask with a label of "AI" only to find another mask underneath labeled "information retrieval".

Re: The Generative AI Con

#422

Post by LPisGood »

webmaven wrote: post #419
LPisGood wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course that is exactly the middle ground that I’m not certain is so big. Developer productivity has gone up immensely in the last 50 years and the industry is larger than ever.

Um. How are you measuring that productivity?

Any meaningful metric.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#423

Post by qingcharles »

mahogany wrote: post #418
simonw wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I admire your optimism that good manuals and reputable sources exist for the average furnace in the average basement.

If there are no reputable sources to point to, then where exactly is GPT deriving its answer from? And how can we be assured GPT is correct about the furnace in question?

I mean.. I fed it all the photos of the unit and every diagram and instruction panels from the thing. I was confident in the information it was giving me about what parts did what and where to look and what to look for. You have to evaluate its output, certainly.

Getting it to fix a mower now. It's surfacing some good YouTube vids.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#424

Post by simonw »

qingcharles wrote: post #423
mahogany wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there are no reputable sources to point to, then where exactly is GPT deriving its answer from? And how can we be assured GPT is correct about the furnace in question?

I mean.. I fed it all the photos of the unit and every diagram and instruction panels from the thing. I was confident in the information it was giving me about what parts did what and where to look and what to look for. You have to evaluate its output, certainly. Getting it to fix a mower now. It's surfacing some good YouTube vids.

I use it like that all the time. There's so much information in the world which assumes you have a certain level of understanding already - you can decipher the jargon terms it uses, you can fill in the blanks when it doesn't provide enough detail.

I don't have 100% of the "common sense" knowledge about every field, but good LLMs probably have ~80% of that "common sense" baked in. Which makes them better at interpreting incomplete information than I am.

A couple of examples: a post on some investment forum mentions DCA. A cooking recipe tells me "boil the pasta until done".

I absolutely buy that feeding in a few photos of dusty half-complete manual pages found near my water heater would provide enough context for it to answer questions usefully.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#425

Post by webmaven »

Aunche wrote: post #322
fullshark wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is predicting protein folding GenAI? Seems like traditional machine learning?

I suppose I'm thinking about transformer architecture rather than strictly GenAI, but the computer science aspects of protein folding and GenAI seem like they overlap significantly.

People are using these models to generate candidate molecules for specific purposes. According to some estimates I've seen, their hit rate is about 50% instead of 25-33%, and doesn't take two years.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#426

Post by daveguy »

webmaven wrote: post #416
nostrademons wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reasoning people have for them selling API requests at a loss is simply their financial statements. Anthropic burned $3B this year. ChatGPT lost $5B. Microsoft has spent $19B on AI and Google has spent close to $50B. Given that revenue for the market leader ChatGPT is $3.7B, it's safe to say that they're losing massive amounts of money. These companies are heavily subsidized by investors and their cloud service p…

Are the training costs (CapEx) and inference costs (OpEx) being lumped together?

Not sure if it matters at this point. There will need to be many more rounds of CapEx to realize the promises that have been put forth about these models.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#427

Post by daveguy »

TeaBrain wrote: post #366
square_usual wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are you getting this from? Outside of o3, every AI provider's API is super cheap, with most productive queries I do coming in under 2c. We have no reason to believe any of them are selling API requests at a loss. I think <2c per query hardly counts as "quite expensive".

The implication would be that those API requests are being sold at a loss. Amodei wrote in January that Claude 3.5 Sonnet was trained for only a few $10Ms, but Anthropic has been losing billions.

That would be a killer for the current and near future generations of LLM as a business. If they are having to pay many times in compute what they are able to get for the API use (due to open models being near comparable?), then you definitely can't "make up for it in volume".

Re: The Generative AI Con

#428

Post by recursive »

zyngaro wrote: post #274
levkk wrote: post #91

If my Android (or IPhone) disappeared tomorrow, I would feel like I time traveled back a century. If Google search was gone, I wouldn't be able to do my job anymore. If the cloud disappeared, I wouldn't be able to build apps anymore. There are no workarounds, unless you feel like going to a library...? If ChatGPT disappeared tomorrow (or derivatives like Copilot, etc.), I would be mildly inconvenienced. Then I'd go b…

If electricity disappeared we would go back to lighting candles…

And clearly candles are definitely viable products.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#429

Post by nitwit005 »

levkk wrote: post #91

If my Android (or IPhone) disappeared tomorrow, I would feel like I time traveled back a century. If Google search was gone, I wouldn't be able to do my job anymore. If the cloud disappeared, I wouldn't be able to build apps anymore. There are no workarounds, unless you feel like going to a library...? If ChatGPT disappeared tomorrow (or derivatives like Copilot, etc.), I would be mildly inconvenienced. Then I'd go b…

People lose their phones all the time. No one has a dramatic time travel moment. You open up your laptop, or walk to your desktop. It's not a necessity excepting actual phone calls.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#430

Post by daveguy »

jcgrillo wrote: post #360
jddj wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worthwhile is a hard measure. To make money though it just needs to have a large or important audience and a means of convincing people to think, want, or do things that people with money will pay to make people think, want or do. Ads, in other words

Can you get enough revenue from ads to pay the cost of serving LLM queries? Has anyone demonstrated this is a viable business yet? A related question: has anyone figured out how to monetize LLM input? When a user issues a Google search query they're donating extremely valuable data to Google that can be used to target relevant ads to that user. Is anyone doing this successfully with LLM prompt text?

I bet Google is utilizing the value of the LLM input prompts with close to the same efficiency they are monetizing search. I that case, there are two questions -- 1) will LLM overtake search? and 2) can anyone beat Google at monetizing these inputs? I think the answer to both is no. Google already has a wide experience lead monetizing queries. And personally, I'd rather have a search engine that does a better job of excluding spam without having to worry whether or not it's making stuff up. Kagi has a better search than any of the LLMs (except for local results like restaurants/maps).
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