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Bored of It

paulrobertlloyd.com

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Re: Bored of It

#431

Post by Seb-C »

9rx wrote: post #414
skydhash wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's ignore the hype and marketing and truly consider LLM as the first stage of "something". The truth is that I've heard a lot of speculation, but no inching towards any of the speculated objective on a practical scale. For anything else, any such first stage was usually constrained on a very small scale while the glaring issues were ironed out. Now a lot of us are being forced to tolerate what is essentially a pro…

Perhaps LLMs are in the Model T stage? The experience is terrible. Its slow. The roads are muddy and full of ruts. You are bound to break your arm when you spin the crank. But, still, it offers something ever so slightly more than the horse that you put up with it anyway.

Natural language is a terrible interface to interact with a computer, worse than any UI or programming language.

LLMs are more like replacing automobiles with mechanical horses. You fundamentally cannot get it significantly better.

Re: Bored of It

#432

Post by [deleted] »

placardloop wrote: post #93

AI is really bringing out the worst in capitalist corporatism. I think even the most pessimistic AI doomer will agree that the technology is fascinating and can do some cool things, but our corporate overlords have made it such an all-encompassing topic that it’s hard not to be disillusioned by it. Yes, it’s an interesting technology - but seeing other interesting technologies and projects get disinvested in because…

[deleted]

Re: Bored of It

#433

Post by tim333 »

placardloop wrote: post #93

AI is really bringing out the worst in capitalist corporatism. I think even the most pessimistic AI doomer will agree that the technology is fascinating and can do some cool things, but our corporate overlords have made it such an all-encompassing topic that it’s hard not to be disillusioned by it. Yes, it’s an interesting technology - but seeing other interesting technologies and projects get disinvested in because…

I'm kind of puzzled. I've been interested in AI for ~45 years and read quite a lot of the stuff on HN and similar. I'm not aware of any of that being pushed on me by a corporate overlord? I'll give you there is more hype and money these days.

However I also read Kurzweil / Moravec stuff which has been predicting human level intelligence around now since at least 1990 and that to me is the interesting bit, and not really at all corporate, rather than open-whatever has raised $x bn etc.

Re: Bored of It

#434

Post by TeMPOraL »

lurk2 wrote: post #196
mapt wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On that specific quote - I feel like this is offensive on more than one level. The waste of our best minds... sure. Fine. But - "to sell you ads." Marketting has the dubious distinction of being one area of human endeavor where technological advances serve mostly to make your life worse, make your mind less focused, make your wallet more empty. The spherical-cow "ideal" 100% efficient perfect marketing campaign/tacti…

> The spherical-cow "ideal" 100% efficient perfect marketing campaign/tactic literally hypnotizes you into dropping all your money on an arbitrary good or service. It is isomorphic to somebody mugging you. I like the quote and despise advertising of any kind for mostly the same reason, but you could apply this logic to any kind of business and it starts to fall apart. > The spherical-cow "ideal" 100% efficient perfec…

100% efficient everything is an unimaginable dystopia. All that's nice, and good, all kindness and love and happiness, all that exists within economic inefficiencies. It's the slack that lets us be human.

That said, of the four examples you mentioned, only one has the distinction of being a metaphorical cancer on modern society, entrapping everything it touches in negative-sum games until it burns out all value and metastasizes to the next fertile ground. It's what ruined medium after medium, from phones through over-the-air TV, cable, web, video streaming, news, social media - and it just keeps going.

I wrote this over 5 years ago, and since then, the cancer analogy only felt ever more accurate to me: https://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html

Re: Bored of It

#435

Post by xboxnolifes »

joewhale wrote: post #80
bufferoverflow wrote: post #54

Nobody asked for it??? Nobody wants it??? You're not paying attention. I want it. I think it's our only chance at quickly solving huge complex problems like aging, cancer, Alzheimer's.

Aging isn’t a problem. It’s normal.

We define normal by what is common and familiar. But that has no bearing on what ought to be.

It's normal for half of all babies to die in the first year of their life. It's normal for an infected limb to commonly lead to death. Etc.

Re: Bored of It

#436

Post by nsagent »

SamBam wrote: post #284
nsagent wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll bite. I received my PhD in Computer Science focused on NLP and creative text generation last year and I think the hype around LLMs is ridiculous (academics are no better than industry on chasing hype). They're trained to predict the next token given a context, and that's exactly what they're good at. How old do you think I am?

> "is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it." Does this not explain why you just got your PhD in this? ("This" being broad, but "NLP and creative text generation" sounds like it's in the same ballpark as LLMs.)

Nope. I did it purely due to long-term intellectual curiosity.

I first pursued "AI" in undergrad during the last AI winter. For example, the only professor who taught neural networks at Purdue was in the EE dept, not CS, and was retiring the semester I was first qualified to study it. There weren't enough seats in the class, and since it was graduate level, I wasn't allowed to take it as an undergrad.

I really tried every avenue I could think of at the time to pursue AI — taking part in Robocup, taking classical AI (also from the EE dept), etc. None of what I was exposed to seemed like it was pushing the the intellectual boundaries, so I instead got into video game AI as a way to pursue AI (a number of famous ML researchers like Demis Hassabis got their start in video games).

When I started my PhD a very tiny group of researchers were looking at text generation, let alone for creative text. The idea was very niche.

Note, I only pursued a PhD after I got an interview at OpenAI in 2017 that made me realize a PhD was likely necessary to pursue research.

Re: Bored of It

#437

Post by 9rx »

Seb-C wrote: post #431
9rx wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps LLMs are in the Model T stage? The experience is terrible. Its slow. The roads are muddy and full of ruts. You are bound to break your arm when you spin the crank. But, still, it offers something ever so slightly more than the horse that you put up with it anyway.

Natural language is a terrible interface to interact with a computer, worse than any UI or programming language. LLMs are more like replacing automobiles with mechanical horses. You fundamentally cannot get it significantly better.

> Natural language is a terrible interface to interact with a computer

And period. It is terrible when interacting with people to. Its only saving grace is that it is widely supported.

> You fundamentally cannot get it significantly better.

It will when we flip the script. The trouble right now is that we're trying to do it backwards. Eventually we'll settle on a programming language as the de facto language of LLMs, that can be translated to natural language for interfacing with the pesky humans still running in legacy mode. That is when transformation will occur.

Re: Bored of It

#438

Post by xboxnolifes »

gizmo wrote: post #18

The world is changing. Maybe for the better, maybe not. Personally, I'm pretty optimistic. Other people might mostly see risks and harm. I get that. But what I don't get is how people think this is boring . Today's kids will grow up in a strangely alien world that used to be science fiction. That's why people can't stop talking about.

I'm bored of hearing about it because every conversation about it is the same.

Re: Bored of It

#439

Post by placardloop »

tim333 wrote: post #433
placardloop wrote: post #93

AI is really bringing out the worst in capitalist corporatism. I think even the most pessimistic AI doomer will agree that the technology is fascinating and can do some cool things, but our corporate overlords have made it such an all-encompassing topic that it’s hard not to be disillusioned by it. Yes, it’s an interesting technology - but seeing other interesting technologies and projects get disinvested in because…

I'm kind of puzzled. I've been interested in AI for ~45 years and read quite a lot of the stuff on HN and similar. I'm not aware of any of that being pushed on me by a corporate overlord? I'll give you there is more hype and money these days. However I also read Kurzweil / Moravec stuff which has been predicting human level intelligence around now since at least 1990 and that to me is the interesting bit, and not rea…

You must not work in big tech, then. At my company, AI-companion tools were forcibly installed in everyone’s browser, soon followed by a press release parading how “100% of people at our company now use AI because it’s so great”. Attempts to uninstall the tool are explicitly blocked. Similarly, AI coding tools are forcibly installed in IDEs.

Every single hackathon or team workshop has been turned into a AI-specific hackathons or training. Managers have been told explicitly that they must come up with yearly goals that include the use of AI. Every project proposal must include a section answering how this project plans to utilize AI.

Re: Bored of It

#440

Post by GeoAtreides »

senordevnyc wrote: post #411
placardloop wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn’t even close to being the greatest tool in human history. This type of misunderstanding and hyperbole is exactly why people are tired/bored/frustrated of it. The uncomfortable truth is that AI is the world’s greatest con man. The tools and hype around them have created an environment where AI is incredibly effective at fooling people into thinking it is knowledgeable and helpful, even when it isn’t. And the pe…

What is the greatest tool in human history in your opinion? I think it's too early to call whether AI is the answer to that question, but I think it could be. Yes, LLMs are terrible in all kinds of ways, but there's clearly something there that's of great value. I use it all day every day as a staff-level engineer, and it's making me much better and faster. I can see glimmers of intelligence there, and if we're on a…

> What is the greatest tool in human history in your opinion?

Language, fire, writing; in that order.

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