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OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

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Re: OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

#441
post #195
post #115

Question for the group here: do we honestly feel like we've exhausted the options for delivering value on top of the current generation of LLMs? I lead a team exploring cutting edge LLM applications and end-user features. It's my intuition from experience that we have a LONG way to go. GPT-4o / Claude 3.5 are the go-to models for my team. Every combination of technical investment + LLMs yields a new list of potential…

> potential applications > if you ... > for example ... Yes there seems to be lots of potential. Yes we can brainstorm things that should work. Yes there is a lot of examples of incredible things in isolation. But it's a little bit like those youtube videos showing amazing basketball shots in 1 try, when in reality lots of failed attempts happened beforehand. Except our users experience the failed attempts (LLM repli…

We have built quite a few highly useful LLM applications in my org that have reduced cost and improved outcomes in several domains - fraud detection, credit analysis, customer support, and a variety of other spaces. By in large they operate as cognitive load reducers but also handle through automation the vast majority of work since in our uses false negatives are not as bad as false positives but the majority of things we analyze are not true positives (99.999%+). As such the LLMs do a great job at anomaly detection and allow us to do tasks it would be prohibitively expensive with humans and their false positive and negative rates are considerably higher than LLMs.

I see these statements often here about “I’ve never seen an effective commercial use of LLMs,” which tells me you aren’t working with very creative and competent people in areas that are amenable to LLMs. In my professional network beyond where I work now I know at least a dozen people who have successful commercial applications of LLMs. They tend to be highly capable people able to build the end to end tool chains necessary (which is a huge gap) and understand how to compose LLMs in hierarchical agents with effective guard rails. Most ineffectual users of LLMs want them to be lazy buttons that obviate the need to think. They’re not - like any sufficiently powerful tool they require thought up front and are easy to use wrong. This will get better with time as patterns and tools emerge to get the most use out of them in a commercial setting. However the ability to process natural language and use an emergent (if not actual) abductive reasoning is absurdly powerful and was not practically possible 4 years ago - the assertion such an amazing capability in an information or decisioning system is not commercially practical is on the face absurd.

Re: OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

#442
post #437

Sam Altman might be wrong then? Learning from data is not enough; there is a need for the kind of system-two thinking we humans develop as we grow. It is difficult to see how deep learning and backpropagation alone will help us model that. For tasks where providing enough data is sufficient to cover 95% of cases, deep learning will continue to be useful in the form of 'data-driven knowledge automation.' For other cas…

If Sam Altman concluded that AI is reaching it's limits, it probably wouldn't be a very good strategic decision for him to say it.

Re: OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

#443
post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "let's only allow the LLM to do things we know it is rock-solid at." Even this is insanely hard in my opinion. The one thing that you would assume LLM to excel at is spelling and grammar checking for the English language, but even the top model (GPT-4o) can be insanely stupid/unpredictable at times. Take the following example from my tool: https://app.gitsense.com/?doc=6c9bada92&model=GPT-4o&samples... 5 models are…

> It keeps complaining that GitHub is spelled like Github, when it isn't I feel like this is unfair. That's the only thing it got wrong? But we want it to pass all of our evals, even ones the perhaps a dictionary would be better at solving? Or even an LLM augmented with a dictionary.

My reason for commenting wasn't to say LLM sucks, but rather we need to get over the honeymoon phase. The fact the GPT-4o (one of the most advanced, if not the most advanced when it comes to non programming tasks) hallucinated "Github" as the input, should give us pause.

LLM has its place and it will forever change how we think about UX and other things, but we need to realize you really can't create a public facing solution without significant safe guards, if you don't want egg on your face.

Re: OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

#444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scaling laws are not dead. The number of people predicting death of Moore's law doubles every two years. - Jim Keller https://www.youtube.com/live/oIG9ztQw2Gc?si=oaK2zjSBxq2N-zj1...

Moore's law is doomed. At some point you start reaching the level of individual atoms. This is just physics.

You are missing the economic component.. it isn't just how small can a transistor be.. it was really about how many transistors can you get for your money. So even when we reach terminal density, we probably haven't reached terminal economics.

Re: OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

#445
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> potential applications > if you ... > for example ... Yes there seems to be lots of potential. Yes we can brainstorm things that should work. Yes there is a lot of examples of incredible things in isolation. But it's a little bit like those youtube videos showing amazing basketball shots in 1 try, when in reality lots of failed attempts happened beforehand. Except our users experience the failed attempts (LLM repli…

We have built quite a few highly useful LLM applications in my org that have reduced cost and improved outcomes in several domains - fraud detection, credit analysis, customer support, and a variety of other spaces. By in large they operate as cognitive load reducers but also handle through automation the vast majority of work since in our uses false negatives are not as bad as false positives but the majority of thi…

>compose LLMs in hierarchical agents with effective guard rails

Could you elaborate? Is this related to the "teams of specialized LLMs" concept I saw last year when Auto-GPT was getting a lot of hype?

Re: OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

#446

Anthropic's latest 3.5 sonnet is a cut above GPT-4 and 4.0. And if someone had given it to me and said, here's GPT-4.5, I would have been very happy with it.

For law, I use both and find that neither is clearly superior. I’ll often pick one to first draft, and then feed to the other for suggestions and my edits.

Re: OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

#447
post #397
post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "let's only allow the LLM to do things we know it is rock-solid at." Even this is insanely hard in my opinion. The one thing that you would assume LLM to excel at is spelling and grammar checking for the English language, but even the top model (GPT-4o) can be insanely stupid/unpredictable at times. Take the following example from my tool: https://app.gitsense.com/?doc=6c9bada92&model=GPT-4o&samples... 5 models are…

I do contract work on fine-tuning efforts, and I can tell you that most humans aren't designed to be public-facing either. While LLMs do plenty of awful things, people make the most incredibly stupid mistakes too, and that is what LLMs needs to be benchmarked against. The problem is that most of the people evaluating LLMs are better educated than most and often smarter than most. When you see any quantity of prompts…

> While LLMs do plenty of awful things, people make the most incredibly stupid mistakes too

I am 100% not blaming the LLM, but rather VCs and the media for believing the VCs. Once we get over the hype and people realize there isn't a golden goose, the better off we will be. Once we accept that LLM is not perfect and that it is not what we are being sold, I believe we will find a place for it that will make a huge impact. Unfortunately for OpenAI and others, I don't believe they will play as big of a role as they would like us to believe/will.

Re: OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

#448
post #418
post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is SO MUCH we haven't figured out about how to use them yet. I mean, it's pretty clear to me they're a potentially great human-machine interface, but trying to make LLMs - in their current fundamental form - a reliable computational tool.. well, at best it's an expensive hack, but it's just not the right tool for the job. I expect the next leap forward will require some orthogonal discovery and lead to a diff…

One of the biggest challenges in learning how to use and build on LLMs is figuring out how to work productively with a technology that - unlike most computers - is inherently unreliable and non-deterministic. It's possible, but it's not at all obvious and requires a slightly skewed way of looking at them.

This really reminds me of a trend years ago to create probabilistic programming constructs. I think it was just a trend way ahead of its time. Typical software engineers tend to be very ill-suited to think in probabilities and how to build reasonably reliable systems around them.

Re: OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

#449
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> potential applications > if you ... > for example ... Yes there seems to be lots of potential. Yes we can brainstorm things that should work. Yes there is a lot of examples of incredible things in isolation. But it's a little bit like those youtube videos showing amazing basketball shots in 1 try, when in reality lots of failed attempts happened beforehand. Except our users experience the failed attempts (LLM repli…

We have built quite a few highly useful LLM applications in my org that have reduced cost and improved outcomes in several domains - fraud detection, credit analysis, customer support, and a variety of other spaces. By in large they operate as cognitive load reducers but also handle through automation the vast majority of work since in our uses false negatives are not as bad as false positives but the majority of thi…

Do they build guardrails themselves or do they use an llm guardrail api like Modelmetry or Langwatch?

Re: OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI

#450
post #109

"While the model was initially expected to significantly surpass previous versions of the technology behind ChatGPT, it fell short in key areas, particularly in answering coding questions outside its training data." Right. If you generate some code with ChatGPT, and then try to find similar code on the web, you usually will. Search for unusual phrases in comments and for variable names. Often, something from Stack Ov…

> Right. If you generate some code with ChatGPT, and then try to find similar code on the web, you usually will. People who "follow" AI, as the latest fad they want to comment on and appear intelligent about, repeat things like this constantly, even though they're not actually true for anything but the most trivial hello-world types of problems. I write code all day every day. I use Copilot and the like all day every…

I've had generated code include comments so specific I was able to find the exact github repo where it came from.
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