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Many in the AI field think the bigger-is-better approach is running out of road

economist.com

51–60 of 354 posts

Re: Many in the AI field think the bigger-is-better approach is running out of road

#51
post #11

We need a way to make tight little specialist models that don't hallucinate and reliably report when they don't know. Trying to cram all of the web into a LLM is a dead end.

They don't know that they don't know. It's only hallucination from a human's perspective. From the model's perspective it's _all_ hallucination.

Re: Many in the AI field think the bigger-is-better approach is running out of road

#52
post #11

We need a way to make tight little specialist models that don't hallucinate and reliably report when they don't know. Trying to cram all of the web into a LLM is a dead end.

The same way "attention" was a game changer, I'm not sure why they don't invent some recursive self-maintenance algorithm that constantly improves the neural network within. Self directed attention, so to speak.

Re: Many in the AI field think the bigger-is-better approach is running out of road

#53
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok - what's the ROI on the $10bn (++) that OpenAI have had? So far I reckon This isn't what VC's (or microsoft) dream of.

I think Azure OpenAI service is growing at 1000% per quarter according to last earnings call

Indeed. Azure OpenAI service is how you get corporate-blessed ChatGPT that you can use with proprietary information, among other things. There's a huge demand for it.

Re: Many in the AI field think the bigger-is-better approach is running out of road

#54
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search has definitely been dead since before LLMs, we just don't have a replacement yet.

For a while my replacement was “use google, add ‘reddit’ at the end.” Not sure how much longer that will work given even just this limited blackout impacted how effective that was lol

That hasn’t worked since about three months after companies found out people do it. It’s all astroturfing now days anyway and if it applies to products (which it for sure does) you can be sure that government actors caught on as well.

Re: Many in the AI field think the bigger-is-better approach is running out of road

#55
post #35
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPT4 is really good at code and you can generally verify hallucination easily. The other good use cases are using LLM to turn natural language prompts into API calls to real data.

This is what I've been doing. GPT-4 to generate some data from some input, followed up by a 3.5T call to verify the output against the input to verify the content. You can feed the 3.5T output straight back into GPT-4 again and it will self-correct. Doing this a couple of times gives me 100% accuracy for my use case that involves some level of summarization and reasoning. Hallucinations are not as big of a deal at al…

This sounds interesting, can you detail this data flow a bit more and maybe provide an example?

Re: Many in the AI field think the bigger-is-better approach is running out of road

#57
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. We are in the very early innings of capital being deployed to all this.

Ok - what's the ROI on the $10bn (++) that OpenAI have had? So far I reckon This isn't what VC's (or microsoft) dream of.

The level of exposure since chatGPT has/will result in a lot of money turning up, especially for applications of the existing technology (whether they succeed or fail). That stats on usage demonstrate that the thundering herd has noticed and that attention can be extremely valuable.

I think its quite likely that OpenAI will make that money back and more, as both the industry leader and with the power of their brand (chatGPT).

Re: Many in the AI field think the bigger-is-better approach is running out of road

#58
post #49
post #11

We need a way to make tight little specialist models that don't hallucinate and reliably report when they don't know. Trying to cram all of the web into a LLM is a dead end.

> that don't hallucinate “Hallucination” is part of thought. Solving a new problem requires hallucinating new, non existing, possible outcomes and solutions, to find one that will work. It seems that eliminating the ability to interpolate and extrapolate (hallucinations) would make intelligence impossible. It would eliminate creativity, tying together new concepts, creation, etc. Is the goal AI, or a nice database fr…

>Is the goal AI, or a nice database front end, to reference facts?

The latter given the kind of products that are currently being built with it. You don't want your code completion or news aggregator to hallucinate for the same reason you don't want your wrench to hallucinate, it's a tool.

And as for hallucinations, that's a PR friendly misnomer for "it made **** up". Using the same phrase doesn't mean it has functionally anything to do with the cognitive processes involved in human thought. In the same way a 'artificial' neural net is really a metaphorical neural net, it has very few things in common with biological neurons.

Re: Many in the AI field think the bigger-is-better approach is running out of road

#59
Sparse networks are the future, there's definitely a few major algorithmic hurdles we'll have to cross before they end up a real option but long term they will dominate (after all they already do in the living world).

All our current approaches rely on dense matrix multiplications. These approaches necessitate a tremendous amount of communication bandwidth (and low latency collectives). This is extremely challenging and expensive to scale O(n^2.3).

The constraints of physics and finance make significantly larger models out of reach for now.

Re: Many in the AI field think the bigger-is-better approach is running out of road

#60
post #11

We need a way to make tight little specialist models that don't hallucinate and reliably report when they don't know. Trying to cram all of the web into a LLM is a dead end.

I don’t know how a bunch of specialist models don’t combine into a super useful generalist model. Do we believe too much knowledge breaks an LLM?
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