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Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

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Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#531

Post by anothermathbozo »

bwfan123 wrote: post #522
whilenot-dev wrote: post #514

I watched Karpathy's Intro to Large Language Models [0] not so long ago and must say that I'm a bit confused by this presentation, and it's a bit unclear to me what it adds. 1,5 years ago he saw all the tool uses in agent systems as the future of LLMs, which seemed reasonable to me. There was (and maybe still is) potential for a lot of business cases to be explored, but every system is defined by its boundaries nonet…

> Am I all of a sudden the one lacking imagination? No, The reality of what these tools can do is sinking in.. The rubber is meeting the road and I can hear some screaching. The boosters are in 5 stages of grief coming to terms with what was once AGI and is now a mere co-pilot, while the haters are coming to terms with the fact that LLMs can actually be useful in a variety of usecases.

> The reality of what these tools can do is sinking in

It feels premature to make determinations about how far this emergent technology can be pushed.

Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#532

Post by Workaccount2 »

whilenot-dev wrote: post #514

I watched Karpathy's Intro to Large Language Models [0] not so long ago and must say that I'm a bit confused by this presentation, and it's a bit unclear to me what it adds. 1,5 years ago he saw all the tool uses in agent systems as the future of LLMs, which seemed reasonable to me. There was (and maybe still is) potential for a lot of business cases to be explored, but every system is defined by its boundaries nonet…

The fundamental mistake I see is people applying LLMs to the current paradigm of software; enormous hulking codebases made to have as many features as possible to appeal to as many users as possible.

LLMs are excellent at helping non-programmers write narrow use case, bespoke programs. LLMs don't need to be able to one-shot excel.exe or Plantio.apk so that Christine can easily track when she watered and fed her plants nutrients.

The change that LLMs will bring to computing is much deeper than Garden Software trying to slot in some LLM workers to work on their sprawling feature-pack Plantio SaaS.

I can tell you first hand I have already done this numerous times as a non-programmer working a non-tech job.

Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#533

Post by whilenot-dev »

kadushka wrote: post #511
whilenot-dev wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Modern chip fabrication is closer to LLM code As is, I don't quite understand what you're getting at here. Please just think that through and tell us what happens to the yield ratio when the software running on all those photolithography machines wouldn't be deterministic.

An output of a fab, just like an output of an LLM, is non-deterministic, but is good enough, or is being optimized to be good enough. Non-determinism is not the problem, it's the quality of the software that matters. You can repeatedly ask me to solve a particular leetcode puzzle, and every time I might output a slightly different version. That's fine as long as the code solves the problem. The software running on th…

Hardware always involves some level of non-determinism, because the physical world is messier than the virtual software world. Every hardware engineer accepts that and learns how to design solutions despite those constraints. But you're right, non-determinism is not the current problem in some fabs, because the whole process has been modeled with it in mind, and it's the yield ratio that needs to be deterministic enough to offer a service. Remember the struggles in Intels fabs? Revenue reflects that at fabs.

The software quality at companies like ASML seems to be in a bad shape already, and I remember ex-employees stating that there are some team leads higher up who can at least reason about existing software procedures, their implementation, side effects and their outcomes. Do you think this software is as thoroughly documented as some open source project? The purchase costs for those machines are in the mid-3-digit million range (operating costs excluded) and are expected to run 24/7 to be somewhat worthwhile. Operators can handle hardware issues on the spot and work around them, but what do you think happens with downtime due to non-deterministic software issues?

Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#534

Post by natebc »

acedTrex wrote: post #526
bwfan123 wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Am I all of a sudden the one lacking imagination? No, The reality of what these tools can do is sinking in.. The rubber is meeting the road and I can hear some screaching. The boosters are in 5 stages of grief coming to terms with what was once AGI and is now a mere co-pilot, while the haters are coming to terms with the fact that LLMs can actually be useful in a variety of usecases.

I actually quite agree with this, there is some reckoning on both sides happening. It's quite entertaining to watch, a bit painful as well of course as someone who is on the "they are useless" side and is noticing some very clear usecases where a value add is present.

I'm with you. I give several of 'em a shot a few times a week (thanks Kagi for the fantastic menu of choices!). Over the last quarter or so I've found that the bullshit:useful ratio is creeping to the useful side. They still answer like a high school junior writing a 5 paragraph essay but a decade of sifting through blogspam has honed my own ability to cut through that.

Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#535

Post by dang »

guappa wrote: post #152
dang wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wouldn't be unlearnable if it fits the way the user is already thinking.

AI is not mind reading.

Behavioral patterns are not unpredictable. Who knows how far an LLM could get by pattern-matching what a user is doing and generating a UI to make it easier. Since the user could immediately say whether they liked it or not, this could turn into a rapid and creative feedback loop.

Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#536

Post by lelanthran »

diggan wrote: post #480
lelanthran wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Would you say that ML isn't a successful discipline? Not yet it isn't; all I am seeing are tools to replace programmers and artists :-/ Where are the tools to take in 400 recipes and spit out all of them in a formal structure (poster upthread literally gave up on trying to get an LLM to do this). Tools that can replace the 90% of office staff who aren't programmers? Maybe it's a successful low-code industry right n…

> Not yet it isn't; all I am seeing are tools to replace programmers and artists :-/ You're missing a huge part of the ecosystem, ML is so much more than just "generative AI", which seems to be the extent of your experience so far. Weather predictions, computer vision, speech recognition, medicine research and more are already improved by various machine learning techniques, and already was before the current LLM/gen…

> You're missing a huge part of the ecosystem, ML is so much more than just "generative AI", which seems to be the extent of your experience so far.

I'm not missing anything; I'm saying the current boom is being fueled by claims of "replacing workers", but the only class of AI being funded to do that are LLMs, and the only class of worker that might get replaced are programmers and artists.

Karpathy's video, and this thread, are not about the un-hyped ML stuff that has been employed in various disciplines since 2010 and has not been proposed as a replacement for workers.

Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#537

Post by bwfan123 »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #372
greybox wrote: post #353

He's talking about "LLM Utility companies going down and the world becoming dumber" as a sign of humanity's progress. This if anything should be a huge red flag

He lives in a GenAI bubble where everyone is self-congratulating about the usage of LLMs. The reality is that there's not a single critical component anywhere that is built on LLMs. There's absolutely no reliance on models, and ChatGPT being down has absolutely no impact on anything beside teenagers not being able to cheat on their homeworks and LLM wrappers not being able to wrap.

> The reality is that there's not a single critical component anywhere that is built on LLMs.

Remember that there are billion dollar usecases where being correct is not important. For example, shopping recommendations, advertizing, search results, image captioning, etc. All of these usecases have humans consuming the output, and LLMs can play a useful role as productivity boosters.

Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#538

Post by diggan »

natebc wrote: post #534
acedTrex wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually quite agree with this, there is some reckoning on both sides happening. It's quite entertaining to watch, a bit painful as well of course as someone who is on the "they are useless" side and is noticing some very clear usecases where a value add is present.

I'm with you. I give several of 'em a shot a few times a week (thanks Kagi for the fantastic menu of choices!). Over the last quarter or so I've found that the bullshit:useful ratio is creeping to the useful side. They still answer like a high school junior writing a 5 paragraph essay but a decade of sifting through blogspam has honed my own ability to cut through that.

> but a decade of sifting through blogspam has honed my own ability to cut through that.

Now, a different skill need to be honed :) Add "Be concise and succinct without removing any details" to your system prompt and hopefully it can output its text slightly better.

Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#539

Post by sponnath »

alightsoul wrote: post #471

It's interesting to see people here and on Blind are more wary? of AI than people in say, Reddit or Youtube comments

Reddit and YouTube are such huge social media platforms that it really depends on which bubble (read: subreddits/yt channels) you're looking at. There's the "AGI is here" people over at r/singularity and then the "AI is useless" people at r/programming. I'm simplifying arguments from both sides here but you get my point.

Re: Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]

#540

Post by AlexCoventry »

nsagent wrote: post #518
AlexCoventry wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen evidence of "anyone can vibe code", but at this stage the result tends to be a 5,000-line application intricately entangled with 500,000 lines of irrelevant slop. Still, the wonder is that the bear can dance at all. That's a new thing under the sun.

Having worked with game designers writing code for their missions/levels in a scripting language, I'd say this has been the case for quite a long while. They start with the code from another level, then modify it until it seems to do what they want. During the alpha testing phase, we'd have a programmer read through the code and remove all the useless cruft and fix any associated bugs. In some sense that's what vibe…

I'm not kidding about the orders of magnitude, though. It's been literally roughly 100 lines to per line required to competently implement the app. It doesn't seem economically feasible to me, at this stage. I would prefer to just rewrite. (I know it's a common bias.)
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