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ML promises to be profoundly weird

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Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#581

Post by GrinningFool »

Retric wrote: post #476
jychang wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's sort of the exception that proves the rule. This is where STEM people are weak- a lack of knowledge on history. In another forum, someone would have chipped in that England's virgin forests were fully deforested by 1150. And someone else would have pointed out that this deforestation produced the economic demand for coal that drove the Industrial Revolution in the first place. Still, that kind of underscores OP'…

> powered solely by human muscle Both animals and water power go way back. The early steam engine was measured in horsepower because that’s what it was replacing in mines. It couldn’t compete with nearby water power which was already being moved relatively long distances through mechanical means at the time. Hand waving this as unimportant really misunderstands just how limited the Industrial Revolution was.

Before LLMs we had code generators and automation that eliminated a lot of time- and resource-consuming tasks. I think the point still holds.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#582

Post by davebren »

Sol- wrote: post #277
drob518 wrote: post #94

> It remains unclear whether continuing to throw vast quantities of silicon and ever-bigger corpuses at the current generation of models will lead to human-equivalent capabilities. Massive increases in training costs and parameter count seem to be yielding diminishing returns. Or maybe this effect is illusory. Mysteries! I’m not even sure whether this is possible. The current corpus used for training includes virtual…

I think in domains like Math and Software Engineering, they are less constrained by training data anyway. They can synthetically generate and validate programs. To what extent that scales into novel insights is a different matter, but I think they dream of the AlphaGo Zero moment at least in verifiable domains.

How can it ever play against itself on novel software tasks? First it has to come up with the task. Then it can write tests but then it needs to verify that the tests are correct, mixture of experts can come to wrong conclusions, etc...

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#583

Post by davebren »

embedding-shape wrote: post #102
drob518 wrote: post #94

> It remains unclear whether continuing to throw vast quantities of silicon and ever-bigger corpuses at the current generation of models will lead to human-equivalent capabilities. Massive increases in training costs and parameter count seem to be yielding diminishing returns. Or maybe this effect is illusory. Mysteries! I’m not even sure whether this is possible. The current corpus used for training includes virtual…

> I’m not even sure whether this is possible. Based on what's happened so far, maybe. At least that's exactly how we got to the current iteration back in 2022/2023, quite literally "lets see what happens when we throw an enormous amount data at them while training" worked out up until one point, then post-training seems to have taken over where labs currently differ.

It works as far as consolidating existing human knowledge, but general intelligence doesn't suddenly emerge from it. They're out of data now but if there was 10x more (assuming it's not rehashed from existing data) and they had a 10x larger model then it would be better but that's only because there's more that it can copy from.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#584

Post by [deleted] »

retsibsi wrote: post #507
jychang wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Irrelevant. Here's Bret Devereaux (an actual historian) explaining this distinction and precisely why those are irrelevant in the context of the Industrial Revolution: https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus... > Diet indicators and midden remains indicate that there’s more meat being eaten, indicates a greater availability of animals which may include draft animals (for pulling plows) and must n…

I think I prefer the 'STEM people' approach of trying to say true things, rather than this superior approach of just saying things and then, when they turn out to be false, dismissing them as irrelevant. If the truth of the claim is irrelevant, why did you make it in the first place!

[deleted]

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#585

Post by [deleted] »

embedding-shape wrote: post #180
drob518 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but we played the scaling card and it worked but is now reaching limits. What is the next card? You can surely argue that we can find a new one at any time. That’s the definition of a breakthrough. I just don’t see one at the moment.

> I just don’t see one at the moment. Did you see the one before the current one was even found? Things tend to look easy in hindsight, and borderline impossible trying to look forward. Otherwise it sounds like you're in the same spot as before :)

[deleted]

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#586

Post by ivraatiems »

data_maan wrote: post #579

If LLMs lie as much as the OP claims in the article, why can they then solve Olympiad math problems they never saw during training, consistently? There's the aimoprize.com on Kaggle for example that shows this

Because those two things are unrelated.

First, something lying sometimes doesn't mean it lies all the time.

Second, the whole point of LLMs is inference - they use massive amounts of amalgamated information to produce answers. The Olympiad math problems are not frontier mathematics requiring ideation, they are complex examples of existing problems. That means they're exactly the sort of thing an LLM with enough training data is good at.

The question of whether recombining existing knowledge is all it takes to be "creative" or produce things which are novel is an open one, but I don't think this is contradictory on its face.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#587

Post by davebren »

liquid_thyme wrote: post #252
drob518 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What large caches of undigitized content exists? Surely, not everything has been digitized, but I can’t think it’s much in percentage terms.

The amount of private data that is locked up inside private internal databases is huge. This is especially true of regulated industries. There is a wealth of data - financial data showing how to budget for things, pricing data on various products that are B2B, standard operating procedures at mature companies that have gone through various revisions, designs for manufacturing plants so people don't keep reinventing a…

I think it's implied that they're not talking about private data when they say they've run out.

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#589

Post by 8note »

endymion-light wrote: post #534
jychang wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's sort of the exception that proves the rule. This is where STEM people are weak- a lack of knowledge on history. In another forum, someone would have chipped in that England's virgin forests were fully deforested by 1150. And someone else would have pointed out that this deforestation produced the economic demand for coal that drove the Industrial Revolution in the first place. Still, that kind of underscores OP'…

Yeah - really struggling to understand why people are not grasping this point. Yes, Easter Island was deforested far earlier - but you wouldn't compare the steam engine's capability in resource extraction compared to what people on Easter Island were doing. It feels like people are almost straining to not understand the point - I think it's quite clear how ML + AI serve to extract resources of data at a unheard of sc…

the conclusion doesnt follow from the premise is the issue.

the laws and enclosure happened basically orthogonal to the respurce constraints, so there's no actual comparison to draw.

if you insist on a causation, id go with the opposite - the laws making ownership and forcing people off of land enabled the exploitation and innovation, not that it was cleanup for exploitation that was already happening. existing exploitation across all kinds of degrees was already being managed without the enclosure.

if you just want to make stuff up, you can reference anything you want, like that some elaborate thing happened in star wars, and thus the same thing must be happening with AI

Re: ML promises to be profoundly weird

#590

Post by salawat »

endymion-light wrote: post #534
jychang wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's sort of the exception that proves the rule. This is where STEM people are weak- a lack of knowledge on history. In another forum, someone would have chipped in that England's virgin forests were fully deforested by 1150. And someone else would have pointed out that this deforestation produced the economic demand for coal that drove the Industrial Revolution in the first place. Still, that kind of underscores OP'…

Yeah - really struggling to understand why people are not grasping this point. Yes, Easter Island was deforested far earlier - but you wouldn't compare the steam engine's capability in resource extraction compared to what people on Easter Island were doing. It feels like people are almost straining to not understand the point - I think it's quite clear how ML + AI serve to extract resources of data at a unheard of sc…

It is hard to convince a man of that which his income is dependent on him not understanding. -Upton Sinclair

You aren't wrong. There's definitely going to be a need to drag people kicking and screaming to enlightenment unfortunately. Too much money to be made at stake otherwise.

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