Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Generative AI is overrated, long live old-school AI

encord.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 192 posts

Re: Generative AI is overrated, long live old-school AI

#61

Post by [deleted] »

croes wrote: post #23
goldenkey wrote: post #3

When the generative model is autoregressive (autocomplete), it can easily be used as a predictor. All of the state of the art language models are tested against multiple choice exams and other types of prediction tasks. In fact, it's how they are trained...masking - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/mpnet-combines... For example: "Multiple-choice questions in 57 subjects (professional & academic)" - https…

Being good at standardized tests isn't really a good measure. What happens with completely new questions from totally different subject. The generative model will produce nonsense.

[deleted]

Re: Generative AI is overrated, long live old-school AI

#62

Post by nico »

JohnFen wrote: post #47
nico wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me what’s exciting about Chat/GPT type of tech, is that they can be the “coordinators” of other models. Imagine asking an AI assistant to perform a certain industrial control task. The assistant, instead of executing the task “itself”, could figure out which model/system should perform the task and have it do it. Then even monitor the task and check it’s completion.

I'm not sure how the likes of ChatGPT could accomplish that even in theory, but I won't say it's not possible at some point in the future. Gpt itself, perhaps, someday.

Already ChatSpot is doing it. Their system is essentially a ChatGPT-enhanced Hubspot management system using chatux.

ChatSpot can understand your commands and then perform actions in the system for you, for example add a lead, change their contact info, write a blog post, publish it, add an image…

Edit: but if you connected it with physical actions, it could control your house, maybe check your smart refrigerator, order food on Instacart, send you recipe, schedule the time to cook in your calendar, request an Uber to pick you up from work, invite someone over, play music…

There’s a discussion about this on another homepage thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35172362

Re: Generative AI is overrated, long live old-school AI

#63

Post by sterlind »

version_five wrote: post #7

Seems like the person who wrote the blog works in "classical" deep learning. So do I, so here's the fairest take I can come up with: "AI" has for recent memory been a marketing term anyway. Deep learning and variations have had a good run at being what people mean when they refer to AI, probably overweighting towards big convolution based computer vision models. Now, "AI" in people's minds means generative models. Th…

do people actually use SVMs anymore?

like, regression, sure - because it's a tool to measure how well a hypothesis (polynomial function) matches the data (points.) and CNNs are still foundational in computer vision. but the first and last time I heard of SVMs was in college, by professors who were weirdly dismissive of these newfangled deep neural networks, and enamored by the "kernel trick."

but aren't SVMs basically souped up regression models? are they used in anything ML-esque, i.e. besides validating a hypothesis about the behavior of a system?

Re: Generative AI is overrated, long live old-school AI

#64

Post by JohnFen »

nico wrote: post #62
JohnFen wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how the likes of ChatGPT could accomplish that even in theory, but I won't say it's not possible at some point in the future. Gpt itself, perhaps, someday.

Already ChatSpot is doing it. Their system is essentially a ChatGPT-enhanced Hubspot management system using chatux. ChatSpot can understand your commands and then perform actions in the system for you, for example add a lead, change their contact info, write a blog post, publish it, add an image… Edit: but if you connected it with physical actions, it could control your house, maybe check your smart refrigerator, or…

Ah, ok. I thought you were talking about something a bit more profound than that.

Re: Generative AI is overrated, long live old-school AI

#66

Post by ulrikhansen54 »

whiplash451 wrote: post #9
ulrikhansen54 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's about ~10% point improvement left (i.e, from 80% to 90%) before it starts to stagnate. We've seen the same with predictive models benchmarked on ImageNet et. al.

By stagnate, you mean beating humankind at the task, right? :)

Ha, touché...

Re: Generative AI is overrated, long live old-school AI

#67

Post by nico »

stormfather wrote: post #60
nico wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> model for the truth? Without sensing/experiencing the world, there is no truth. The only truth we can ever truly know, is the present moment. Even our memories of things that we “know” that happened, we perceive them in the now. Language doesn’t have a truth. You can make up anything you want with language. So the only “truth” you could teach an LLM, is your own description of it. But these LLMs are trained on thou…

I think for practical purposes you could hold that text from wikipedia or scientific papers if true, for example. The issue I think OP is referring to is if a LLM can refer back to these axiomatically true sources to ground and justify its outputs like a human would.

Well in that case, maybe the debate is: do we want that? Why?

Re: Generative AI is overrated, long live old-school AI

#68

Post by jacksnipe »

sterlind wrote: post #63
version_five wrote: post #7

Seems like the person who wrote the blog works in "classical" deep learning. So do I, so here's the fairest take I can come up with: "AI" has for recent memory been a marketing term anyway. Deep learning and variations have had a good run at being what people mean when they refer to AI, probably overweighting towards big convolution based computer vision models. Now, "AI" in people's minds means generative models. Th…

do people actually use SVMs anymore? like, regression, sure - because it's a tool to measure how well a hypothesis (polynomial function) matches the data (points.) and CNNs are still foundational in computer vision. but the first and last time I heard of SVMs was in college, by professors who were weirdly dismissive of these newfangled deep neural networks, and enamored by the "kernel trick." but aren't SVMs basicall…

We loved them in medical testing. Very explainable models.

Re: Generative AI is overrated, long live old-school AI

#69

Post by dimitrios1 »

kenjackson wrote: post #57
dimitrios1 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny to me we look at GPT4 scoring high on all these tests and think it's worth anything when educators and a lot of us here have been lamenting the standardized tests since Bush made it a preeminent feature of our country's education system. They are not a good measure of intelligence. They measure how well you can take a test.

Funny -- I literally had someone tell me this same thing this morning... but the exact same guy last week was arguing with me against the reduced importance of these same tests for college admissions. Last week he was arguing how critical these tests were for the college admissions process, but this morning the same tests are basically worthless. Not saying you hold the same opinions -- but I wouldn't be surprised if…

In principle I agree. On one hand, we can positively conclude that IQ is indeed important, but at the same time are horrible at measuring it. That being said, there is a country mile difference between most of these tests suitability for the purposes they are being used.

Re: Generative AI is overrated, long live old-school AI

#70

Post by dimitrios1 »

dahdum wrote: post #30
dimitrios1 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny to me we look at GPT4 scoring high on all these tests and think it's worth anything when educators and a lot of us here have been lamenting the standardized tests since Bush made it a preeminent feature of our country's education system. They are not a good measure of intelligence. They measure how well you can take a test.

> They are not a good measure of intelligence. They measure how well you can take a test. The tests aren't trying to measure intelligence, but rather whether you've learned the material.

Again, they are horrible at that.
Post reply on HN