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Generative AI is overrated, long live old-school AI

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

#71

Post by xwdv »

nico wrote: post #59
version_five wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just wrong. Also, even if a LLM could do that, so could a shell script, without the risks involved in using "AI" for it, or for now the ridiculous external dependence that would involve. I wonder if in 10 years people will be stuck debugging Rube-Goldberg machines composed of LLM api calls doing stuff that if-statements can do, probably cobbled together with actual if-statements

Sure, maybe you can use a shell script, but now the AI assistant can write it based on your verbal/text description, and then the assistant can also run it for you after you’ve checked it. What your are saying is: “why use the washing machine, if I my clothes are even cleaner when I wash them myself - I also spend less detergent and less water”. You are free to keep doing your laundry by hand. But I bet most people p…

Spare me the shitty analogies. We write shell scripts because it’s cheap, fast, and the behavior is very predictable.

Like it or not, an AI’s behavior is a black box and can’t be “proven” to execute exactly the same every time for the scenarios you are targeting.

A shell script will do exactly what it has been written to do every time, unless tampered with. And if changes need to be made, it can be done quickly without need for retraining, god knows how long that would take for an AI to learn something new. God help you if you need to maintain “versions” of your AI, trained for different things.

Face it, AI are pointless and slow for certain classes of problems.

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

#73

Post by sterlind »

gautamdivgi wrote: post #51
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…

Isn’t most of the mathematics of AI old, as in really old? Regression, both linear and logistic are from the mid 1800s to early 1900s. Neural networks, at least the basics are from around 1950. What has really changed is the engineering, the data volume and the number of fields we can apply the mathematics to. The math itself (or what is the basis of AI) is really old.

backpropagation didn't get solved until the '80s, weirdly. before then people were using genetic algorithms to train neural networks.

and it was only in the last decade that the vanishing gradients problem was tamed.

my impression is that ML researchers were stumbling along in the mathematical dark, until they hit a combination (deep neural nets trained via stochastic gradient descent with ReLU activation) that worked like magic and ended the AI winter.

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

#74

Post by ulrikhansen54 »

jasfi wrote: post #14
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.

There's no way there's only 10% left to improve in those models. New versions are coming out regularly that are clearly improved. Midjourney v5 and GPT-4 were just released showing huge improvements, for example. Not only that, but the innovation around this tech is also just getting started. It's immediately applicable for business use. The classical techniques still have their uses, of course.

It's not that there's only 10% left to improve. It's that the data needed, compute requirements, and model size are as intensive, getting from 0 to 80 as they are getting from 80 to ~85 or ~90. See https://paperswithcode.com/sota/image-classification-on-imag...

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

#75

Post by qorrect »

jasfi wrote: post #14
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.

There's no way there's only 10% left to improve in those models. New versions are coming out regularly that are clearly improved. Midjourney v5 and GPT-4 were just released showing huge improvements, for example. Not only that, but the innovation around this tech is also just getting started. It's immediately applicable for business use. The classical techniques still have their uses, of course.

> Not only that, but the innovation around this tech is also just getting started.

You mean since the 2010's ?

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

#76

Post by glitchc »

I see and I hear:

"Don't be dazzled by AI computer vision's creative charm! Classical computer vision, though less flashy, remains crucial for solving real-world challenges and unleashing computer vision's true potential."

Meant for those in classical computer vision before ML ate the field.

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

#77

Post by sweezyjeezy »

GuB-42 wrote: post #43

Is there a fundamental difference? I mean, the only thing GPT does is predict the next word, which makes it not so different from a compression algorithm. And diffusion models (the image generating stuff) are essentially fancy denoisers. Depending on how you assemble the big building blocks, you get generation or you get prediction.

Depends how far you take the word 'fundamental', on the one hand yeah most DL systems are trying to predict something, and they generally have some concept of compression built in. But in terms of the steps to curate a dataset, train, test, iterate and actually use the model for a given end goal - they are pretty fundamentally different.

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

#78

Post by glitchc »

nico wrote: post #45
seydor wrote: post #16

I m not sure it's overrated, but the concerns are very real. We love the model because it speaks our language as if it's "one of us", but this may be deceiving, and the complete lack of model for truth is disturbing. Making silly poems is fun but the real uses are in medicine and biology, fields that are so complex that they are probably impenetrable to the human mind. Can Reinforcement learning alone create a model…

> 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…

Our senses lie to us all the time. What we perceive may have strong to almost no correlation to reality. Can you see in the ultraviolet? No human can. Flowers look completely different. Same goes for sounds and smells.
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