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What if A.I. doesn't get better than this?

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Re: What if A.I. doesn't get better than this?

#71

Post by AtlasBarfed »

k__ wrote: post #44

Good question. In the one side I read stuff about exponential gains with every new model. On the other side, the coding improvements look logarithmic to me.

Which to me means, what's the Big o of this entire venture?

Ultimately, what they need to do is add nines of reliability. I guess I could argue that what they are producing now is like two nines: 99% accuracy.

Of course, that depends on how you measure it and yada yada yada. So for things like self-driving, I could see how people could argue that the accuracy rate is 99.9% on a minute by minute basis.

But how many nines do you need? Especially for self-driving five more? What's the computational cost to achieve that? Is it just five times? Is it 25 times? Is it two to the five power?

Re: What if A.I. doesn't get better than this?

#72

Post by microtonal »

9rx wrote: post #65
tempodox wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's nothing new. The question is, will those users be willing and able to pay ten times as much or more for those same services they get for a significant discount now.

Will they pay ten times more for a Big Mac? Probably not, but why would they need to? Hundreds of billions is Facebook's revenue. The businesses in this space are there if they can take those customers alone, never mind all the other places where advertising takes place. The market exists, is sufficiently large, and willing to spend. All these "AI" businesses need to do is show that the users are spending time on the…

The world is not a zero-sum game, but I don't think it's likely that companies will double their advertising. So either Google, Meta, etc. will lose the AI game and most of the advertising revenue will shift to different companies or Google, Meta, etc. win and they get to keep their advertising income.

I don't see how suddenly hundreds of billions of additional ad revenue will appear.

I think some of AI companies truly wanted to make a fortune replacing all white collar workers through model exclusivity, but that open models (initially Llama and then a sequence of really good Chinese models) threw a wrench in the cogs. There is not as much you can make anymore if everyone can host their own 'workers' near cost price.

Re: What if A.I. doesn't get better than this?

#73

Post by 9rx »

benterix wrote: post #69
9rx wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will they pay ten times more for a Big Mac? Probably not, but why would they need to? Hundreds of billions is Facebook's revenue. The businesses in this space are there if they can take those customers alone, never mind all the other places where advertising takes place. The market exists, is sufficiently large, and willing to spend. All these "AI" businesses need to do is show that the users are spending time on the…

> The question is really only: Will users actually want to continue to use these services once the novelty wears off? The assumption is that they are useful enough to become an integral part of our lives, but time will tell... But LLMs do have some niche, stable applications already. For example, they replaced Stack Overflow to a large extent, because you can get the answer you need faster, and it's often better adap…

Stack Overflow wasn't bringing in hundreds of billions in revenue and never could have hoped to. A niche won't cut it.

I mean, should it all come crashing down and once the dust settles there is no doubt room for a niche service to rise from the ashes. Many have predicted exactly that AI will have its own "dark fibre" moment. But the current crop of providers seeking "world domination" won't survive if they can only carve out a SO-style niche.

Re: What if A.I. doesn't get better than this?

#74

Post by kbelder »

bbqfog wrote: post #9

AI is so new and so powerful, that we don't really know how to use it yet. The next step is orchestration. LLMs are already powerful but they need to be scaled horizontally. "One shotting" something with a single call to an LLM should never be expected to work. That's not how the human brain works. We iterate, we collaborate with others, we reflect... We've already unlocked the hard and "mysterious" part, now we just…

I think that's it. Even if there were no improvements with LLMs as they exist today, the integration and usage can still be vastly improved. Right now, we don't have multiple LLM-aware systems communicating, with a standardized information repository.

Right now we have the technology to have an AI observe a room, count the people in it, see what they're doing, observe their mood, and set the lighting to the appropriate level. We just don't have all the sensors and integrations and protocols to manage that. The LLM interfaces with email, your bank, your phone, etc., is crude and clunky. So much more could be done with the LLMs we have now.

(And just to be clear, most of those integrations sound horrible and dystopian. But they're examples.)

Re: What if A.I. doesn't get better than this?

#75

Post by 9rx »

microtonal wrote: post #72
9rx wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will they pay ten times more for a Big Mac? Probably not, but why would they need to? Hundreds of billions is Facebook's revenue. The businesses in this space are there if they can take those customers alone, never mind all the other places where advertising takes place. The market exists, is sufficiently large, and willing to spend. All these "AI" businesses need to do is show that the users are spending time on the…

The world is not a zero-sum game, but I don't think it's likely that companies will double their advertising. So either Google, Meta, etc. will lose the AI game and most of the advertising revenue will shift to different companies or Google, Meta, etc. win and they get to keep their advertising income. I don't see how suddenly hundreds of billions of additional ad revenue will appear. I think some of AI companies tru…

> So either Google, Meta, etc. will lose the AI game

They might lose entirely (search, social media, etc.) if users are more likely to direct their eyeballs to "AI" services. And that isn't an impossible scenario. What do you need traditional web search, stupid internet comments, etc. for when an LLM will generate all that and more immediately at your behest? The newspaper companies lost when other forms of media came along. "AI" could easily push things the same way.

But the businesses are still trying to prove that. It is still early days. Only time will tell if they will actually get the aforementioned user base.

Re: What if A.I. doesn't get better than this?

#76

Post by benterix »

noboostforyou wrote: post #61
supriyo-biswas wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Back then people were happy if they got models to write a small simple function and it worked. Now they expect models to manipulate large production codebases and get it right first time. This push is mostly coming from the C-level and the hustler types, both of which need this to work out in order for their employeeless corporation fantasy to work out.

> This push is mostly coming from the C-level and the hustler types, both of which need this to work out in order for their employeeless corporation fantasy to work out. The irony, at least in my mind, is that C-level hustler types are exactly the perfect role to be replaced by "AI" for big cost-savings. For obvious reasons, it won't happen.

Frankly, I'm not sure if LLM would be the best replacement. Given they need to make decisions, I'd say ensemble methods could work better, at least in scenarios where you can actually perform reliable simulations (e.g. production, but not necessarily marketing). LLMs tend to averages whereas what shareholders want is to optimize for X, where X is usually, but not necessarily, net profit.

(It would be a fun experiment to create such an optimization startup and advertise it to boards as "AI-CEO-as-a-service" and watch the faces of these CEOs pushing for AI in workplace. Maybe they would start having a more nuanced view.)

Re: What if A.I. doesn't get better than this?

#77

Post by microtonal »

k__ wrote: post #44

Good question. In the one side I read stuff about exponential gains with every new model. On the other side, the coding improvements look logarithmic to me.

That's completely possible if the development of LLMs follow an S-curve (sigmoidal). At the beginning of the curve it will look exponential, then linear, and finally logarithmic. For different tasks, LLMs could be on different points on the curve, which would explain why some people perceive the improvements as exponential and others perceive them as logarithmic - they are simply working on different things and so experience different gradients.

Re: What if A.I. doesn't get better than this?

#79

Post by IAmGraydon »

DanHulton wrote: post #11
brainwipe wrote: post #8

The title is irritating, conflating AI with LLMs. LLMs are a subset of AI. I expect future systems will be mobs of expert AI agents rather than relying on LLMs to do everything. An LLM will likely be in the mix for at least the natural language processing but I wouldn't bet the farm on them alone.

That battle was long-ago lost when the leading LLM companies and organizations insisted on referring to their products and models solely as "AI", not the more-specific "LLMs". Implementers of that technology followed suit, and that's just what it means now. You can't blame the New Yorker for using the term in its modern, common parlance.

This is something I immediately noticed when ChatGPT first released. It was instantly called "AI", but previous to that, HN would have been up in arms that it's "machine learning" not actual intelligence. For some reason, the crowd here and everywhere else just accepted the misuse of the word intelligence and let it happen. Elsewhere I can understand, but people here know better.

Intentionally misconstruing it as actual intelligence was all a part of the grift from the beginning. They've always known there's no intelligence behind the scenes, but pushing this lie has allowed them to take in hundreds of billions in investor money. Perhaps the biggest grift the world has ever seen.

Re: What if A.I. doesn't get better than this?

#80

Post by microtonal »

9rx wrote: post #75
microtonal wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world is not a zero-sum game, but I don't think it's likely that companies will double their advertising. So either Google, Meta, etc. will lose the AI game and most of the advertising revenue will shift to different companies or Google, Meta, etc. win and they get to keep their advertising income. I don't see how suddenly hundreds of billions of additional ad revenue will appear. I think some of AI companies tru…

> So either Google, Meta, etc. will lose the AI game They might lose entirely (search, social media, etc.) if users are more likely to direct their eyeballs to "AI" services. And that isn't an impossible scenario. What do you need traditional web search, stupid internet comments, etc. for when an LLM will generate all that and more immediately at your behest? The newspaper companies lost when other forms of media cam…

They might lose entirely (search, social media, etc.) if users are more likely to direct their eyeballs to "AI" services.

Sorry that I wasn't clear enough. That was what I was trying to imply - in that case the ad purchases that currently go to Google etc. will go to a new AI company. This is why both Google is investing so heavily in LLMs, they know that LLMs can kill search + website visits and thus cause them to lose their ad income.

But either way, it's questionable if it will increase all ad spending. So either AI companies collapse and a lot of VC money is burned or Google et al. collapse and a lot capital is burned (pension funds and whatnot).

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