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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?

#91

Post by bee_rider »

legacynl wrote: post #86
olddustytrail wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs aren't monolingual so you might want to expand that beyond English. Consider how multilingual people think. Also, apparently it's pretty common for people to think in words and have an internal monologue. I hadn't realized this was a thing until recently but it seems many people don't think abstractly as you've described.

There have been psychological experiments that have shown what OP experiences. In this particular experiment subjects were asked to make a series of arbitrary choices between 2 items, while being hooked up to some brain scanning equipment. Subjects were asked to think about it for 5 seconds before making the choice. The experiment showed that scientists were able to predict the choice before the subjects consciously…

5 seconds is an interesting amount of time. I think we all can simulate an argument in our heads, and it could even convince us. But, that takes time. 5 seconds seems like just enough time to result a thought into words.

I wonder if they could plot the mind-changing process resulting from that sort of argument. If that is what even happens.

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

#92

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#93

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#94

Post by variadix »

9rx wrote: post #55
rossdavidh wrote: post #15

What happens is they go out of business: "these firms spent five hundred and sixty billion dollars on A.I.-related capital expenditures in the past eighteen months, while their A.I. revenues were only about thirty-five billion." DeepSeek (and the like) will prevent the kind of price increases necessary for them to pay back hundreds of billions of dollars already spent, much less pay for more. If they don't find a way…

> If they don't find a way to make LLMs do significantly more than they do thus far... They only need two things, really: A large user base and a way to include advertising in the responses. The market willing to pay hundreds of billions of dollars will soon follow. The businesses are currently in the user base building stage. Hemorrhaging money to get them is simply the cost of doing business. Once they feel that is…

I don’t see how advertising is going to work with agents, especially if they’re being used by companies to replace or supplement jobs. Am I going to have comments in my code with ads for McDonalds? Will the AI support agent start trying to sell me a VPN?

I don’t think any of these AI companies can justify their expenses without meaningfully automating a significant amount of white collar work, which is yet to happen.

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

#95

Post by tempodox »

9rx wrote: post #73
benterix wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Stack Overflow wasn't bringing in hundreds of billions in revenue

Neither do LLMs. Instead, they cost hundreds of billions. Whether those investments can ever be recovered is still an unanswered question.

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

#96

Post by tim333 »

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.

The title annoys me more because if doesn't mention anything about time. AI will almost certainly get a good bit better eventually. The questions will it in the next couple of years or will we have to wait for some breakthrough.

I'm amused they seem to refer to Marcus and Zitron as "these moderate views of A.I". They are both pretty much professional skeptics who seem to fill their days writing AI is rubbish articles.

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

#97

Post by 9rx »

tempodox wrote: post #95
9rx wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Stack Overflow wasn't bringing in hundreds of billions in revenue Neither do LLMs. Instead, they cost hundreds of billions. Whether those investments can ever be recovered is still an unanswered question.

> Neither do LLMs.

Not yet. Of course, if you had read the thread you'd know that LLM businesses are trying to see if they can capture Facebook-scale/beyond user bases in order to serve ads to them at Facebook-scale/beyond.

> Whether those investments can ever be recovered is still an unanswered question.

Yes, that's the question we are discussing. Welcome to many comments ago.

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

#98

Post by cloverich »

mgfist wrote: post #26
rossdavidh wrote: post #15

What happens is they go out of business: "these firms spent five hundred and sixty billion dollars on A.I.-related capital expenditures in the past eighteen months, while their A.I. revenues were only about thirty-five billion." DeepSeek (and the like) will prevent the kind of price increases necessary for them to pay back hundreds of billions of dollars already spent, much less pay for more. If they don't find a way…

DeepSeek is also undercutting itself. No one is making a profit here, everyone is trying to gobble market share. Even if you have the best model and don't care to make a dime, inference is very expensive.

I'm not familiar with the actual strategy, but one strategy of something like DeepSeek or any open model could be, roughly, to avoid moat creation by other companies. E.g. one reason Google maintained dominance for so long is they simply paid off every smart person and company that might build competitors.

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

#99

Post by 9rx »

variadix wrote: post #94
9rx wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If they don't find a way to make LLMs do significantly more than they do thus far... They only need two things, really: A large user base and a way to include advertising in the responses. The market willing to pay hundreds of billions of dollars will soon follow. The businesses are currently in the user base building stage. Hemorrhaging money to get them is simply the cost of doing business. Once they feel that is…

I don’t see how advertising is going to work with agents, especially if they’re being used by companies to replace or supplement jobs. Am I going to have comments in my code with ads for McDonalds? Will the AI support agent start trying to sell me a VPN? I don’t think any of these AI companies can justify their expenses without meaningfully automating a significant amount of white collar work, which is yet to happen.

> I don’t think any of these AI companies can justify their expenses without meaningfully automating a significant amount of white collar work

The businesses in question are building chatbots, not trying to automate jobs. Their primary goal at this stage is to get legions of people hooked on chatting with their service on a regular basis. Once (if) they have succeeded with that, then they can move on to step two.

> Am I going to have comments in my code with ads for McDonalds?

"Give me a function which stores a supplied string to a file in $HOME." -> "I have updated your code with said function. It [...] Have you considered storing the file on Amazon S3 for additional robustness and reliability?"

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

#100

Post by KevinMS »

I always expect things like this to eventually deliver about 90% of what they promise, which turns out to be 100% for some niche uses, and for the rest it just gets abandoned because 90% isn't good enough. Like when voice recognition became super hyped in the late 90's, it was going to change how the world interacts with machines, and eventually it turned into "Hey Siri"
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