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Does anyone else feel like most of this AI buzz is destined to go the way of voice recognition? When that tech was new it was paraded around like gods gift to m

Does anyone else feel like most of this AI buzz is destined to go the way of voice recognition? When that tech was new it was paraded around like gods gift to man, but when the high wore off we realized it was just a very shitty button that sometimes did the thing when you pressed it. ChatGPT wordage is okay at informing you I guess. It's extremely verbose, and kind of answers some questions, but using a proper search engine and applying my own critical thinking to get results feels so much better-- the same way it feels so much better to just use your phone/computer vs a voice assistant. Tech is cool though so it's fun to watch

echelon 4y ago
No, we've stumbled across the next industrial revolution and perhaps the next step function evolution of our species (or whatever comes after, "alignment" folks be damned). I've been bearish about so much. Pointless crypto, tech being cellphone incrementalism, slow speed of basic science, etc. I'm using this tech to make so much stuff that I could never produce before. It's incredible. Take my judgment with a grain of salt. I'm in the thick of it and building in the space. That said, never have I ever been so excited. The statement that tech eats the world? We'll, AI eats tech. And us. I feel like everything has led to this.
- oxfordmale 4y ago
  No this is not yet the next industrial evolution. ChatGPT is still at the beginning of its hype curve. It is amazing, however, it is just a language model. It can't reason, just regurgitate.
  - echelon 4y ago
    Shortbets 24 months. Looking at LLMs is also not seeing the forest of Tacotron, neural vocoders, acoustic models, Stable Diffusion, NeRFs... This is snowballing so fast.
    - Xelynega 4y ago
      All of those examples have the exact same limitation, they can't replace processes that create novel ideas since they're statistical recombinations of existing ones.
      - dwaltrip 4y ago
        That's not a fleshed out argument. Why do you believe that "statistical combinations" can't create novel ideas?
        MagicMoonlight 4y ago
        Because it has no mechanism for creating novel ideas... It's like saying a calculator could spontaneously derive its own proof. No it can't, because it has no ability to do that. It physically does not have a way to create new ideas. It cannot reshape its own circuitry like a brain and it does not have spontaneous thoughts.
        mashygpig 4y ago
        How do humans come up with novel ideas?
        sanroot98 4y ago
        First we need to define ,what creativity and intelligence means ,so we can compare that with human results
        dwaltrip 4y ago
        I hear what you are saying, but I'm not convinced. Can you dig a bit deeper? What makes an idea "novel"? What types of physical processes can create new ideas or have spontaneous thoughts, and which can't? What is "special" about brains, in your view? I'm looking for some meat on the bone here.
        Sparyjerry 4y ago
  - kirso 4y ago
    Pretty much this. LLMs are still limited, perhaps by design but it is so. I recently summarised an article by Maggie Appleton on some of the shortcomings of the model and the implication here: https://twitter.com/kirso_/status/1610849402557722625 https://twitter.com/kirso_/status/1610849402557722625 disclaimer: I am not the author of the original article. Several examples: - Language models cannot reason, consult external sources, or sense the world as we can. They also lack access to a shared reality, embodied experiences, and the ability to tell stories grounded in culture, such as referencing obscure concepts or interests. - Current LLMs fall short due to recycled ideas, unoriginal explanations and not having an opinion. Excellence in writing (and thus thinking) requires a greater sense of critical reasoning, scepticism and going beyond the status quo and comfort. EDIT: a few examples added.
- GravitasFailure 4y ago
  I'm curious how you see the current spate of AI/ML leading to an industrial revolution and what that revolution would look like to you.
  - cypress66 4y ago
    Not him, but machines/AI operated by a few persons could do the job of hundreds before. That's the similarity.
    - GravitasFailure 4y ago
      The reason why I was asking is I've seen claims thrown around a lot about automation revolutionizing manufacturing, but that revolution has already been underway for eight decades with notable companies moving away from from it because humans are several orders of magnitude more versatile than any machine. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of room for improvement to make machinery smarter, but I'm just not seeing anything like an industrial revolution coming because of it.
      - cypress66 4y ago
        I don't mean for physical jobs, but for jobs that could be done remotely/through zoom. Like programmers, lawyers, digital artists, and so on.
- agentwiggles 4y ago
  I'm pretty bullish on it too. I'm not sure it's the next industrial revolution, or at least not yet, but the utility of it while working on my current project has been huge. It's not anywhere near the point where it can write the app for me, and it has a bad habit of being confidently wrong. But I've been able to use it extremely effectively to cut down on the amount of time it's taking me to learn new things as I build. I'm a fan, and hope that the next iteration feels like another leap the same way ChatGPT does from GPT3.
  - CuriouslyC 4y ago
    ChatGPT/Stable Diffusion are like the Newcomen engine of our time. It took 100 years for the world to see what the Newcomen engine promised, but I think we'll see it in 30. AI is going to totally reshape content creation - what it means to be a creator is going to be completely different for the next generation.
- corytheboyd 4y ago
  For the record I'm not downvoting you, I was legitimately curious to hear some differing opinions. What is an example of something you built with AI that couldn't have been built without it? I'm still skeptical, but curious :)
  - echelon 4y ago
    FakeYou.com is my "pandemic project" that lept to millions of users. People make music and memes with it. It's at the low end of creation, but still provides value. We've built voice conversion and singer vocalist conversion. We solved the real time case first, ironically, and are waiting to finish the web version (bigger reach/audience/impact) to launch them together. It'll be about a week longer. You can turn Taylor Swift songs into Freddy Mercury songs. It's wild. (You can also do this with your own voice!) We're going to lean heavy into music production for non experts. Stems, instrumental generation, full synthesis, virtual bands. But the great thing is that I'm a filmmaker. I have another subteam working on mocap, NeRFs (previously live photogrammetry in unreal), and LLMs. We have something really special launching here soon too. Find my Twitch channel. :) 100% of this feels new to the world. And it's building like a tsunami.
- rattray 4y ago
  interesting! what are you making with it?
version_five 4y ago
Yes the hype cycle has had gasoline poured on it (to mix metaphors). AI hype already came and went and it seemed like we were settling in to the "plateau of productivity" where we'd get some post hype applications. Now all that's been blown up and we're right back to the overblown "it's the next electricity" stuff. I think expectations are going to get deflated a lot faster this time, given how quick the rise was. I mean, doesn't being a Bing feature pretty much speak for itself
- Hoasi 4y ago
  > I mean, doesn't being a Bing feature pretty much speak for itself It does if we are being honest. But that's not taking away the immense potential of these new tools and models.
goertzen 4y ago
This time is different for two reasons: 1) It actually works 2) people are paying for it And that is with the handicapped version (sandboxed and no wallet attached). Once you can give these systems web access and a wallet we’ll see the full size of the wave.
- mike_hearn 4y ago
  People paid for voice recognition, and it did kinda work back circa ~2000, it just wasn't as good as it is today. So is that a rebuttal?
tony2016 4y ago
No. Voice recognition is useless for me. Why talk to a computer when it makes mistakes getting correctly everything I say. Imagine an office were everyone is talking to their computer. It's noisy and silly. With ChatGPT where it finds answers where a normal Google search is not very helpful, I find ChatGPT very helpful. I pasted some code I didn't understand to it and it explained to me what it does. That was very cool. Google would not have been able to help me.

echelon 4y ago

No, we've stumbled across the next industrial revolution and perhaps the next step function evolution of our species (or whatever comes after, "alignment" folks be damned). I've been bearish about so much. Pointless crypto, tech being cellphone incrementalism, slow speed of basic science, etc. I'm using this tech to make so much stuff that I could never produce before. It's incredible. Take my judgment with a grain of salt. I'm in the thick of it and building in the space. That said, never have I ever been so excited. The statement that tech eats the world? We'll, AI eats tech. And us. I feel like everything has led to this.

oxfordmale 4y ago
No this is not yet the next industrial evolution. ChatGPT is still at the beginning of its hype curve. It is amazing, however, it is just a language model. It can't reason, just regurgitate.
- echelon 4y ago
  Shortbets 24 months. Looking at LLMs is also not seeing the forest of Tacotron, neural vocoders, acoustic models, Stable Diffusion, NeRFs... This is snowballing so fast.
  - Xelynega 4y ago
    All of those examples have the exact same limitation, they can't replace processes that create novel ideas since they're statistical recombinations of existing ones.
    - dwaltrip 4y ago
      That's not a fleshed out argument. Why do you believe that "statistical combinations" can't create novel ideas?
      - MagicMoonlight 4y ago
        Because it has no mechanism for creating novel ideas... It's like saying a calculator could spontaneously derive its own proof. No it can't, because it has no ability to do that. It physically does not have a way to create new ideas. It cannot reshape its own circuitry like a brain and it does not have spontaneous thoughts.
        mashygpig 4y ago
        How do humans come up with novel ideas?
        sanroot98 4y ago
        First we need to define ,what creativity and intelligence means ,so we can compare that with human results
        dwaltrip 4y ago
        I hear what you are saying, but I'm not convinced. Can you dig a bit deeper? What makes an idea "novel"? What types of physical processes can create new ideas or have spontaneous thoughts, and which can't? What is "special" about brains, in your view? I'm looking for some meat on the bone here.
        Sparyjerry 4y ago
- kirso 4y ago
  Pretty much this. LLMs are still limited, perhaps by design but it is so. I recently summarised an article by Maggie Appleton on some of the shortcomings of the model and the implication here: https://twitter.com/kirso_/status/1610849402557722625 https://twitter.com/kirso_/status/1610849402557722625 disclaimer: I am not the author of the original article. Several examples: - Language models cannot reason, consult external sources, or sense the world as we can. They also lack access to a shared reality, embodied experiences, and the ability to tell stories grounded in culture, such as referencing obscure concepts or interests. - Current LLMs fall short due to recycled ideas, unoriginal explanations and not having an opinion. Excellence in writing (and thus thinking) requires a greater sense of critical reasoning, scepticism and going beyond the status quo and comfort. EDIT: a few examples added.
GravitasFailure 4y ago
I'm curious how you see the current spate of AI/ML leading to an industrial revolution and what that revolution would look like to you.
- cypress66 4y ago
  Not him, but machines/AI operated by a few persons could do the job of hundreds before. That's the similarity.
  - GravitasFailure 4y ago
    The reason why I was asking is I've seen claims thrown around a lot about automation revolutionizing manufacturing, but that revolution has already been underway for eight decades with notable companies moving away from from it because humans are several orders of magnitude more versatile than any machine. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of room for improvement to make machinery smarter, but I'm just not seeing anything like an industrial revolution coming because of it.
    - cypress66 4y ago
      I don't mean for physical jobs, but for jobs that could be done remotely/through zoom. Like programmers, lawyers, digital artists, and so on.
agentwiggles 4y ago
I'm pretty bullish on it too. I'm not sure it's the next industrial revolution, or at least not yet, but the utility of it while working on my current project has been huge. It's not anywhere near the point where it can write the app for me, and it has a bad habit of being confidently wrong. But I've been able to use it extremely effectively to cut down on the amount of time it's taking me to learn new things as I build. I'm a fan, and hope that the next iteration feels like another leap the same way ChatGPT does from GPT3.
- CuriouslyC 4y ago
  ChatGPT/Stable Diffusion are like the Newcomen engine of our time. It took 100 years for the world to see what the Newcomen engine promised, but I think we'll see it in 30. AI is going to totally reshape content creation - what it means to be a creator is going to be completely different for the next generation.
corytheboyd 4y ago
For the record I'm not downvoting you, I was legitimately curious to hear some differing opinions. What is an example of something you built with AI that couldn't have been built without it? I'm still skeptical, but curious :)
- echelon 4y ago
  FakeYou.com is my "pandemic project" that lept to millions of users. People make music and memes with it. It's at the low end of creation, but still provides value. We've built voice conversion and singer vocalist conversion. We solved the real time case first, ironically, and are waiting to finish the web version (bigger reach/audience/impact) to launch them together. It'll be about a week longer. You can turn Taylor Swift songs into Freddy Mercury songs. It's wild. (You can also do this with your own voice!) We're going to lean heavy into music production for non experts. Stems, instrumental generation, full synthesis, virtual bands. But the great thing is that I'm a filmmaker. I have another subteam working on mocap, NeRFs (previously live photogrammetry in unreal), and LLMs. We have something really special launching here soon too. Find my Twitch channel. :) 100% of this feels new to the world. And it's building like a tsunami.
rattray 4y ago
interesting! what are you making with it?

version_five 4y ago

Yes the hype cycle has had gasoline poured on it (to mix metaphors). AI hype already came and went and it seemed like we were settling in to the "plateau of productivity" where we'd get some post hype applications. Now all that's been blown up and we're right back to the overblown "it's the next electricity" stuff. I think expectations are going to get deflated a lot faster this time, given how quick the rise was. I mean, doesn't being a Bing feature pretty much speak for itself

Hoasi 4y ago
> I mean, doesn't being a Bing feature pretty much speak for itself It does if we are being honest. But that's not taking away the immense potential of these new tools and models.

goertzen 4y ago

This time is different for two reasons: 1) It actually works 2) people are paying for it And that is with the handicapped version (sandboxed and no wallet attached). Once you can give these systems web access and a wallet we’ll see the full size of the wave.

mike_hearn 4y ago
People paid for voice recognition, and it did kinda work back circa ~2000, it just wasn't as good as it is today. So is that a rebuttal?

tony2016 4y ago

No. Voice recognition is useless for me. Why talk to a computer when it makes mistakes getting correctly everything I say. Imagine an office were everyone is talking to their computer. It's noisy and silly. With ChatGPT where it finds answers where a normal Google search is not very helpful, I find ChatGPT very helpful. I pasted some code I didn't understand to it and it explained to me what it does. That was very cool. Google would not have been able to help me.