3 ms·

Every day I see one or two new thought pieces on how AI is not actually good/capable/impressive or how AI is overhyped. I have seen zero thought pieces on how

Every day I see one or two new thought pieces on how AI is not actually good/capable/impressive or how AI is overhyped. I have seen zero thought pieces on how AI is amazing and hyped. Meanwhile a lot of people are having fun with, or doing useful things with, StableDiffusion and ChatGPT. The negative takes are mostly correct in all the limitations they talk about, but what they miss is how amazing these things are despite these limitations. These things are remarkably simple and limited yet they can generate realistic photos of myself in places I've never been, wearing clothes I've never worn, doing things I've never done, with a quick text sentence. Or nearly pass the bar exam. On top of that a lot of the limitations have straightforward ways to address, many of which are already in progress. It is going to get really interesting. StableDiffusion knows nothing about the images it is produces, its just repeated denoising with image targets. It doesn't really understand anything about your text either, its just matching up tags. But both of those things can easily change. Put a big language model in front of it to better understand text. Already variants of these image models have depth information. Next up 3d object information, maybe next models of physics so it can understand how things would actually work in the scene, and so on. going to get wild.

arcturus17 4y ago
> but what they miss is how amazing these things are despite these limitations The author of this Twitter thread is François Chollet, Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google, creator of Keras and major contributor to TensorFlow, and author of Deep Learning in Python, considered by many a seminal book in introductory DL... I'd say he understands how amazing these things are despite the limitations, and he specifically says in the thread that it's an amazing time to be building DL apps.
- logicchains 4y ago
  >The author of this Twitter thread is François Chollet, Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google, creator of Keras and major contributor to TensorFlow, and author of Deep Learning by Python, considered by many a seminal book in introductory DL... That sounds like someone who's great at API design, not a deep learning researcher.
  - arcturus17 4y ago
    > That sounds like someone who's great at API design, not a deep learning researcher. Your point being, that a data science researcher or an academic would be better positioned to speak about DL products than one of the driving forces of two of the most widely used ML/DL libraries in the world, and an author of a seminal book on DL applications?
Jensson 4y ago
> I have seen zero thought pieces on how AI is amazing and hyped. You didn't see this one? There are many more, but I remembered this one. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34086462 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34086462
- jackmott42 4y ago
  You know, I did. Thanks for pointing that out.
dcolkitt 4y ago
Don’t think anybody doubts that the current achievements are intellectually impressive. The issue for VCs is how valuable are they from a business perspective. Creating photos of people in places they’ve never been is really cool, but realistically how much money will people actually pay for that? For AI to be as valuable as current rounds are implying it has to actually be capable of replacing your lawyer, your accountant, your software engineer. ChatGPT is nowhere near accurate enough to do that. It’s the same issue we ran into with super cruise control versus fully autonomous driving. Or speech recognition. Early progress was fast. Last mile in AI is always brutal. Maybe there’s some argument to say ChatGPT won’t replace your lawyer or software engineer but will make them 20% more efficient. Possible. Though I’m still skeptical. ChatGPT’s unparalleled ability to create really convincing sounding errors is a big hidden negative productivity drag.

arcturus17 4y ago

> but what they miss is how amazing these things are despite these limitations The author of this Twitter thread is François Chollet, Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google, creator of Keras and major contributor to TensorFlow, and author of Deep Learning in Python, considered by many a seminal book in introductory DL... I'd say he understands how amazing these things are despite the limitations, and he specifically says in the thread that it's an amazing time to be building DL apps.

logicchains 4y ago
>The author of this Twitter thread is François Chollet, Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google, creator of Keras and major contributor to TensorFlow, and author of Deep Learning by Python, considered by many a seminal book in introductory DL... That sounds like someone who's great at API design, not a deep learning researcher.
- arcturus17 4y ago
  > That sounds like someone who's great at API design, not a deep learning researcher. Your point being, that a data science researcher or an academic would be better positioned to speak about DL products than one of the driving forces of two of the most widely used ML/DL libraries in the world, and an author of a seminal book on DL applications?

Jensson 4y ago

> I have seen zero thought pieces on how AI is amazing and hyped. You didn't see this one? There are many more, but I remembered this one. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34086462 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34086462

jackmott42 4y ago
You know, I did. Thanks for pointing that out.

dcolkitt 4y ago

Don’t think anybody doubts that the current achievements are intellectually impressive. The issue for VCs is how valuable are they from a business perspective. Creating photos of people in places they’ve never been is really cool, but realistically how much money will people actually pay for that? For AI to be as valuable as current rounds are implying it has to actually be capable of replacing your lawyer, your accountant, your software engineer. ChatGPT is nowhere near accurate enough to do that. It’s the same issue we ran into with super cruise control versus fully autonomous driving. Or speech recognition. Early progress was fast. Last mile in AI is always brutal. Maybe there’s some argument to say ChatGPT won’t replace your lawyer or software engineer but will make them 20% more efficient. Possible. Though I’m still skeptical. ChatGPT’s unparalleled ability to create really convincing sounding errors is a big hidden negative productivity drag.