6 ms·

I'm calling you out: you're being edgy for the sake of being edgy by saying it's grift.

by saiojd 4y ago

dvt 4y ago
Crypto was pushed by crypto bros and their VC funders, and now AI is being pushed by AI bros and their VC funders (probably the same group). I think there's a lot more overlap than you're giving it credit for.
- polygamous_bat 4y ago
  > AI is being pushed by AI bros and their VC funders There is a large class of AI researchers who have been working on this problem for decades (and I am one of them). What you see right now is the tip of the iceberg. Compared to that, crypto was invented by an anonymous dude in some random forum. Remember that what you see in the surface is not all there is, and thinking so is a very shallow interpretation of things.
  - roncesvalles 4y ago
    >What you see right now is the tip of the iceberg. This piqued my interest. What more can we expect to see than what's already available for the public to use?
  - YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
    >> There is a large class of AI researchers who have been working on this problem for decades (and I am one of them). Which problem is that? It's not clear from the context and I don't want to make uninformed assumptions. It is true that many people have worked on problems like language understanding, language modelling and language generation for many years. It is also true that most people who are today so excited about large language models don't know anything about all those years of research. My experience is that, at some point, there was a switch from computational linguistics (i.e. doing linguistics with the help of computers) to statistical natural language processing (i.e. trying to represent language with statistics). The idea behind the switch was that understanding human language, its mechanisms, its origins, and so on, is too hard, and we can make a lot of progress if we stop trying to do all that, and instead turn to learning statistics from large corpora (cf. "every time I fire a linguist..."). Of course, without good understanding of what language is, and how it works, it is very difficult to evaluate such progress, but the answer to that was obviously to establish new metrics, and then try to maximise performance according to those metrics; metrics such as BLEU or ROUGE and friends, that are suspiciously like the kind of metric that one would choose if one wanted to measure progress as the ability to learn statistics from a large corpus. So it's true to say that many people have worked on all sorts of problems to do with natural language and AI, but I'm still left wondering exactly what you mean by "this problem". For me the problem is that an entire field of research ("NLP") abandoned the search for answers to interesting scientific questions and turned instead to the production of toys, and to spectacle, presumably because that's where the money is and researchers must also pay them bills. And so now we have large language models that are better at reproducing language than earlier models, but we don't have the tools to evaluate or understand those models; and so people who aren't experts, but also people who are experts, can't separate the wheat from the chaff, and keep coming up with wild, senseless proclamations that could well have been generated by a language model themselves.
Vt71fcAqt7 4y ago
Yeah, it's pretty difficult to call call cutting edge research that requires a math degree a "grift". If that's a grift, what isn't a grift? I feel like this word has lost all meaning to the extent that it had any to begin with.
kodah 4y ago
You could've just looked in my post history, but I'm guessing "calling me out" was more important to you than any actual determination of the veracity of my argument. It's not the first time I've called it a grift or the last time that I will. As for the edginess of what I said, if you take it in the context of money-making and society-affecting use cases it is a nothing burger. Maybe you would have preferred if I highlighted the use cases for fantasy RPG or story telling in general. The grift is in the people trying to push this into things like search and customer support before they can figure out how to make it stick to truths, which makes the energy waste and dollars spent become a very deep trench to defend.
- saiojd 4y ago
  What frustrated me with your post was not the argument itself but the sentence "it's fascinating to see the support that this grift has gotten" which feels like flamebait (sorry, I can see how that was not clear).

I'm calling you out: you're being edgy for the sake of being edgy by saying it's grift.

by saiojd 4y ago

I'm calling you out: you're being edgy for the sake of being edgy by saying it's grift.

dvt 4y ago

Crypto was pushed by crypto bros and their VC funders, and now AI is being pushed by AI bros and their VC funders (probably the same group). I think there's a lot more overlap than you're giving it credit for.

polygamous_bat 4y ago
> AI is being pushed by AI bros and their VC funders There is a large class of AI researchers who have been working on this problem for decades (and I am one of them). What you see right now is the tip of the iceberg. Compared to that, crypto was invented by an anonymous dude in some random forum. Remember that what you see in the surface is not all there is, and thinking so is a very shallow interpretation of things.
- roncesvalles 4y ago
  >What you see right now is the tip of the iceberg. This piqued my interest. What more can we expect to see than what's already available for the public to use?
- YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
  >> There is a large class of AI researchers who have been working on this problem for decades (and I am one of them). Which problem is that? It's not clear from the context and I don't want to make uninformed assumptions. It is true that many people have worked on problems like language understanding, language modelling and language generation for many years. It is also true that most people who are today so excited about large language models don't know anything about all those years of research. My experience is that, at some point, there was a switch from computational linguistics (i.e. doing linguistics with the help of computers) to statistical natural language processing (i.e. trying to represent language with statistics). The idea behind the switch was that understanding human language, its mechanisms, its origins, and so on, is too hard, and we can make a lot of progress if we stop trying to do all that, and instead turn to learning statistics from large corpora (cf. "every time I fire a linguist..."). Of course, without good understanding of what language is, and how it works, it is very difficult to evaluate such progress, but the answer to that was obviously to establish new metrics, and then try to maximise performance according to those metrics; metrics such as BLEU or ROUGE and friends, that are suspiciously like the kind of metric that one would choose if one wanted to measure progress as the ability to learn statistics from a large corpus. So it's true to say that many people have worked on all sorts of problems to do with natural language and AI, but I'm still left wondering exactly what you mean by "this problem". For me the problem is that an entire field of research ("NLP") abandoned the search for answers to interesting scientific questions and turned instead to the production of toys, and to spectacle, presumably because that's where the money is and researchers must also pay them bills. And so now we have large language models that are better at reproducing language than earlier models, but we don't have the tools to evaluate or understand those models; and so people who aren't experts, but also people who are experts, can't separate the wheat from the chaff, and keep coming up with wild, senseless proclamations that could well have been generated by a language model themselves.

Vt71fcAqt7 4y ago

Yeah, it's pretty difficult to call call cutting edge research that requires a math degree a "grift". If that's a grift, what isn't a grift? I feel like this word has lost all meaning to the extent that it had any to begin with.

kodah 4y ago

You could've just looked in my post history, but I'm guessing "calling me out" was more important to you than any actual determination of the veracity of my argument. It's not the first time I've called it a grift or the last time that I will. As for the edginess of what I said, if you take it in the context of money-making and society-affecting use cases it is a nothing burger. Maybe you would have preferred if I highlighted the use cases for fantasy RPG or story telling in general. The grift is in the people trying to push this into things like search and customer support before they can figure out how to make it stick to truths, which makes the energy waste and dollars spent become a very deep trench to defend.

saiojd 4y ago
What frustrated me with your post was not the argument itself but the sentence "it's fascinating to see the support that this grift has gotten" which feels like flamebait (sorry, I can see how that was not clear).