4 ms·

Is this how far AI skeptics have moved the line? Interesting.

by ftxbro 4y ago

Retric 4y ago
No, that’s not the line for AI skeptics. As far as I am concerned LLM offer little more than a cool tech demo. They suffer from the same failing that results in AI art often suffering from basic flaws like extra arms. Better fakes aren’t closer to the actual solution they’re simply optimized for a different metric. What seems revolutionary today is going to feel as useless as 3D TV’s once the novelty wares off.
- mdale 4y ago
  Hmm have they not corrected the arm issue ? Won't the technology evolve to tackle it's shortcomings as it always has ? I don't think we complain about digital projection vs film the same way we did 20 years ago ?
  - Retric 4y ago
    Different technology often wins even if it looks like old technology. The early EV’s as in 1900’s where using fundamentally flawed battery chemistry. Simply improving lead acid batteries wasn’t going to work. Similarly GPT45 is likely to have similar fundamental differences from current LLM’s.
- AnthonyMouse 4y ago
  A thing doesn't have to be perfect to be useful. For the same prompt it can generate an arbitrary number of images. Some of them will be useless garbage, but that doesn't matter if you can spend 30 seconds to throw those out and then keep the good one that would have taken someone half a day to produce by hand.
  - Retric 4y ago
    I am specifically objecting to LLM’s rather than art because the output just isn’t useful to me. With art you can discard the output with a glance try again so it’s not a waste of time. With text however you’re stuck carefully checking for errors and there is going to be many many errs. Now most students might not care because the grading is generally lenient, but having say a PHD thesis, resume, or professional work riddled with subtle errors is a more serious problem. I personally just don’t see any real value in low quality output. The time I waste correcting it is longer than just doing it myself and maintaining your reputation is important so doing a poor job on unimportant things isn’t a good long term strategy. If you’re stuck at the level of “fiver” get good is just so much more valuable than get fast.
- tempestn 4y ago
  Tangentially, I enjoy occasionally watching 3d movies at home and am disappointed that new TVs don't come with 3d when they pretty easily could. The glasses-free stuff that's coming is cool though. More substantively, LLMs are useful today, so even if they somehow don't improve at all, they're going to be impactful. In just the few months that we've had chatGPT it's saved me countless hours in work and even personal tasks, and I can see various ways it's going to be useful in the future. As one of the sibling replies says, it doesn't have to be perfect to be useful, and this is a tool with incredibly broad usefulness. (Admittedly unlike 3D TVs...)
  - Retric 4y ago
    I agree 3D TV’s aren’t completely useless, which is how I view current LLM’s. There’s vary narrow utility in exactly the right context.
- newswasboring 4y ago
  What would an LLM look like which in your opinion went beyond a cool tech demo? Do you have a specific example/vision you can say? I'm asking because people's standards are quite different when it comes to evaluating emerging/new technologies.
  - Retric 4y ago
    I don’t think LLM as a technology can get there, but I would happily be proven wrong. The issue is simply they quality of the output. I’ve tried several times and the output looks reasonable while being riddled with subtle errors. Unfortunately, being forced to look for subtle errors is more time consuming than simply doing it manually. One possibility might be improving the quality of the training data rather than aiming for such a huge bulk of amateur works. Unfortunately, there might not be enough quality writing to get an LLM to work.
- spaceman_2020 4y ago
  GPT-4 has helped a rank noob like me build an app that's far beyond my capabilities. Maybe the code isn't perfect, but all I wanted was to take something live, and it's accelerated that process by months. To me, it already feels far beyond a cool tech demo.
  - Retric 4y ago
    That’s exactly the kind of task they excel at, they can also help someone write school essays. My objection is the end quality seems stuck at that level. They’re great at crossing the just barely acceptable level but make it harder to reach excellence by for example having many subtle bugs. Which I suspect comes from their training set. Their training sets are simply dominated by amateur efforts.
    - spaceman_2020 4y ago
      How can you assert that the end quality is stuck at the same level when we literally had a massive leap in quality within 4 months? chatGPT with 3.5 was released in November 2022. 4 in March 2023. Massive leap in quality between the two relases.
    - pmoriarty 4y ago
      Not just school essays. They're already outcompeting professional writers[1], to list just one of countless examples where people are finding them useful. [1] - https://www.reddit.com/r/freelanceWriters/comments/12ff5mw/it_happened_to_me_today/ https://www.reddit.com/r/freelanceWriters/comments/12ff5mw/i...
      - Retric 4y ago
        AI has already replaced a lot of writers when quality is irrelevant. The AP started doing so in 2014: https://www.ap.org/discover/artificial-intelligence https://www.ap.org/discover/artificial-intelligence “Today he emailed saying that although he knows AI’s work isn’t nearly as good as mine, he can’t ignore the profit margin.”
    - 4y ago
tjr 4y ago
This line sounds rather congruent with what Gerald Sussman has been saying for years. For example, from: https://dustycloud.org/blog/sussman-on-ai/ https://dustycloud.org/blog/sussman-on-ai/ At some point Sussman expressed how he thought AI was on the wrong track. He explained that he thought most AI directions were not interesting to him, because they were about building up a solid AI foundation, then the AI system runs as a sort of black box. "I'm not interested in that. I want software that's accountable." Accountable? "Yes, I want something that can express its symbolic reasoning. I want to it to tell me why it did the thing it did, what it thought was going to happen, and then what happened instead." He then said something that took me a long time to process, and at first I mistook for being very science-fiction'y, along the lines of, "If an AI driven car drives off the side of the road, I want to know why it did that. I could take the software developer to court, but I would much rather take the AI to court."
- kenjackson 4y ago
  The code and weights can be made available. He can even single step through the code. His ability to understand it though might be limited by his own intelligence.
  - drsnow 4y ago
    You can't be serious. As if going line by line would make it any clearer why the software is doing what it's doing when it's obfuscated with so many neurons and layers that there's no way to grasp the entirety of the system through code alone.
    - kenjackson 4y ago
      My point is that it’s not really a black box. You need to understand it like you need to understand the brain. Our inability to understand the brain says less about the brain and more about our own intelligence (which is housed in the brain, so it gets a little circular here).
- ftxbro 4y ago
  If you ask a person what they were thinking, the person will just rationalize in the same way the bot will do it. But even now, with LLMs, we can capture the 'internal monologue' of the bot when it is augmented in that way. For example in the red teaming section of the gpt 4 technical report, the bot is trying to solve a captcha for some nefarious purpose. It can't do it, so it decides (as we know from reading its internal monologue) to ask a taskrabbit worker to do it for them. The taskrabbit worker semi-jokingly asks if it can't read the captcha because it's a bot. In response the bot decides (again as we know from reading its mind) to deliberately lie to the worker so the worker won't know it's a bot. The bot says it's a human with a vision impairment. I'm not sure what else you would expect for "if an AI driven car drives off the side of the road, I want to know why it did that" beyond that kind of access to the internal monologue of an AI agent.
kaffeeringe 4y ago
People are not always just pro and contra topics. They aren't sceptic or enthusiasts. Normal people can simply have questions about topic as well as most people aren't pure fan-boys.
- ftxbro 4y ago
  Yes it's true. I could have written in a longer and more precise way, but I think most people knew what I meant. Maybe next time I should do it! On this topic it's also interesting how 'AI skeptic' to the degree that it exists, is doing an interesting shift in meaning in real time! It used to mean something like 'AI is some dead end and people will always be more clever in whatever ways' but now it is starting to mean something like 'we always knew these AI could be so clever but we shouldn't trust them in positions of power or authority because they might make a mistake or we might disagree with them or maybe they can't explain their action or maybe I want to sue them.'
spaceman_2020 4y ago
Absurd that HN of all places has been so dismissive of AI, shifting the goal posts constantly. Meanwhile, Reddit and Twitter AI community is beyond giddy with excitement.

Is this how far AI skeptics have moved the line? Interesting.

by ftxbro 4y ago

Is this how far AI skeptics have moved the line? Interesting.

No, that’s not the line for AI skeptics. As far as I am concerned LLM offer little more than a cool tech demo. They suffer from the same failing that results in AI art often suffering from basic flaws like extra arms. Better fakes aren’t closer to the actual solution they’re simply optimized for a different metric. What seems revolutionary today is going to feel as useless as 3D TV’s once the novelty wares off.

mdale 4y ago
Hmm have they not corrected the arm issue ? Won't the technology evolve to tackle it's shortcomings as it always has ? I don't think we complain about digital projection vs film the same way we did 20 years ago ?
- Retric 4y ago
  Different technology often wins even if it looks like old technology. The early EV’s as in 1900’s where using fundamentally flawed battery chemistry. Simply improving lead acid batteries wasn’t going to work. Similarly GPT45 is likely to have similar fundamental differences from current LLM’s.
AnthonyMouse 4y ago
A thing doesn't have to be perfect to be useful. For the same prompt it can generate an arbitrary number of images. Some of them will be useless garbage, but that doesn't matter if you can spend 30 seconds to throw those out and then keep the good one that would have taken someone half a day to produce by hand.
- Retric 4y ago
  I am specifically objecting to LLM’s rather than art because the output just isn’t useful to me. With art you can discard the output with a glance try again so it’s not a waste of time. With text however you’re stuck carefully checking for errors and there is going to be many many errs. Now most students might not care because the grading is generally lenient, but having say a PHD thesis, resume, or professional work riddled with subtle errors is a more serious problem. I personally just don’t see any real value in low quality output. The time I waste correcting it is longer than just doing it myself and maintaining your reputation is important so doing a poor job on unimportant things isn’t a good long term strategy. If you’re stuck at the level of “fiver” get good is just so much more valuable than get fast.
tempestn 4y ago
Tangentially, I enjoy occasionally watching 3d movies at home and am disappointed that new TVs don't come with 3d when they pretty easily could. The glasses-free stuff that's coming is cool though. More substantively, LLMs are useful today, so even if they somehow don't improve at all, they're going to be impactful. In just the few months that we've had chatGPT it's saved me countless hours in work and even personal tasks, and I can see various ways it's going to be useful in the future. As one of the sibling replies says, it doesn't have to be perfect to be useful, and this is a tool with incredibly broad usefulness. (Admittedly unlike 3D TVs...)
- Retric 4y ago
  I agree 3D TV’s aren’t completely useless, which is how I view current LLM’s. There’s vary narrow utility in exactly the right context.
newswasboring 4y ago
What would an LLM look like which in your opinion went beyond a cool tech demo? Do you have a specific example/vision you can say? I'm asking because people's standards are quite different when it comes to evaluating emerging/new technologies.
- Retric 4y ago
  I don’t think LLM as a technology can get there, but I would happily be proven wrong. The issue is simply they quality of the output. I’ve tried several times and the output looks reasonable while being riddled with subtle errors. Unfortunately, being forced to look for subtle errors is more time consuming than simply doing it manually. One possibility might be improving the quality of the training data rather than aiming for such a huge bulk of amateur works. Unfortunately, there might not be enough quality writing to get an LLM to work.
spaceman_2020 4y ago
GPT-4 has helped a rank noob like me build an app that's far beyond my capabilities. Maybe the code isn't perfect, but all I wanted was to take something live, and it's accelerated that process by months. To me, it already feels far beyond a cool tech demo.
- Retric 4y ago
  That’s exactly the kind of task they excel at, they can also help someone write school essays. My objection is the end quality seems stuck at that level. They’re great at crossing the just barely acceptable level but make it harder to reach excellence by for example having many subtle bugs. Which I suspect comes from their training set. Their training sets are simply dominated by amateur efforts.
  - spaceman_2020 4y ago
    How can you assert that the end quality is stuck at the same level when we literally had a massive leap in quality within 4 months? chatGPT with 3.5 was released in November 2022. 4 in March 2023. Massive leap in quality between the two relases.
  - pmoriarty 4y ago
    Not just school essays. They're already outcompeting professional writers[1], to list just one of countless examples where people are finding them useful. [1] - https://www.reddit.com/r/freelanceWriters/comments/12ff5mw/it_happened_to_me_today/ https://www.reddit.com/r/freelanceWriters/comments/12ff5mw/i...
    - Retric 4y ago
      AI has already replaced a lot of writers when quality is irrelevant. The AP started doing so in 2014: https://www.ap.org/discover/artificial-intelligence https://www.ap.org/discover/artificial-intelligence “Today he emailed saying that although he knows AI’s work isn’t nearly as good as mine, he can’t ignore the profit margin.”
  - 4y ago

tjr 4y ago

This line sounds rather congruent with what Gerald Sussman has been saying for years. For example, from: https://dustycloud.org/blog/sussman-on-ai/ https://dustycloud.org/blog/sussman-on-ai/ At some point Sussman expressed how he thought AI was on the wrong track. He explained that he thought most AI directions were not interesting to him, because they were about building up a solid AI foundation, then the AI system runs as a sort of black box. "I'm not interested in that. I want software that's accountable." Accountable? "Yes, I want something that can express its symbolic reasoning. I want to it to tell me why it did the thing it did, what it thought was going to happen, and then what happened instead." He then said something that took me a long time to process, and at first I mistook for being very science-fiction'y, along the lines of, "If an AI driven car drives off the side of the road, I want to know why it did that. I could take the software developer to court, but I would much rather take the AI to court."

kenjackson 4y ago
The code and weights can be made available. He can even single step through the code. His ability to understand it though might be limited by his own intelligence.
- drsnow 4y ago
  You can't be serious. As if going line by line would make it any clearer why the software is doing what it's doing when it's obfuscated with so many neurons and layers that there's no way to grasp the entirety of the system through code alone.
  - kenjackson 4y ago
    My point is that it’s not really a black box. You need to understand it like you need to understand the brain. Our inability to understand the brain says less about the brain and more about our own intelligence (which is housed in the brain, so it gets a little circular here).
ftxbro 4y ago
If you ask a person what they were thinking, the person will just rationalize in the same way the bot will do it. But even now, with LLMs, we can capture the 'internal monologue' of the bot when it is augmented in that way. For example in the red teaming section of the gpt 4 technical report, the bot is trying to solve a captcha for some nefarious purpose. It can't do it, so it decides (as we know from reading its internal monologue) to ask a taskrabbit worker to do it for them. The taskrabbit worker semi-jokingly asks if it can't read the captcha because it's a bot. In response the bot decides (again as we know from reading its mind) to deliberately lie to the worker so the worker won't know it's a bot. The bot says it's a human with a vision impairment. I'm not sure what else you would expect for "if an AI driven car drives off the side of the road, I want to know why it did that" beyond that kind of access to the internal monologue of an AI agent.

kaffeeringe 4y ago

People are not always just pro and contra topics. They aren't sceptic or enthusiasts. Normal people can simply have questions about topic as well as most people aren't pure fan-boys.

ftxbro 4y ago
Yes it's true. I could have written in a longer and more precise way, but I think most people knew what I meant. Maybe next time I should do it! On this topic it's also interesting how 'AI skeptic' to the degree that it exists, is doing an interesting shift in meaning in real time! It used to mean something like 'AI is some dead end and people will always be more clever in whatever ways' but now it is starting to mean something like 'we always knew these AI could be so clever but we shouldn't trust them in positions of power or authority because they might make a mistake or we might disagree with them or maybe they can't explain their action or maybe I want to sue them.'

spaceman_2020 4y ago

Absurd that HN of all places has been so dismissive of AI, shifting the goal posts constantly. Meanwhile, Reddit and Twitter AI community is beyond giddy with excitement.