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My favorite quote from the essay: "When they [AI companies] do ‘do’ science, they are still using science mostly as an aesthetic. They publish papers with gran

My favorite quote from the essay: "When they [AI companies] do ‘do’ science, they are still using science mostly as an aesthetic. They publish papers with grand claims but provide no access to any of the data or code used in the research. Their approach to science is what “my girlfriend goes to another school; you wouldn’t know her” is to high school cliques."

version_five 3y ago
That's like IBM doing research, or "thought leadership" from consulting companies. At the end of the day, it's sales / marketing content. It's a spectrum, and some of it is obviously high quality, bit a major aim is to draw in customers as opposed to directly supporting products or customer engagements. On the plus side, doing research does advance the state of the art, so it's one of the most productive marketing activities.
williamcotton 3y ago
Favorite, because it is hilariously wrong? Functioning code and tools are available for almost all of the relevant AI and ML work in academic publications. Yes, it took a big leak from Meta for a certain type of model, but the techniques to use LLMs and other transformer based tools are not vaporware. Most have code repositories and functioning open-source implementations. We can certainly be critical of the datasets used for testing but we can’t accuse people of selling snake oil when so many of us are implementing and gaining value from the techniques described in these academic publications.
- latexr 3y ago
  > for almost all of the relevant AI and ML work The word “relevant” is an important qualifier which may be doing a lot of lifting. Who defines what is “relevant”? How do you interpret it for this particular case? I haven‘t looked at the matter myself, but the author did provide a source for their claim¹. Do you have any specific information on why it is wrong? It is not my intention to put you on the spot, I’m trying to understand if your point is based on data or gut feeling so I can myself get a better understanding of the validity of each argument. ¹ https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2023/beware-of-ai-snake-oil/#fn:7 https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2023/beware-of-ai-snake-oil/...
  - williamcotton 3y ago
    I’d say the two most relevant models right now are Stable Diffusion and GPT-4. Stable Diffusion is open in all senses of the word. GPT-4 is closed but the techniques it enables are reproducible by anyone with a credit card. GPT-like things like LLaMA are, well, available. Direct, individually reproducible, these tools and their related academic publications qualify as computer science. Nullius in verba certainly applies.
    - latexr 3y ago
      > GPT-4 is closed but the techniques it enables are reproducible by anyone with a credit card. Requiring a credit card to verify scientific claims is a large deterrent. And in addition one needs to provide them with a phone number, which many people will not be comfortable with when considering their CEO’s history.¹ Even ignoring the above, using the output of ChatGPT is definitely not the same as having “access to any of the data or code used in the research”, which is the author’s complaint and what the original commenter quoted. As for the other cases, we could only properly assess them if we discussed specific studies which I don’t think we’re going to do in the limited context of HN comments. Thank you for taking the time to explain your view. ¹ https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-crypto-eyeball-scanning-orb-problems https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-...
      - pwillia7 3y ago
        I had to give apple my credit card to install xcode... e: and I'll never forgive them for it
        throwaway1777 3y ago
        You actually don’t have to pay to use Xcode. You only need to pay to build for real devices and submit to the App Store.
        jhbadger 3y ago
- ad404b8a372f2b9 3y ago
  The GPT4 "paper" that's been talked about so much is little more than a marketing press release. I certainly disagree that it's the case for the whole field of ML. But the AI that's in the news right now is LLMs with OpenAI in the lead who have done their utmost to imped reproducible research and even research built on top of their already released tools. It's been a trend that started with Google years ago and their increasingly large models which are unreproducible for most of the scientific community and often not released (if I recall correctly).
  - brookst 3y ago
    Extrapolation from one GPT4 paper to all papers from all sources is a huge mistake. It's funny the article makes its own overbroad claims without data or references, in the name of asserting that's all that's going on in AI.
    - latexr 3y ago
      > without data or references Can you clarify what you mean? There are almost two dozen footnotes pointing to references and papers.
      - brookst 3y ago
        I mean, there is no data support in the claim that this pattern is essentially universal in AI research. Citing a few instances doesn’t prove the point. I’m open to the idea that AI research is generally more closed than other areas of research, but there is no quantitative analysis of how open AI research is, or how open other areas of research are. pick any other area of research, and I will happily find you some footnotes citations that support exactly these claims.
        latexr 3y ago
        > Citing a few instances doesn’t prove the point. I haven’t read every linked reference, but for a relatively short article there are more than a few. It's certainly more annotated than the average article I find on HN. Shouldn’t the quality of the sources matter most? And if what matters is the number, how many would be enough in this case? What would prove the point? > or how open other areas of research are. Other areas of research are irrelevant to the point. Even if other areas suck, that doesn’t excuse this one sucking too. > pick any other area of research, and I will happily find you some footnotes citations that support exactly these claims. Even if that is true, it doesn’t make the argument automatically false or irrelevant for any particular case. First you objected the author had no data or references. Now you’re saying that for any area of research you can find references to prove the point they’re making. Which is it? Is the problem that they didn’t provide enough sources, or that the sources aren’t believable?
- thuuuomas 3y ago
  We can’t be critical of the datasets used for testing if we don’t know what’s in them. The same applies to training data - it should be disclosed.
  - williamcotton 3y ago
    Most of the datasets are available. TriviaQA: https://huggingface.co/datasets/trivia_qa https://huggingface.co/datasets/trivia_qa HotPotQA: https://huggingface.co/datasets/hotpot_qa https://huggingface.co/datasets/hotpot_qa Those two are used in most of the question-and-answer based metrics for LLMs in academic publications. The same applies for other datasets used for other metrics. HuggingFace has most of if not everything of any relevance.
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
  Well, crypto and blockchain have real, verified, science behind them, and that hasn’t prevented the crypto industry from becoming a ponzi garden of delights. I suspect we’ll be seeing some highly entertaining stuff, coming down the pipes. Might not be as bad as the crypto snake oil bazaar, but it should have some interesting hucksters.
  - UncleEntity 3y ago
    I saw a billboard yesterday that was advertising some AI thing that probably had nothing to do with AI other than jumping on the hypetrain. Wish I could remember what it was selling, thinking it was something about lawn care.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > Might not be as bad as the crypto snake oil bazaar I think it will be as bad as with cyrptocurrency, if only because so many of the people involved come from the cryptocurrency crowd.
gumballindie 3y ago
> They publish papers with grand claims but provide no access to any of the data or code used in the research. A common pattern around ai companies. To me it appears that a genuinely interesting technology has been hijacked by marketing and fud.
synarchefriend 3y ago
Providing no access to the underlying data is far more common in other fields of science than AI.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  It is? In my experience with the research world, providing access to the underlying data is table stakes. If you don't do that, then nobody can verify the correctness of your papers.
renewiltord 3y ago
LOL this is such total bullshit. "Attention is All You Need" is from Google and is close to the inflection point of all this. This article is a complete clown show written in the style of online insult memes because that gets traction. It's by a clown masquerading as a technologist masquerading as a clown. See, I can do it too.

version_five 3y ago

That's like IBM doing research, or "thought leadership" from consulting companies. At the end of the day, it's sales / marketing content. It's a spectrum, and some of it is obviously high quality, bit a major aim is to draw in customers as opposed to directly supporting products or customer engagements. On the plus side, doing research does advance the state of the art, so it's one of the most productive marketing activities.

williamcotton 3y ago

Favorite, because it is hilariously wrong? Functioning code and tools are available for almost all of the relevant AI and ML work in academic publications. Yes, it took a big leak from Meta for a certain type of model, but the techniques to use LLMs and other transformer based tools are not vaporware. Most have code repositories and functioning open-source implementations. We can certainly be critical of the datasets used for testing but we can’t accuse people of selling snake oil when so many of us are implementing and gaining value from the techniques described in these academic publications.

latexr 3y ago
> for almost all of the relevant AI and ML work The word “relevant” is an important qualifier which may be doing a lot of lifting. Who defines what is “relevant”? How do you interpret it for this particular case? I haven‘t looked at the matter myself, but the author did provide a source for their claim¹. Do you have any specific information on why it is wrong? It is not my intention to put you on the spot, I’m trying to understand if your point is based on data or gut feeling so I can myself get a better understanding of the validity of each argument. ¹ https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2023/beware-of-ai-snake-oil/#fn:7 https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2023/beware-of-ai-snake-oil/...
- williamcotton 3y ago
  I’d say the two most relevant models right now are Stable Diffusion and GPT-4. Stable Diffusion is open in all senses of the word. GPT-4 is closed but the techniques it enables are reproducible by anyone with a credit card. GPT-like things like LLaMA are, well, available. Direct, individually reproducible, these tools and their related academic publications qualify as computer science. Nullius in verba certainly applies.
  - latexr 3y ago
    > GPT-4 is closed but the techniques it enables are reproducible by anyone with a credit card. Requiring a credit card to verify scientific claims is a large deterrent. And in addition one needs to provide them with a phone number, which many people will not be comfortable with when considering their CEO’s history.¹ Even ignoring the above, using the output of ChatGPT is definitely not the same as having “access to any of the data or code used in the research”, which is the author’s complaint and what the original commenter quoted. As for the other cases, we could only properly assess them if we discussed specific studies which I don’t think we’re going to do in the limited context of HN comments. Thank you for taking the time to explain your view. ¹ https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-crypto-eyeball-scanning-orb-problems https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-...
    - pwillia7 3y ago
      I had to give apple my credit card to install xcode... e: and I'll never forgive them for it
      - throwaway1777 3y ago
        You actually don’t have to pay to use Xcode. You only need to pay to build for real devices and submit to the App Store.
        jhbadger 3y ago
ad404b8a372f2b9 3y ago
The GPT4 "paper" that's been talked about so much is little more than a marketing press release. I certainly disagree that it's the case for the whole field of ML. But the AI that's in the news right now is LLMs with OpenAI in the lead who have done their utmost to imped reproducible research and even research built on top of their already released tools. It's been a trend that started with Google years ago and their increasingly large models which are unreproducible for most of the scientific community and often not released (if I recall correctly).
- brookst 3y ago
  Extrapolation from one GPT4 paper to all papers from all sources is a huge mistake. It's funny the article makes its own overbroad claims without data or references, in the name of asserting that's all that's going on in AI.
  - latexr 3y ago
    > without data or references Can you clarify what you mean? There are almost two dozen footnotes pointing to references and papers.
    - brookst 3y ago
      I mean, there is no data support in the claim that this pattern is essentially universal in AI research. Citing a few instances doesn’t prove the point. I’m open to the idea that AI research is generally more closed than other areas of research, but there is no quantitative analysis of how open AI research is, or how open other areas of research are. pick any other area of research, and I will happily find you some footnotes citations that support exactly these claims.
      - latexr 3y ago
        > Citing a few instances doesn’t prove the point. I haven’t read every linked reference, but for a relatively short article there are more than a few. It's certainly more annotated than the average article I find on HN. Shouldn’t the quality of the sources matter most? And if what matters is the number, how many would be enough in this case? What would prove the point? > or how open other areas of research are. Other areas of research are irrelevant to the point. Even if other areas suck, that doesn’t excuse this one sucking too. > pick any other area of research, and I will happily find you some footnotes citations that support exactly these claims. Even if that is true, it doesn’t make the argument automatically false or irrelevant for any particular case. First you objected the author had no data or references. Now you’re saying that for any area of research you can find references to prove the point they’re making. Which is it? Is the problem that they didn’t provide enough sources, or that the sources aren’t believable?
thuuuomas 3y ago
We can’t be critical of the datasets used for testing if we don’t know what’s in them. The same applies to training data - it should be disclosed.
- williamcotton 3y ago
  Most of the datasets are available. TriviaQA: https://huggingface.co/datasets/trivia_qa https://huggingface.co/datasets/trivia_qa HotPotQA: https://huggingface.co/datasets/hotpot_qa https://huggingface.co/datasets/hotpot_qa Those two are used in most of the question-and-answer based metrics for LLMs in academic publications. The same applies for other datasets used for other metrics. HuggingFace has most of if not everything of any relevance.
ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
Well, crypto and blockchain have real, verified, science behind them, and that hasn’t prevented the crypto industry from becoming a ponzi garden of delights. I suspect we’ll be seeing some highly entertaining stuff, coming down the pipes. Might not be as bad as the crypto snake oil bazaar, but it should have some interesting hucksters.
- UncleEntity 3y ago
  I saw a billboard yesterday that was advertising some AI thing that probably had nothing to do with AI other than jumping on the hypetrain. Wish I could remember what it was selling, thinking it was something about lawn care.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > Might not be as bad as the crypto snake oil bazaar I think it will be as bad as with cyrptocurrency, if only because so many of the people involved come from the cryptocurrency crowd.

gumballindie 3y ago

> They publish papers with grand claims but provide no access to any of the data or code used in the research. A common pattern around ai companies. To me it appears that a genuinely interesting technology has been hijacked by marketing and fud.

synarchefriend 3y ago

Providing no access to the underlying data is far more common in other fields of science than AI.

JohnFen 3y ago
It is? In my experience with the research world, providing access to the underlying data is table stakes. If you don't do that, then nobody can verify the correctness of your papers.

renewiltord 3y ago

LOL this is such total bullshit. "Attention is All You Need" is from Google and is close to the inflection point of all this. This article is a complete clown show written in the style of online insult memes because that gets traction. It's by a clown masquerading as a technologist masquerading as a clown. See, I can do it too.