7 ms·

What if Generative AI turned out to be a Dud?

58 points by kjhughes 3y ago

version_five 3y ago
There are some good points and some stuff I think is hyperbole. I do wonder if he's so dismissive of the potential of AI why he's concerned about it's "misuse". Is the hypothesis that it will only be good for bad things but otherwise not yield commercial value. That aside, we're obviously in a bubble, that's the easiest claim in the world to make. We're also in a real estate bubble, etc. The only claim that matters is predicting when it will pop, otherwise it's just hot air.
- zarzavat 3y ago
  I don’t think we’re in an AI bubble. AI has hardly any penetration into society. If you compare with smartphones then we are pretty much in the late 1980s brick phone era where the technology is just starting to be adopted by society. The key technology, AGI, has not even been invented yet. It’s possible we may see a mini bubble if AGI takes a while to be developed, but I think it’s more likely that we won’t because even the current generation of AI has a lot further to run.
  - JimtheCoder 3y ago
    "AI has hardly any penetration into society." To clarify, I assume you are talking about Gen AI when you say "AI"?
    - oceanplexian 3y ago
      I think penetration into society is a really nebulous statement. It’s possible AI (Even Generative AI) will penetrate society long before we know about it. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me that Wall Street is already using it to trade some non-insignificant fraction of the US economy. Similar to how Linux is probably holding modern civilization together behind the scenes but most people are completely oblivious.
    - zarzavat 3y ago
      Sorry yes, I meant generative AI since we were talking about a “bubble”. Obviously there are other forms of AI that are more mature and deployed, but that’s not what the hype is about.
  - robotresearcher 3y ago
    > AI has hardly any penetration into society. > If you compare with smartphones Every smartphone runs multiple AI systems in it. Some are used multiple times a day, most just working and keeping out of your way. Unless you exclude from AI the stuff we used to call AI until it started working really well.
    - PartiallyTyped 3y ago
      If you have an iphone, you can open your images and search for cat / dog and the program will just show relevant pics of cats and dogs. It also searches in text inside of said images.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - Nullabillity 3y ago
        Except for the half the time that it can't even guess the location from the already-embedded GPS data.
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
  - berniedurfee 3y ago
    I don’t think generative AI is a stepping stone to AGI. I think they’re quite different. I understand generative AI as a million monkeys on a million typewriters, but we figured out how to rig the typewriters to generate convincing and sometimes correct output. Neither monkeys individually or collectively understand anything about how they responded. They just get a treat for doing well. AGI is something very different IMO. Language and speech will be emergent in AGI without requiring massive inputs, like how a child learns. LLMs seem like sort of a (very impressive) parlor trick. Neat, useful and terrifying, but not a pathway to AGI.
    - paxcoder 3y ago
      [dead]
  - nextaccountic 3y ago
    > If you compare with smartphones then we are pretty much in the late 1980s brick phone era where the technology is just starting to be adopted by society. ChatGPT was the largest growing site in the history of the Internet, reaching 100 millions users in two months. This seems more than 1980 brick phones
    - gmerc 3y ago
      How much of that is a function of distributed and hype infrastructures being in place though. It’s disingenuous comparing the way Facebook scaled to ChatGPT which scales primarily along social media vectors with massive distribution.
- Legend2440 3y ago
  Because he's Gary Marcus. The man has made his entire media personality about dissing AI, and he's been doing it a lot longer than LLMs have been around.
  - user_named 3y ago
    So far he's been right every time.
- resolutebat 3y ago
  Generative AI is excellent at churning out prose good enough for targeted scams, fake news and search engine optimization, and there is plenty of commercial value in all three of those. However, none of those three will transform humanity as we know it, they'll just make life a bit worse for everybody.
  - seanhunter 3y ago
    It's also really excellent at a bunch of other things. For example I am currently doing self-directed study in maths. It turns out chatgpt is very good at explaining lots of things if you prompt correctly. You need to check things yourself and be on the lookout for plausible but wrong explanations, but it's like having a patient pure maths friend to work on things with - your friend won't get everything right either after all. Something with real commercial potential is what microsoft released (I think today) [1] which is a sort of wizard thing that accellerates various azure gpt-powered standard deployments that do things like set up private ephemeral instances that connect to your enterprise data sources behind your firewall. This has enormous potential given how difficult it is in most large enterprises to actually join data sources together, find basic information etc. Think of an automated helpdesk that can draw on all of the stuff in all of the various disjointed systems in most big companies. That has the potential to be quite transformative to the workplace for a lot of people. In general I think this bar of "transforming humanity" is just arbitrary and way too high for any technology. You could look at the map on your phone and say "that's all very well but will it transform humanity?" well no. It won't make toast either, but it's quite useful sometimes. Just as overinflated expectations and hype are unhelpful I think it's easy to be cynical and miss important tech developments just because we impose arbitrary standards on them that other technologies didn't have to meet on their way to adoption. [1] https://github.com/microsoft/azurechatgpt https://github.com/microsoft/azurechatgpt
    - seanhunter 3y ago
      Here's an example of this kind of self-study chat btw (so you can see the pros and cons) https://chat.openai.com/share/d1428952-84e6-42be-9e0a-2ce62b132068 https://chat.openai.com/share/d1428952-84e6-42be-9e0a-2ce62b... It's interesting that in the final matrix example it somehow messed up the Latex by forgetting to put \begin{bmatrix} at the front which is why the formatting goes bonkers. It's also kind of cheesy that it chose a diagonal matrix rather than having to find the roots of the characteristic polynomial but any case you get the idea hopefully and can see how this would be helpful when you're trying to learn this stuff yourself? I'm certainly finding it great as I work through textbooks etc to chat through concepts in this way to check my understanding and drill into things.
- aaron695 3y ago
  [dead]
hotpotamus 3y ago
I just used eBay for the first time in awhile and they added a generative AI tool when writing listings. I'm sure it could add some generic marketing bullshit to my listing, but how is it supposed to really help me? I just need a brief description of the item and it's condition and maybe a few details.
- sharemywin 3y ago
  what if it could on average add $10 to the end price of your listing. you may not care but ebay would because they could multiple it by some % of every listing.
  - piuantiderp 3y ago
    Any advantage from "adding" to the listing would quickly go to 0.
    - sharemywin 3y ago
      Disclaimer and WARNING: I'm going to use ChatGPT's text to illustrate a point about ChatGPT's capabilities. If this offends you please overt your eyes as it may be extremely offensive to some to use a ChatGPT response in a HN post. This will out perform "a steak" for sale 365 days a year even if everyone else has the same kind of marketing drivel. in fact someone will probably buy both you and your competitors. The Marvelous Ribeye: Where Flavor Meets Elegance Exhibit A-->Prepare to be seduced by the enchanting symphony of textures and tastes that only a meticulously selected Ribeye can offer. Our expertly curated steak boasts marbling that weaves intricate pathways of rich, buttery fat throughout the meat, ensuring unparalleled succulence. Each mouthwatering slice unveils an orchestra of flavors, from the savory umami notes to the gentle whispers of natural sweetness.<-- adjectives sell...nouns tell...
      - piuantiderp 3y ago
        The point is everyone has chatGPT and everyone will use it. And am being very charitable that that kind of writing works
Legend2440 3y ago
Yawn. Gary Marcus saying exactly the same things he's said for decades.
- seanhunter 3y ago
  What if Gary Marcus turned out to be a dud?
taneq 3y ago
When I started university I spent a while reading up on neural networks and Everyone Knew that they were a dead end. So I'd be a little hesitant to pronounce a specific set of machine learning techniques to be 'a dud' after only a few years.
- seanhunter 3y ago
  Precisely. When I first looked at neural nets 20 years ago or so it was a "Well Known Result"[tm] that deep networks of any kind were pointless and anything that could be done with a deep network could be done in a single layer. Like lots of tech procnostications that didn't age well.
  - LeBit 3y ago
    Where did you study? 20 years ago, I was doing computer engineering in Canada and neural networks were not sold as a dead end. It was made clear they were a very powerful tool.
    - seanhunter 3y ago
      Not neural networks in general, multilayer neural networks as they were called then ("deep" now). This was self-study but I did read widely on the topic and that was the general consensus.
0dayz 3y ago
I don't agree with the article about how ai is a dud, but the novelty of ai will fade away and as such the hype surrounding it won't last. The issue I've seen with our latest ai is how we've barely been shown real world use cases as we used to see (ai playing games, ai iterate on design, ai learning music) I mean hell legally speaking we don't even know the ownership of ai's creation (as in the court hasnt set a precedent). Until we get more of those kind of ais/robots, in a diverse set of fields, I think it'll just be powered by novelty.
hexage1814 3y ago
What if that world wide web thing kids are talking these days turned out to be a dud?
- sfpotter 3y ago
  It is a dud.
mark_l_watson 3y ago
I have mixed feelings about Gary Marcus. I enjoyed reading Rebooting AI that he wrote with Ernest Davis, and he makes some valid points in this article. However, I think he ignores some practical use cases. I am not a good example since I am retired (I limit myself to about 6 to 8 hours a week consulting, and I am always working on writing a book) but I feel that I am at least 25% more efficient when using tools like GitHub Copilot integrated into Emacs and using Bing+ChatGPT or Bard for bouncing ideas off of, and sometimes for search. I find that if I carefully express an idea that I am thinking about that I usually get something at least interesting to think about and sometime very useful. I am excited by research on hybrid approaches to AGI, but also excited by what we have right now with OpenAI and Hugging Face APIs and models that can be self hosted.
- JHonaker 3y ago
  Do you mind reflecting a bit on your use of Copilot? I've been trying it out, but I haven't found it to be particularly helpful. I really find it to be more annoying than helpful. The mental burden of figuring out what the code is actually doing when a large chunk appears is exhausting, and it leaves me with a false level of understanding similar to the feeling of competency you get when you type out a tutorial's examples. Underwhelming is how I'd describe my experience with ChatGPT too. There are so many people making claims of ridiculously improved efficiency, that I'm really unsure if it's me or not.
  - mark_l_watson 3y ago
    I used it for about a year with VSCode, then integrated it into Emacs. I easily ignore completions I don’t need.
    - JHonaker 3y ago
      I meant more “what are you actually completing?” And “how much?” I haven’t found the completions to be particularly helpful. For instance, I’m often fighting incorrect array indices and slices, pulling out magic numbers into variables, decoding some one-liner completion, or figuring out what’s usable and what I need to cut out and replace in a larger block. What’s really struck me is how much I really want Agda style hole-filling completion. I want to just be able to type a variable name and have it destructure cases for me. That happened a few times, and it was really nice. I’d forgotten how nice it was to be able to do that in Agda. I want that everywhere. Also, just noticed who you were, I really enjoyed some of your Lisp books.
sunpazed 3y ago
"The medium is the message" should be the take-away here, ergo; not what Generative AI does, but how it shapes us. The Internet augmented our connectivity to one-another. Search augmented our knowledge. Generative AI is augmenting our skills.
tbalsam 3y ago
if signal(ml_model) > noise_floor: return "not dud" elif signal(ml_model) <= noise_floor - epsilon and signal(ml_model) - signal(previous_ml_model) >= expected_improvement slope: return "might show potential promise" else: return "not ready for years to come, or likely dud. unknown 'true' status from this point of measurement."
ilaksh 3y ago
Does Gary Marcus do research anymore, or literally just spend all of his time making weak but loud arguments against any AI with a neural network attached to it? I get the impression that at one time he was trying to do AI (or similar) research, but it didn't involve neural networks. And ever since neural networks turned out to be a useful approach, because it wasn't the path he chose, he switched his career to putting down any AI with a neural network. The most annoying thing is that they aren't very well written arguments and he doesn't come up with new ones, much less actual competitive alternative approaches to AI. Also I think that we really do need alternatives to the giant black-box neural networks that are more predictable and auditable but also perform. Yet you never hear him talking about doing any such research. It would be less disappointing if his background was as the owner of a 1990s-style furniture store in Queens. But supposedly he is a researcher.

58 points by kjhughes 3y ago

There are some good points and some stuff I think is hyperbole. I do wonder if he's so dismissive of the potential of AI why he's concerned about it's "misuse". Is the hypothesis that it will only be good for bad things but otherwise not yield commercial value. That aside, we're obviously in a bubble, that's the easiest claim in the world to make. We're also in a real estate bubble, etc. The only claim that matters is predicting when it will pop, otherwise it's just hot air.

zarzavat 3y ago
I don’t think we’re in an AI bubble. AI has hardly any penetration into society. If you compare with smartphones then we are pretty much in the late 1980s brick phone era where the technology is just starting to be adopted by society. The key technology, AGI, has not even been invented yet. It’s possible we may see a mini bubble if AGI takes a while to be developed, but I think it’s more likely that we won’t because even the current generation of AI has a lot further to run.
- JimtheCoder 3y ago
  "AI has hardly any penetration into society." To clarify, I assume you are talking about Gen AI when you say "AI"?
  - oceanplexian 3y ago
    I think penetration into society is a really nebulous statement. It’s possible AI (Even Generative AI) will penetrate society long before we know about it. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me that Wall Street is already using it to trade some non-insignificant fraction of the US economy. Similar to how Linux is probably holding modern civilization together behind the scenes but most people are completely oblivious.
  - zarzavat 3y ago
    Sorry yes, I meant generative AI since we were talking about a “bubble”. Obviously there are other forms of AI that are more mature and deployed, but that’s not what the hype is about.
- robotresearcher 3y ago
  > AI has hardly any penetration into society. > If you compare with smartphones Every smartphone runs multiple AI systems in it. Some are used multiple times a day, most just working and keeping out of your way. Unless you exclude from AI the stuff we used to call AI until it started working really well.
  - PartiallyTyped 3y ago
    If you have an iphone, you can open your images and search for cat / dog and the program will just show relevant pics of cats and dogs. It also searches in text inside of said images.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - Nullabillity 3y ago
      Except for the half the time that it can't even guess the location from the already-embedded GPS data.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
- berniedurfee 3y ago
  I don’t think generative AI is a stepping stone to AGI. I think they’re quite different. I understand generative AI as a million monkeys on a million typewriters, but we figured out how to rig the typewriters to generate convincing and sometimes correct output. Neither monkeys individually or collectively understand anything about how they responded. They just get a treat for doing well. AGI is something very different IMO. Language and speech will be emergent in AGI without requiring massive inputs, like how a child learns. LLMs seem like sort of a (very impressive) parlor trick. Neat, useful and terrifying, but not a pathway to AGI.
  - paxcoder 3y ago
    [dead]
- nextaccountic 3y ago
  > If you compare with smartphones then we are pretty much in the late 1980s brick phone era where the technology is just starting to be adopted by society. ChatGPT was the largest growing site in the history of the Internet, reaching 100 millions users in two months. This seems more than 1980 brick phones
  - gmerc 3y ago
    How much of that is a function of distributed and hype infrastructures being in place though. It’s disingenuous comparing the way Facebook scaled to ChatGPT which scales primarily along social media vectors with massive distribution.
Legend2440 3y ago
Because he's Gary Marcus. The man has made his entire media personality about dissing AI, and he's been doing it a lot longer than LLMs have been around.
- user_named 3y ago
  So far he's been right every time.
resolutebat 3y ago
Generative AI is excellent at churning out prose good enough for targeted scams, fake news and search engine optimization, and there is plenty of commercial value in all three of those. However, none of those three will transform humanity as we know it, they'll just make life a bit worse for everybody.
- seanhunter 3y ago
  It's also really excellent at a bunch of other things. For example I am currently doing self-directed study in maths. It turns out chatgpt is very good at explaining lots of things if you prompt correctly. You need to check things yourself and be on the lookout for plausible but wrong explanations, but it's like having a patient pure maths friend to work on things with - your friend won't get everything right either after all. Something with real commercial potential is what microsoft released (I think today) [1] which is a sort of wizard thing that accellerates various azure gpt-powered standard deployments that do things like set up private ephemeral instances that connect to your enterprise data sources behind your firewall. This has enormous potential given how difficult it is in most large enterprises to actually join data sources together, find basic information etc. Think of an automated helpdesk that can draw on all of the stuff in all of the various disjointed systems in most big companies. That has the potential to be quite transformative to the workplace for a lot of people. In general I think this bar of "transforming humanity" is just arbitrary and way too high for any technology. You could look at the map on your phone and say "that's all very well but will it transform humanity?" well no. It won't make toast either, but it's quite useful sometimes. Just as overinflated expectations and hype are unhelpful I think it's easy to be cynical and miss important tech developments just because we impose arbitrary standards on them that other technologies didn't have to meet on their way to adoption. [1] https://github.com/microsoft/azurechatgpt https://github.com/microsoft/azurechatgpt
  - seanhunter 3y ago
    Here's an example of this kind of self-study chat btw (so you can see the pros and cons) https://chat.openai.com/share/d1428952-84e6-42be-9e0a-2ce62b132068 https://chat.openai.com/share/d1428952-84e6-42be-9e0a-2ce62b... It's interesting that in the final matrix example it somehow messed up the Latex by forgetting to put \begin{bmatrix} at the front which is why the formatting goes bonkers. It's also kind of cheesy that it chose a diagonal matrix rather than having to find the roots of the characteristic polynomial but any case you get the idea hopefully and can see how this would be helpful when you're trying to learn this stuff yourself? I'm certainly finding it great as I work through textbooks etc to chat through concepts in this way to check my understanding and drill into things.
aaron695 3y ago
[dead]

hotpotamus 3y ago

I just used eBay for the first time in awhile and they added a generative AI tool when writing listings. I'm sure it could add some generic marketing bullshit to my listing, but how is it supposed to really help me? I just need a brief description of the item and it's condition and maybe a few details.

sharemywin 3y ago
what if it could on average add $10 to the end price of your listing. you may not care but ebay would because they could multiple it by some % of every listing.
- piuantiderp 3y ago
  Any advantage from "adding" to the listing would quickly go to 0.
  - sharemywin 3y ago
    Disclaimer and WARNING: I'm going to use ChatGPT's text to illustrate a point about ChatGPT's capabilities. If this offends you please overt your eyes as it may be extremely offensive to some to use a ChatGPT response in a HN post. This will out perform "a steak" for sale 365 days a year even if everyone else has the same kind of marketing drivel. in fact someone will probably buy both you and your competitors. The Marvelous Ribeye: Where Flavor Meets Elegance Exhibit A-->Prepare to be seduced by the enchanting symphony of textures and tastes that only a meticulously selected Ribeye can offer. Our expertly curated steak boasts marbling that weaves intricate pathways of rich, buttery fat throughout the meat, ensuring unparalleled succulence. Each mouthwatering slice unveils an orchestra of flavors, from the savory umami notes to the gentle whispers of natural sweetness.<-- adjectives sell...nouns tell...
    - piuantiderp 3y ago
      The point is everyone has chatGPT and everyone will use it. And am being very charitable that that kind of writing works

Legend2440 3y ago

Yawn. Gary Marcus saying exactly the same things he's said for decades.

seanhunter 3y ago
What if Gary Marcus turned out to be a dud?

taneq 3y ago

When I started university I spent a while reading up on neural networks and Everyone Knew that they were a dead end. So I'd be a little hesitant to pronounce a specific set of machine learning techniques to be 'a dud' after only a few years.

seanhunter 3y ago
Precisely. When I first looked at neural nets 20 years ago or so it was a "Well Known Result"[tm] that deep networks of any kind were pointless and anything that could be done with a deep network could be done in a single layer. Like lots of tech procnostications that didn't age well.
- LeBit 3y ago
  Where did you study? 20 years ago, I was doing computer engineering in Canada and neural networks were not sold as a dead end. It was made clear they were a very powerful tool.
  - seanhunter 3y ago
    Not neural networks in general, multilayer neural networks as they were called then ("deep" now). This was self-study but I did read widely on the topic and that was the general consensus.

0dayz 3y ago

I don't agree with the article about how ai is a dud, but the novelty of ai will fade away and as such the hype surrounding it won't last. The issue I've seen with our latest ai is how we've barely been shown real world use cases as we used to see (ai playing games, ai iterate on design, ai learning music) I mean hell legally speaking we don't even know the ownership of ai's creation (as in the court hasnt set a precedent). Until we get more of those kind of ais/robots, in a diverse set of fields, I think it'll just be powered by novelty.

hexage1814 3y ago

What if that world wide web thing kids are talking these days turned out to be a dud?

sfpotter 3y ago
It is a dud.

mark_l_watson 3y ago

I have mixed feelings about Gary Marcus. I enjoyed reading Rebooting AI that he wrote with Ernest Davis, and he makes some valid points in this article. However, I think he ignores some practical use cases. I am not a good example since I am retired (I limit myself to about 6 to 8 hours a week consulting, and I am always working on writing a book) but I feel that I am at least 25% more efficient when using tools like GitHub Copilot integrated into Emacs and using Bing+ChatGPT or Bard for bouncing ideas off of, and sometimes for search. I find that if I carefully express an idea that I am thinking about that I usually get something at least interesting to think about and sometime very useful. I am excited by research on hybrid approaches to AGI, but also excited by what we have right now with OpenAI and Hugging Face APIs and models that can be self hosted.

JHonaker 3y ago
Do you mind reflecting a bit on your use of Copilot? I've been trying it out, but I haven't found it to be particularly helpful. I really find it to be more annoying than helpful. The mental burden of figuring out what the code is actually doing when a large chunk appears is exhausting, and it leaves me with a false level of understanding similar to the feeling of competency you get when you type out a tutorial's examples. Underwhelming is how I'd describe my experience with ChatGPT too. There are so many people making claims of ridiculously improved efficiency, that I'm really unsure if it's me or not.
- mark_l_watson 3y ago
  I used it for about a year with VSCode, then integrated it into Emacs. I easily ignore completions I don’t need.
  - JHonaker 3y ago
    I meant more “what are you actually completing?” And “how much?” I haven’t found the completions to be particularly helpful. For instance, I’m often fighting incorrect array indices and slices, pulling out magic numbers into variables, decoding some one-liner completion, or figuring out what’s usable and what I need to cut out and replace in a larger block. What’s really struck me is how much I really want Agda style hole-filling completion. I want to just be able to type a variable name and have it destructure cases for me. That happened a few times, and it was really nice. I’d forgotten how nice it was to be able to do that in Agda. I want that everywhere. Also, just noticed who you were, I really enjoyed some of your Lisp books.

sunpazed 3y ago

"The medium is the message" should be the take-away here, ergo; not what Generative AI does, but how it shapes us. The Internet augmented our connectivity to one-another. Search augmented our knowledge. Generative AI is augmenting our skills.

tbalsam 3y ago

if signal(ml_model) > noise_floor: return "not dud" elif signal(ml_model) <= noise_floor - epsilon and signal(ml_model) - signal(previous_ml_model) >= expected_improvement slope: return "might show potential promise" else: return "not ready for years to come, or likely dud. unknown 'true' status from this point of measurement."

ilaksh 3y ago

Does Gary Marcus do research anymore, or literally just spend all of his time making weak but loud arguments against any AI with a neural network attached to it? I get the impression that at one time he was trying to do AI (or similar) research, but it didn't involve neural networks. And ever since neural networks turned out to be a useful approach, because it wasn't the path he chose, he switched his career to putting down any AI with a neural network. The most annoying thing is that they aren't very well written arguments and he doesn't come up with new ones, much less actual competitive alternative approaches to AI. Also I think that we really do need alternatives to the giant black-box neural networks that are more predictable and auditable but also perform. Yet you never hear him talking about doing any such research. It would be less disappointing if his background was as the owner of a 1990s-style furniture store in Queens. But supposedly he is a researcher.