8 ms·

Anti-AI Hype LLM Reading List

208 points by atg_abhishek 3y ago

FrustratedMonky 3y ago
There has been a lot of push back lately that the current hype cycle is completely un-warranted, in the process of fading away, and generally that LLM's aren't that good really. I thought that was what this post was about. Really, this is just trying to 'cut through the hype'. When we get beyond the hype, here is a list of articles to explain current state? Am I correct here?
- brandall10 3y ago
  Seems that way. "Hype free" would probably be a better way to put it.
- danielbln 3y ago
  That recent pushback has been a bit exhausting, even more so than a hype preceding it. At least the hype was full of hope and excitement, the recent pushback is full of snide (and often unwarranted) I-told-you-so and a taste of luddite. I guess that's how the pendulum goes.
  - mathisfun123 3y ago
    > I guess that's how the pendulum goes https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel-dialectics/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel-dialectics/
  - vikramkr 3y ago
    Pendulum is probably way sharper this time around because we're dealing with the aftermath of the crypto fallout. Sure in practice this time there are actual applications and lots of people paying actual money for real products, but tech has lost a lot of it's sheen and there's going to be a lot more very understandable dismissal of the next shiny. Even though for this one we should probably actually take it seriously since the societal disruption potential is very high and humans dealt poorly with the previous few transitions when tons of people lost jobs. The AI doesn't even have to be that good. Tons of jobs involve trying to turn humans into robots, like call centers and offshore software consultancies, and I think llms passed the "good enough" point a long time ago
  - version_five 3y ago
    I'm sure there are egregious examples, but I think "I told you so" is fine. You get these waves of bro-kids storming into established disciplines and acting like hot shit, it's not surprising to see people happy when their bubble burst. Importantly, I don't see pushback against ML researchers or practitioners, it's against the charlatans who are using the hype to sell snake oil. That's completely warranted.
  - ilaksh 3y ago
    Those are some key aspects of Gary Marcus but not the worst. The worst is that so many people listen to him. It's actually problematic because it confuses lawmakers.
  - namaria 3y ago
    Conflating luddism with anti technology sentiment just illustrates how shallow your analysis is. And isn't complaining about complaints just more noise? The thing about luddism is, it correlated strongly with suppression of legitimate industrial action. It wasn't an act of ignorance or seeking regression. It was a violent manifestation of labor push back against rampant exploitation in the face of systematic suppression of legitimate channels.
- version_five 3y ago
  Seems more just non-commercial, which is fine. Hype is more subjective. For example the gzip thing appeared to me to be hype, but it's there. And the mere existence of yet another AI list is a kind of hype. Much better than "10 things you need to know [thread]" stuff.
- emmender1 3y ago
  where is the pushback ? can you share any links. all i see is the hype cycle. also, the title is click-bait. I was expecting a list of pushback articles. and whats the deal with developers curating such lists and posting on hn ?
  - mypastself 3y ago
    Among the more amusing ones is Slate’s recent “See? It’s eight months later and there’s no mass unemployment yet”: https://slate.com/technology/2023/08/chat-gpt-artificial-intelligence-jobs-economy-employment-labor.html https://slate.com/technology/2023/08/chat-gpt-artificial-int...
  - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
    The push back was in another post on HN couple days ago. Basically saying the current LLM's aren't that good, this is all hype, charlatan hype. Really ignoring the real results, and taking they hype as all their is. Then this list of articles is kind of the anti-hype-hype. 'here are some real results'. The anti-ai threads https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37256577#37260717 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37256577#37260717 Might have link wrong, here is another https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37256577 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37256577 and another https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37263231 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37263231 Tech people are little bi-polar when it comes to hype. Everyone, seems to love the hype on the way up. Then little while later, the 'hipsters' are like 'that sucks, this hype is all a lie you lemmings'. Then a few year later, the silent majority of engineers are quietly plugging along and have adopted whatever settled out of they hype-hype-backlash cycle.
jhbadger 3y ago
A solid reading list is useful because it's important to understand a technology before either hyping it or criticizing it, Too much description of LLMs both from the "hey this is cool and will revolutionize the world" crowd and this "this is scammy crap like NFTs and not AI" crowd seems to oversimplify the method making it sound like a simple Markov chain. We had Markov chains in the 1980s on hardware less powerful than what's probably powering your microwave today. For better or ill, LLMs are considerably more powerful than that.
- qsort 3y ago
  Coming from someone who has never been a "true believer", I agree that the pushback is a bit harsh, but to be honest they brought it on themselves. When GPT-4 was first released you couldn't walk ten feet without seeing some Linkedin-tier bullshit about how this was going to be the final form of intelligence, the replacement for all developers, the replacement for all workers, the second coming of Christ on live broadcast, you get the idea. When inevitably reality doesn't meet expectations, you get the pushback. The sooner we get over this ridiculous team game where we must either state that LLMs are AGI or LLMs are random number generators, the sooner we can start asking the real question: how can we take this technology, limitations and all, and actually use it in a production system? Where is it useful and where is it useless? Because that's still the point, and if I haven't missed anything, it's still highly nontrivial to answer that question with any degree of seriousness.
  - mountainriver 3y ago
    Lots of people are answering that question today, LLMs are being worked into production systems at an incredible pace
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      But not without trouble. Getting consistent, reproducible and only good results is really hard, plenty of examples of companies that would love to take it into production but that seem to be stuck in a loop where as long as the AI stuff goes off the rails in non-brand safe ways they aren't going to get a green light. And I haven't seen any major change there over the last two months or so, what I have seen is that there are now better test suits and better tooling.
akasakahakada 3y ago
I thought it would be philosophy nonsense like consciousness is not computable/ consciousness need a body etc, but turn out a legit introduction booklist into deeping learning.
- amkkma 3y ago
  "nonsense"
hzay 3y ago
Nice list, many are resources I used to get up to speed on this. I'm currently competing on kaggle on an NLP competition and I feel this is honestly great way to see the limitations of LMs and LLMs. Kaggle's community is like nothing else out there. They share incredible resources and experiments constantly.
29athrowaway 3y ago
See also: the Prolog AI hype
mark_l_watson 3y ago
Great list by Vicki Boykis. I just saw this posted by someone in Mastodon. So far, my favorite linked article is on why you may want to self-host your own open LLMs.
axpy906 3y ago
Wasn’t this posted before?
kordlessagain 3y ago
Adding to the bits about deploying and training models: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37121384 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37121384 If anyone has anything to add, that would be great!
Sparkyte 3y ago
This is a double edged sword. While not being anything like crypto as it will have a real world impact almost immediately the important thing to understand and recognize is that AI is imperfect as it is formed from imperfect data as humans are imperfect. However this does mean that AI can for a lack of better judgement replace a lot of imperfect work. The problem with this replacement is that it rips out a financial ecosystem a heavily interpersonal society depends on in the form of classes. Businesses can not make money without losing money and definitely can not continue to make more money without money to be made. It has almost like a hydrological diagram where instead it is money. The problem is that without a circular flow of income within a currency we experience what we call stagnation which will cause hyper inflation , money printed to meet demand and the depreciated value of a currency and increase in the cost of goods.There was a particularly good reason for having income tax brackets up to 70%. AI needs laws and regulation. It will like keep progressing and ripping out key stones in the foundation of our economy. Less people working eventually means less profits for all businesses and industry.
f137 3y ago
"Anti-hype LLM reading list" - this is the actual title of the github page. "Anti-AI Hype" seems to be a very bad editorializing. It corrupts the meaning of the title, and makes it ambiguous.

208 points by atg_abhishek 3y ago

There has been a lot of push back lately that the current hype cycle is completely un-warranted, in the process of fading away, and generally that LLM's aren't that good really. I thought that was what this post was about. Really, this is just trying to 'cut through the hype'. When we get beyond the hype, here is a list of articles to explain current state? Am I correct here?

brandall10 3y ago
Seems that way. "Hype free" would probably be a better way to put it.
danielbln 3y ago
That recent pushback has been a bit exhausting, even more so than a hype preceding it. At least the hype was full of hope and excitement, the recent pushback is full of snide (and often unwarranted) I-told-you-so and a taste of luddite. I guess that's how the pendulum goes.
- mathisfun123 3y ago
  > I guess that's how the pendulum goes https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel-dialectics/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel-dialectics/
- vikramkr 3y ago
  Pendulum is probably way sharper this time around because we're dealing with the aftermath of the crypto fallout. Sure in practice this time there are actual applications and lots of people paying actual money for real products, but tech has lost a lot of it's sheen and there's going to be a lot more very understandable dismissal of the next shiny. Even though for this one we should probably actually take it seriously since the societal disruption potential is very high and humans dealt poorly with the previous few transitions when tons of people lost jobs. The AI doesn't even have to be that good. Tons of jobs involve trying to turn humans into robots, like call centers and offshore software consultancies, and I think llms passed the "good enough" point a long time ago
- version_five 3y ago
  I'm sure there are egregious examples, but I think "I told you so" is fine. You get these waves of bro-kids storming into established disciplines and acting like hot shit, it's not surprising to see people happy when their bubble burst. Importantly, I don't see pushback against ML researchers or practitioners, it's against the charlatans who are using the hype to sell snake oil. That's completely warranted.
- ilaksh 3y ago
  Those are some key aspects of Gary Marcus but not the worst. The worst is that so many people listen to him. It's actually problematic because it confuses lawmakers.
- namaria 3y ago
  Conflating luddism with anti technology sentiment just illustrates how shallow your analysis is. And isn't complaining about complaints just more noise? The thing about luddism is, it correlated strongly with suppression of legitimate industrial action. It wasn't an act of ignorance or seeking regression. It was a violent manifestation of labor push back against rampant exploitation in the face of systematic suppression of legitimate channels.
version_five 3y ago
Seems more just non-commercial, which is fine. Hype is more subjective. For example the gzip thing appeared to me to be hype, but it's there. And the mere existence of yet another AI list is a kind of hype. Much better than "10 things you need to know [thread]" stuff.
emmender1 3y ago
where is the pushback ? can you share any links. all i see is the hype cycle. also, the title is click-bait. I was expecting a list of pushback articles. and whats the deal with developers curating such lists and posting on hn ?
- mypastself 3y ago
  Among the more amusing ones is Slate’s recent “See? It’s eight months later and there’s no mass unemployment yet”: https://slate.com/technology/2023/08/chat-gpt-artificial-intelligence-jobs-economy-employment-labor.html https://slate.com/technology/2023/08/chat-gpt-artificial-int...
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  The push back was in another post on HN couple days ago. Basically saying the current LLM's aren't that good, this is all hype, charlatan hype. Really ignoring the real results, and taking they hype as all their is. Then this list of articles is kind of the anti-hype-hype. 'here are some real results'. The anti-ai threads https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37256577#37260717 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37256577#37260717 Might have link wrong, here is another https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37256577 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37256577 and another https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37263231 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37263231 Tech people are little bi-polar when it comes to hype. Everyone, seems to love the hype on the way up. Then little while later, the 'hipsters' are like 'that sucks, this hype is all a lie you lemmings'. Then a few year later, the silent majority of engineers are quietly plugging along and have adopted whatever settled out of they hype-hype-backlash cycle.

jhbadger 3y ago

A solid reading list is useful because it's important to understand a technology before either hyping it or criticizing it, Too much description of LLMs both from the "hey this is cool and will revolutionize the world" crowd and this "this is scammy crap like NFTs and not AI" crowd seems to oversimplify the method making it sound like a simple Markov chain. We had Markov chains in the 1980s on hardware less powerful than what's probably powering your microwave today. For better or ill, LLMs are considerably more powerful than that.

qsort 3y ago
Coming from someone who has never been a "true believer", I agree that the pushback is a bit harsh, but to be honest they brought it on themselves. When GPT-4 was first released you couldn't walk ten feet without seeing some Linkedin-tier bullshit about how this was going to be the final form of intelligence, the replacement for all developers, the replacement for all workers, the second coming of Christ on live broadcast, you get the idea. When inevitably reality doesn't meet expectations, you get the pushback. The sooner we get over this ridiculous team game where we must either state that LLMs are AGI or LLMs are random number generators, the sooner we can start asking the real question: how can we take this technology, limitations and all, and actually use it in a production system? Where is it useful and where is it useless? Because that's still the point, and if I haven't missed anything, it's still highly nontrivial to answer that question with any degree of seriousness.
- mountainriver 3y ago
  Lots of people are answering that question today, LLMs are being worked into production systems at an incredible pace
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    But not without trouble. Getting consistent, reproducible and only good results is really hard, plenty of examples of companies that would love to take it into production but that seem to be stuck in a loop where as long as the AI stuff goes off the rails in non-brand safe ways they aren't going to get a green light. And I haven't seen any major change there over the last two months or so, what I have seen is that there are now better test suits and better tooling.

akasakahakada 3y ago

I thought it would be philosophy nonsense like consciousness is not computable/ consciousness need a body etc, but turn out a legit introduction booklist into deeping learning.

amkkma 3y ago
"nonsense"

hzay 3y ago

Nice list, many are resources I used to get up to speed on this. I'm currently competing on kaggle on an NLP competition and I feel this is honestly great way to see the limitations of LMs and LLMs. Kaggle's community is like nothing else out there. They share incredible resources and experiments constantly.

29athrowaway 3y ago