5 ms·

> 48% if half way to 100% … It's halfway their to taking your job and your underwhelmed. You’re implying 100% reliability is actually attainable. If that were

> 48% if half way to 100% … It's halfway their to taking your job and your underwhelmed. You’re implying 100% reliability is actually attainable. If that were the case, wouldn’t that mean the halting problem would have been solved by AI? I’m not an expert but I’ve heard that’s like one of those fundamental laws of information theory that really can’t be broken. > It's typical. It's like an indie band is only popular when not many people know about it. Once everybody starts talking about it all the time it loses it's popularity. I think applying the sociology of hipster band fans to LLMs is a mistake and I’m not sure how the vogueness of the technology correlates with the correctness of the actual models. Sometimes an early technology seems docile or useless at first but eventually reaches ubiquity and in retrospect the utility is obvious. But sometimes (more often than not) standard adoption curves don’t make sense to apply to a new technology because it isn’t useful enough to go through an adoption cycle. I think there’s a temptation to apply the analogy of something like the early internet or smartphone to LLMs but those are networked products. LLMs don’t really improve with the various applications built on top of them if the LLM is itself fundamentally broken or faulty to the point that it is unsafe to use in practice. Furthermore given the massive amount of premature hype due to the AI zeitgeist, you can safely assume enough user hours have been spent messing with LLMs to get a verdict on their utility. Unlike the feeble technology that takes a longtime to reach a scale to know its utility, we don’t have to wait 10 years for 100m people to try LLMs, it happened in a week. My only point being, I think we should be apprehensive about trying to draw analogies of other adoption cycles that structurally are very very different to this one. Obviously, I, like probably everyone else on this website would love LLMs to be reliable to a high degree. Just this morning I had such a good use for an LLM that I was seriously considering building (and admittedly still am pondering) but the second I started to think through the LLM faultiness, I had to consider the complexity of the safe guards and weigh if it was really better to use GPT or just write a nasty regex script and constrain the problem. I’m leaning heavily towards the latter but I’d much prefer a silver bullet if it really killed vampires. Until then (if that day ever comes), it’s lead bullets for me.

corethree 3y ago
>You’re implying 100% reliability is actually attainable. If that were the case, wouldn’t that mean the halting problem would have been solved by AI? I’m not an expert but I’ve heard that’s like one of those fundamental laws of information theory that really can’t be broken. Nah even 100% reliability isn't attainable by a human. 100% obviously doesn't imply solving the halting problem. 100% as in 100% as reliable as a human. Even surpassing a human. Sort of in the same way as a computer now beats humans at chess. >I think applying the sociology of hipster band fans to LLMs is a mistake Why would it be a mistake? Human psychology is similar across all spectrums. What happens in one area is likely possible in another area. If it happens among hipster bands it can happen among hipster technology fads. >I think there’s a temptation to apply the analogy of something like the early internet or smartphone to LLMs but those are networked products. LLMs don’t really improve with the various applications built on top of them if the LLM is itself fundamentally broken or faulty to the point that it is unsafe to use in practice. This is a valid speculation. But it's speculation. Basically your saying that LLMs are fundamentally broken and stuck at 38% forever because of fundamental and permanent flaws. The jury on that one is still out. And your point is highly, highly speculative. We see quantitative improvements on LLMs constantly AND this is a nascent technology we don't completely understand yet. The most probably and logical conclusion is to follow the technological trendline. That trendline is pointing up. To speculate on fundamental flaws of the LLM when people don't even fully understand what's going on with the LLM is illogical because you can't derive conclusions from something you don't understand. We can only generalize the trendline and constant improvements we've seen in AI for the past decade. Again that trendline is pointing to further break throughs in the future. >Obviously, I, like probably everyone else on this website would love LLMs to be reliable to a high degree. No this is not obvious to me. I disagree. I think some people are like you but other people, for example Geoffrey Hinton are in the apocalyptic camp. Personally I'm in the middle, I think it could go either way. It will definitely harm a segment of our society by taking over work, but whether the benefits of AGI outweighs the harm remains to be seen.
- jsunderland323 3y ago
  I'm not going to rebut everything but I want to point out that I think Geoffrey Hinton is way more in your camp in regards to faith in the technology (which is what we're discussing). I'm in the camp that thinks LLMs are at best a viable competitor to furby -- I have zero existential fears and have very little confidence in them. I'm not opposed to AIs, I just think the state of the art is really really bad (sorry) and the doom and existentialism is a marketing ploy to a world imbued in conspiracy theory and institutional distrust in order to compensate for a wildly over promised and under delivered product. But hey, when you gotta raise money, you gotta raise money, and as you put it, the "trend line is going up" and that's all that matters.
__loam 3y ago
I agree with the majority of your well considered comment. I'm okay with LLMs being really unreliable though. I think if they actually worked, it would be an unmitigated disaster for workers globally.
- jsunderland323 3y ago
  I think there’s arguments to be made both ways. I‘m generally of the belief that technology that works is a net win for humanity. But I think we need to stop being vague about what it means for an LLM to work. For me, I just want to tell an LLM to replace all the hard coded strings in my app with translation tags. Sadly, this isn’t possible to do reliably with what we have today. I’m not sure who’s job this would eliminate other than my own. I think the more existential questions are about if we made a god box that could perform all the white collar jobs. I think we’re so far away from that despite being sold that vision, that we might as well consider the moral and philosophical implications of a time machine or teleportation device if we’re going to continue to entertain AI doomerism for LLMs.
  - __loam 3y ago
    Hah fair point

corethree 3y ago

>You’re implying 100% reliability is actually attainable. If that were the case, wouldn’t that mean the halting problem would have been solved by AI? I’m not an expert but I’ve heard that’s like one of those fundamental laws of information theory that really can’t be broken. Nah even 100% reliability isn't attainable by a human. 100% obviously doesn't imply solving the halting problem. 100% as in 100% as reliable as a human. Even surpassing a human. Sort of in the same way as a computer now beats humans at chess. >I think applying the sociology of hipster band fans to LLMs is a mistake Why would it be a mistake? Human psychology is similar across all spectrums. What happens in one area is likely possible in another area. If it happens among hipster bands it can happen among hipster technology fads. >I think there’s a temptation to apply the analogy of something like the early internet or smartphone to LLMs but those are networked products. LLMs don’t really improve with the various applications built on top of them if the LLM is itself fundamentally broken or faulty to the point that it is unsafe to use in practice. This is a valid speculation. But it's speculation. Basically your saying that LLMs are fundamentally broken and stuck at 38% forever because of fundamental and permanent flaws. The jury on that one is still out. And your point is highly, highly speculative. We see quantitative improvements on LLMs constantly AND this is a nascent technology we don't completely understand yet. The most probably and logical conclusion is to follow the technological trendline. That trendline is pointing up. To speculate on fundamental flaws of the LLM when people don't even fully understand what's going on with the LLM is illogical because you can't derive conclusions from something you don't understand. We can only generalize the trendline and constant improvements we've seen in AI for the past decade. Again that trendline is pointing to further break throughs in the future. >Obviously, I, like probably everyone else on this website would love LLMs to be reliable to a high degree. No this is not obvious to me. I disagree. I think some people are like you but other people, for example Geoffrey Hinton are in the apocalyptic camp. Personally I'm in the middle, I think it could go either way. It will definitely harm a segment of our society by taking over work, but whether the benefits of AGI outweighs the harm remains to be seen.

jsunderland323 3y ago
I'm not going to rebut everything but I want to point out that I think Geoffrey Hinton is way more in your camp in regards to faith in the technology (which is what we're discussing). I'm in the camp that thinks LLMs are at best a viable competitor to furby -- I have zero existential fears and have very little confidence in them. I'm not opposed to AIs, I just think the state of the art is really really bad (sorry) and the doom and existentialism is a marketing ploy to a world imbued in conspiracy theory and institutional distrust in order to compensate for a wildly over promised and under delivered product. But hey, when you gotta raise money, you gotta raise money, and as you put it, the "trend line is going up" and that's all that matters.

__loam 3y ago

I agree with the majority of your well considered comment. I'm okay with LLMs being really unreliable though. I think if they actually worked, it would be an unmitigated disaster for workers globally.

jsunderland323 3y ago
I think there’s arguments to be made both ways. I‘m generally of the belief that technology that works is a net win for humanity. But I think we need to stop being vague about what it means for an LLM to work. For me, I just want to tell an LLM to replace all the hard coded strings in my app with translation tags. Sadly, this isn’t possible to do reliably with what we have today. I’m not sure who’s job this would eliminate other than my own. I think the more existential questions are about if we made a god box that could perform all the white collar jobs. I think we’re so far away from that despite being sold that vision, that we might as well consider the moral and philosophical implications of a time machine or teleportation device if we’re going to continue to entertain AI doomerism for LLMs.
- __loam 3y ago
  Hah fair point