5 ms·

A doctor for every person, a teacher for every child, available any time and for free.

danielbln 3y ago
Doctor, therapist, teacher, coach - and with the advent of private, fine-tunable models those can be private, local and in the hand of the people.
- franky47 3y ago
  > private, local and in the hand of the people. We've seen time and time again that "the people" prefers centralised, paid, convenient management of complexity. If the majority of "the people" prefers paying a subscription for watching movies or listening to music, I doubt they'll make the effort to learn how to tune and run private LLMs locally, for medical aspects or otherwise. Not when there will be major companies spending billions on marketing more convenient options. Guillermo Rauch's essay [1] still rings true: it's hard to forego efficiency (though it works just as well for convenience). [1] https://rauchg.com/2017/its-hard-to-forego-efficiency https://rauchg.com/2017/its-hard-to-forego-efficiency
- lewhoo 3y ago
  But I haven't seen any good argument as to why an AI teacher that is even cognitively equivalent to the real deal (and surpasses a human in everything a machine can) won't just become an intellectual worker. I'm not saying this eliminates the need for education, but it certainly erases its major component and that is to be competitive on the job market.
- namaria 3y ago
  I don't know where this idea comes from that we can get more from language models then what we put inside. Thinking we can process any amount of data and get a competent surrogate mind out of it borders on magical thinking.
  - danielbln 3y ago
    Who is we? The model creator or the user? Getting out what we put in is kind of par for the course in education, yes?
    - namaria 3y ago
      >Getting out what we put in is kind of par for the course in education, yes? Yes, you put in a person + knowledge and get out an educated person. Is it reasonable to expect to put in GPU + text and get somehow a competent actor, however narrowly we define competence (maybe if we define actor narrowly enough)?
evrimoztamur 3y ago
A doctor is a lot more than just a black box taking the patients' descriptions and measurements, and running regressions on them. Doctors can touch, feel, understand, comfort in ways that our sensors or tensors (hah) can't. Same applies for a teacher too, in various other aspects. Reducing important professions into statistical models is exactly the kind of crappification that the author's talking about. The logical conclusion of perfect sensors and tensors is not here, and the lacking substitutes along the way will be profit-driven, not solution-driven.
- Jack000 3y ago
  I didn't say they would be better. Most people on earth lack any access to healthcare at all. https://shorturl.at/joA23 https://shorturl.at/joA23
- infecto 3y ago
  Unfortunately most doctors don’t have the time to be that hands on and at the end of the day are just taking your symptoms and comparing it to their flesh database of illness. There is a lot of value from just having help diagnose/triage people with illness. Certainly not a replacement but definitely a complement to get access to healthcare to more.
- dagw 3y ago
  Doctors can touch, feel, understand... Sure they can, but many don't either because of lack of time, or quite frankly, because many doctors are bad at their job. And even in the best case scenario we will never be able to provide doctors to 100% of the population. For many people the choice won't be AI or a (free) caring, passionate doctor who has time to understand you and answer your questions, it's AI or nothing. Same with teaching. A lot of people simply don't have access to teachers, and if even the ones that do, might not have teachers that have the time and knowledge to actually teach what they want to learn.
  - krapp 3y ago
    This is an argument in favor of more human doctors and teachers, not replacing doctors and teachers with software.
squarefoot 3y ago
> A doctor for every person, a teacher for every child, available any time and for free. For free meaning that it is paid by quietly slipping ads into prescriptions or lessons?
- phero_cnstrcts 3y ago
  Well, if that doctor is fully programmable by the big companies it could just diagnose more diseases and write more prescriptions.
  - carlosjobim 3y ago
    Why the "if"? Doctors are systematically bribed by gigantic medical corporations to write prescriptions for their addictive and lethal medication. Pain killer addiction (opioid addiction) kills thousands.
- myrmidon 3y ago
  I understood the "for free" as "with very low marginal cost"-- and no matter how you socialize healthcare/education, that's not something that humans can match.
- ben_w 3y ago
  If the OpenAI pricing is indicative, reading 16k token of medical history and giving a 4k token response will cost $1.50 on GPT-4 and 6.4¢ on GPT-3.5-turbo. The lower of those two is roughly what someone at the UN abject poverty threshold will spend in 48 minutes 30 seconds on "not literally starving to death".
  - danielbln 3y ago
    And if you use fine tuning and RAG you can cut the cost by an order of magnitude. Also, how much did it cost 2 years ago?
    - ben_w 3y ago
      Was it[0] available at any price 2 years ago? (Assuming you mean literally an order of magnitude: 0.64¢ is, judging by Amazon.com, less than the bulk price of a single sheet of unused printer paper, or two thirds of a paperclip). [0] 3 or anything equivalent to it, given 4 obviously wasn't
krapp 3y ago
>A doctor for every person, a teacher for every child, available any time and for free. I'm sorry... I'm supposed to trust my healthcare and child's education to a piece of software whose primary feature is its ability to effectively hallucinate and tell convincing lies? And assuming AI is at all effective, which implies valuable (which implies lucrative,) you expect services built on it to remain free? That's not how anything works in the real world.
- Jack000 3y ago
  > what will LLMs ever do for us? Hallucinations are an engineering problem and can be solved. Compute per dollar is still growing exponentially. Eventually this technology will be widely proliferated and cheap to operate.
  - zyuiop 3y ago
    Are they not an inherent problem with the LLM technology?
  - Karellen 3y ago
    > Hallucinations are an engineering problem and can be solved. I'd like a little more background on that claim. As far as I've been able to tell from my understanding of LLMs, everything they create is a hallucination. It's just a case of "text that could plausibly come next based on the patterns of language they were trained on". When an LLM gets stuff correct, that doesn't make it not a hallucination, it's just that enough correct stuff was in the training data that a fair amount of hallucinations will turn out to be correct. Meanwhile, the LLM has no concept of "true" or "false" or "reality" or "fiction". There's no meta-cognition. It's just "what word probably comes next?" How is that just "an engineering problem [that] can be solved"?
    - ben_w 3y ago
      I agree it's more than a simple engineering challenge, but I do so because it is not entirely clear if even humans avoid this issue, or even if we merely minimise it. We're full of seemingly weird cognitive biases: Roll a roulette wheel in front of people before asking them the percentage of African counties are in the UN, their answers correlate with the number on the wheel. Most of us judge logical strengths of arguments by how believable the conclusion is; by repetition; by rhyme; and worse, knowledge of cognitive biases doesn't help as we tend to use that knowledge to dismiss conclusions we don't like rather than to test our own.
tharne 3y ago
> A doctor for every person, a teacher for every child, available any time and for free. You clearly don't have a deep understanding of what doctors and teachers do.

Doctor, therapist, teacher, coach - and with the advent of private, fine-tunable models those can be private, local and in the hand of the people.

franky47 3y ago
> private, local and in the hand of the people. We've seen time and time again that "the people" prefers centralised, paid, convenient management of complexity. If the majority of "the people" prefers paying a subscription for watching movies or listening to music, I doubt they'll make the effort to learn how to tune and run private LLMs locally, for medical aspects or otherwise. Not when there will be major companies spending billions on marketing more convenient options. Guillermo Rauch's essay [1] still rings true: it's hard to forego efficiency (though it works just as well for convenience). [1] https://rauchg.com/2017/its-hard-to-forego-efficiency https://rauchg.com/2017/its-hard-to-forego-efficiency
lewhoo 3y ago
But I haven't seen any good argument as to why an AI teacher that is even cognitively equivalent to the real deal (and surpasses a human in everything a machine can) won't just become an intellectual worker. I'm not saying this eliminates the need for education, but it certainly erases its major component and that is to be competitive on the job market.
namaria 3y ago
I don't know where this idea comes from that we can get more from language models then what we put inside. Thinking we can process any amount of data and get a competent surrogate mind out of it borders on magical thinking.
- danielbln 3y ago
  Who is we? The model creator or the user? Getting out what we put in is kind of par for the course in education, yes?
  - namaria 3y ago
    >Getting out what we put in is kind of par for the course in education, yes? Yes, you put in a person + knowledge and get out an educated person. Is it reasonable to expect to put in GPU + text and get somehow a competent actor, however narrowly we define competence (maybe if we define actor narrowly enough)?

evrimoztamur 3y ago

A doctor is a lot more than just a black box taking the patients' descriptions and measurements, and running regressions on them. Doctors can touch, feel, understand, comfort in ways that our sensors or tensors (hah) can't. Same applies for a teacher too, in various other aspects. Reducing important professions into statistical models is exactly the kind of crappification that the author's talking about. The logical conclusion of perfect sensors and tensors is not here, and the lacking substitutes along the way will be profit-driven, not solution-driven.

Jack000 3y ago
I didn't say they would be better. Most people on earth lack any access to healthcare at all. https://shorturl.at/joA23 https://shorturl.at/joA23
infecto 3y ago
Unfortunately most doctors don’t have the time to be that hands on and at the end of the day are just taking your symptoms and comparing it to their flesh database of illness. There is a lot of value from just having help diagnose/triage people with illness. Certainly not a replacement but definitely a complement to get access to healthcare to more.
dagw 3y ago
Doctors can touch, feel, understand... Sure they can, but many don't either because of lack of time, or quite frankly, because many doctors are bad at their job. And even in the best case scenario we will never be able to provide doctors to 100% of the population. For many people the choice won't be AI or a (free) caring, passionate doctor who has time to understand you and answer your questions, it's AI or nothing. Same with teaching. A lot of people simply don't have access to teachers, and if even the ones that do, might not have teachers that have the time and knowledge to actually teach what they want to learn.
- krapp 3y ago
  This is an argument in favor of more human doctors and teachers, not replacing doctors and teachers with software.

squarefoot 3y ago

> A doctor for every person, a teacher for every child, available any time and for free. For free meaning that it is paid by quietly slipping ads into prescriptions or lessons?

phero_cnstrcts 3y ago
Well, if that doctor is fully programmable by the big companies it could just diagnose more diseases and write more prescriptions.
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  Why the "if"? Doctors are systematically bribed by gigantic medical corporations to write prescriptions for their addictive and lethal medication. Pain killer addiction (opioid addiction) kills thousands.
myrmidon 3y ago
I understood the "for free" as "with very low marginal cost"-- and no matter how you socialize healthcare/education, that's not something that humans can match.
ben_w 3y ago
If the OpenAI pricing is indicative, reading 16k token of medical history and giving a 4k token response will cost $1.50 on GPT-4 and 6.4¢ on GPT-3.5-turbo. The lower of those two is roughly what someone at the UN abject poverty threshold will spend in 48 minutes 30 seconds on "not literally starving to death".
- danielbln 3y ago
  And if you use fine tuning and RAG you can cut the cost by an order of magnitude. Also, how much did it cost 2 years ago?
  - ben_w 3y ago
    Was it[0] available at any price 2 years ago? (Assuming you mean literally an order of magnitude: 0.64¢ is, judging by Amazon.com, less than the bulk price of a single sheet of unused printer paper, or two thirds of a paperclip). [0] 3 or anything equivalent to it, given 4 obviously wasn't

krapp 3y ago

>A doctor for every person, a teacher for every child, available any time and for free. I'm sorry... I'm supposed to trust my healthcare and child's education to a piece of software whose primary feature is its ability to effectively hallucinate and tell convincing lies? And assuming AI is at all effective, which implies valuable (which implies lucrative,) you expect services built on it to remain free? That's not how anything works in the real world.

Jack000 3y ago
> what will LLMs ever do for us? Hallucinations are an engineering problem and can be solved. Compute per dollar is still growing exponentially. Eventually this technology will be widely proliferated and cheap to operate.
- zyuiop 3y ago
  Are they not an inherent problem with the LLM technology?
- Karellen 3y ago
  > Hallucinations are an engineering problem and can be solved. I'd like a little more background on that claim. As far as I've been able to tell from my understanding of LLMs, everything they create is a hallucination. It's just a case of "text that could plausibly come next based on the patterns of language they were trained on". When an LLM gets stuff correct, that doesn't make it not a hallucination, it's just that enough correct stuff was in the training data that a fair amount of hallucinations will turn out to be correct. Meanwhile, the LLM has no concept of "true" or "false" or "reality" or "fiction". There's no meta-cognition. It's just "what word probably comes next?" How is that just "an engineering problem [that] can be solved"?
  - ben_w 3y ago
    I agree it's more than a simple engineering challenge, but I do so because it is not entirely clear if even humans avoid this issue, or even if we merely minimise it. We're full of seemingly weird cognitive biases: Roll a roulette wheel in front of people before asking them the percentage of African counties are in the UN, their answers correlate with the number on the wheel. Most of us judge logical strengths of arguments by how believable the conclusion is; by repetition; by rhyme; and worse, knowledge of cognitive biases doesn't help as we tend to use that knowledge to dismiss conclusions we don't like rather than to test our own.

tharne 3y ago

> A doctor for every person, a teacher for every child, available any time and for free. You clearly don't have a deep understanding of what doctors and teachers do.