4 ms·

Indeed. These are basically tech demos at this point. A marvel to see, and sometimes useful, but still extremely crude. There's a lot of headroom for sophistic

Indeed. These are basically tech demos at this point. A marvel to see, and sometimes useful, but still extremely crude. There's a lot of headroom for sophistication as a few more research insights are made and an experienced tooling team commits a few years to making rich multimodal/ensemble code assistants that can perform smart analyses, transformations, boilerplating, etc on your project instead of just adding some text to your file. But it'll take a years of insight and labor to build that system up, adapt it to different industries/uses, and prove it out as engineering-ready. People get caught up in the novelty of Copilot and ChatGPT and then imagine that the revolution arrives when some new paper comes out tomorrow (or that none will arrive because of today's limitations), but the far more likely reality is that the revolution paces as something more like the internet's -- real and profound, but unfolding gradually over the span of decades as people work hard to make new things with it.

renegade-otter 3y ago
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." -Arthur C. Clarke
TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
Frankly, we may be barking up the wrong tree with LLMs. Sure they deliver novel and very marketable results, hence the insane funding, but I can’t help but feel it’s really just a parlor trick and there is a yet undiscovered algorithm that can actually deliver the AGI that we seek - AGI that reliable and precise like fictional AIs.
- jrockway 3y ago
  I think a lot of progress in the field of AI comes from random breakthroughs rather than evolution of existing ideas. For that reason, I think AGI will probably be another random breakthrough, and not just an LLM with more parameters. Good if you're NVidia, bad if you're OpenAI. The random breakthrough could happen at Google, or it could happen in some professor's basement. There is no way to know, and no way to throw money at the problem and guarantee a return.
  - TillE 3y ago
    > bad if you're OpenAI Just a few days ago there was a (somewhat cryptic) report about OpenAI developing a model that could do simple math. I'm certain they're pursuing quite a lot of research that's not directly related to LLMs. I don't think we're heading towards AGI any time soon, but I can imagine a complex system in the next couple years which uses an LLM for text generation, but offloads its serious "thinking" on to predictable, specialized subsystems. It's easy to imagine a lot of possibilities for code in particular.
    - jrockway 3y ago
      I look at it like finding a lost treasure or something like that. The government expedition with a 1 trillion dollar budget might find it first... or it might be in some guy's attic and his kid came over and happened to notice it. Spending infinite money on research increases your chances, but it's still a chance.
      - Belomolo 3y ago
        The protein folding project was basically solved due to money and ml. Alpha fold. The leap that area took thanks to it was a leap. It's more than just something potentially better
  - TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
    > Good if you're NVidia, bad if you're OpenAI Not necessarily good for Nvidia. If the new algorithm is branch heavy, don’t parallelize well, … etc. and operate better on CPUs rather than GPUs, it will be Intel, AMD, and ARM that enjoy the windfall.
    - jrockway 3y ago
      Good point!
  - ImHereToVote 3y ago
    It would be a very poor AGI if it didn't create a company that does AGI ASICs in the first few days. Minutes?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- oblio 3y ago
  > there is a yet undiscovered algorithm that can actually deliver the AGI that we seek - AGI that reliable and precise like fictional AIs. Nobody wants to hear this, but AGI could very well be the next invention after practical cold fusion and faster-than-light travel. Yes, we're moving faster, but does anyone know how long the road is? A space rocket is moving very quickly (50k kmph?), much faster than any other technology such as airliners, maglev trains, but the closest star is still several light years away.
staunton 3y ago
I think the ultimate jump in capability would be achieved by making a dedicated language to be used by an LLM and training it in parallel on mainly that. The problem is that to make this actually useful you need to establish a new programming language. And making a useful programming language that is actually used by people is even more expensive and takes more time than training a state-of-the-art LLM...
moring 3y ago
> These are basically tech demos at this point. I disagree with this conclusion. Crude as it is, Copilot _does_ make me faster in practice, even though I have to proofread its output. I think this also agrees with your second statement, that progress will come in small but useful improvements. If you treat Copilot like improved auto-completion, then it is very useful today. Actually, while using syntax trees as the underlying model is a very interesting approach, there is still a lot of low-hanging fruit to make Copilot much more useful than it is today, just in terms of performance (waiting 1-2 seconds to see if there is a completion, and if it makes sense, interrupts my typing flow) as well as low-level features (e.g. mark and insert part of a suggestion, instead of inserting the whole and then removing the wrong parts).
Belomolo 3y ago
Internet was hard limited on getting access in a physical world. The first tech giving me internet reliable was DSL or 60kbytes/sec. This tech could only be replaced with replacing or adding cables. Nvidia is making a ton more petaflops per month than last year and a lot of money and people have moved/shifted in a very short period of time. Even my company saw the writing and the only/primarily thing we talk about is ml. I also don't have to wait for services like a bank or anyone else supporting emails or internet services. We have everything already in place for a much faster speed than at any other tech before.

renegade-otter 3y ago

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." -Arthur C. Clarke

TerrifiedMouse 3y ago

Frankly, we may be barking up the wrong tree with LLMs. Sure they deliver novel and very marketable results, hence the insane funding, but I can’t help but feel it’s really just a parlor trick and there is a yet undiscovered algorithm that can actually deliver the AGI that we seek - AGI that reliable and precise like fictional AIs.

jrockway 3y ago
I think a lot of progress in the field of AI comes from random breakthroughs rather than evolution of existing ideas. For that reason, I think AGI will probably be another random breakthrough, and not just an LLM with more parameters. Good if you're NVidia, bad if you're OpenAI. The random breakthrough could happen at Google, or it could happen in some professor's basement. There is no way to know, and no way to throw money at the problem and guarantee a return.
- TillE 3y ago
  > bad if you're OpenAI Just a few days ago there was a (somewhat cryptic) report about OpenAI developing a model that could do simple math. I'm certain they're pursuing quite a lot of research that's not directly related to LLMs. I don't think we're heading towards AGI any time soon, but I can imagine a complex system in the next couple years which uses an LLM for text generation, but offloads its serious "thinking" on to predictable, specialized subsystems. It's easy to imagine a lot of possibilities for code in particular.
  - jrockway 3y ago
    I look at it like finding a lost treasure or something like that. The government expedition with a 1 trillion dollar budget might find it first... or it might be in some guy's attic and his kid came over and happened to notice it. Spending infinite money on research increases your chances, but it's still a chance.
    - Belomolo 3y ago
      The protein folding project was basically solved due to money and ml. Alpha fold. The leap that area took thanks to it was a leap. It's more than just something potentially better
- TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
  > Good if you're NVidia, bad if you're OpenAI Not necessarily good for Nvidia. If the new algorithm is branch heavy, don’t parallelize well, … etc. and operate better on CPUs rather than GPUs, it will be Intel, AMD, and ARM that enjoy the windfall.
  - jrockway 3y ago
    Good point!
- ImHereToVote 3y ago
  It would be a very poor AGI if it didn't create a company that does AGI ASICs in the first few days. Minutes?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
oblio 3y ago
> there is a yet undiscovered algorithm that can actually deliver the AGI that we seek - AGI that reliable and precise like fictional AIs. Nobody wants to hear this, but AGI could very well be the next invention after practical cold fusion and faster-than-light travel. Yes, we're moving faster, but does anyone know how long the road is? A space rocket is moving very quickly (50k kmph?), much faster than any other technology such as airliners, maglev trains, but the closest star is still several light years away.

staunton 3y ago

I think the ultimate jump in capability would be achieved by making a dedicated language to be used by an LLM and training it in parallel on mainly that. The problem is that to make this actually useful you need to establish a new programming language. And making a useful programming language that is actually used by people is even more expensive and takes more time than training a state-of-the-art LLM...

moring 3y ago

> These are basically tech demos at this point. I disagree with this conclusion. Crude as it is, Copilot _does_ make me faster in practice, even though I have to proofread its output. I think this also agrees with your second statement, that progress will come in small but useful improvements. If you treat Copilot like improved auto-completion, then it is very useful today. Actually, while using syntax trees as the underlying model is a very interesting approach, there is still a lot of low-hanging fruit to make Copilot much more useful than it is today, just in terms of performance (waiting 1-2 seconds to see if there is a completion, and if it makes sense, interrupts my typing flow) as well as low-level features (e.g. mark and insert part of a suggestion, instead of inserting the whole and then removing the wrong parts).

Belomolo 3y ago

Internet was hard limited on getting access in a physical world. The first tech giving me internet reliable was DSL or 60kbytes/sec. This tech could only be replaced with replacing or adding cables. Nvidia is making a ton more petaflops per month than last year and a lot of money and people have moved/shifted in a very short period of time. Even my company saw the writing and the only/primarily thing we talk about is ml. I also don't have to wait for services like a bank or anyone else supporting emails or internet services. We have everything already in place for a much faster speed than at any other tech before.