5 ms·
The Year in Computer Science
- minroot 3y agoMost of this are just AI things
- FrustratedMonky 3y agoCurrent LLM's, Combined with Symbolic AI. Could that be the next jump.
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoThat's my personal hunch, too. Not so much for making "intelligence" ala Hal 9000, but for coordination / planning / structuring of what was acquired using probabilistic methods. For, like, actual practical applications ... rather than pretending to be a person. Had a person associated with a VC basically tell me that the VC community would fund nothing to do with symbolic, though. Not the current trend sauce.
- mkvoid 3y agoThat's super interesting. Any ideas on other trends that are occurring but that VCs won't touch? Genuinely curious now.
- blovescoffee 3y ago"A person associated with a VC" could mean virtually anyone. Not to be too dismissive but also temper how much stock you put into that judgement.
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoI'm not saying this person is right, and I have no idea, not my milieu.
- utopcell 3y ago(fun fact.) What do you get if you subtract 1 from each letter in I, B, M ?
- blovescoffee 3y agoFor the most part, approximating symbolic AI with LLMs is way more powerful than approximating LLMs with symbolic AI. There may be more power still in keeping the "logic" inside fuzzy weights instead of complicating things by merging two paradigms.
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoUntil you want to be able to show exactly how and why your system arrived at a result... Completely depends on the thing you're trying to do, but if you're running an autonomous vehicle or a factory system or something similar, relying on mysterious weights and fuzziness to make critical decisions sounds like a disaster. But being able to point to a pile of Horn clauses that were vetted by PMs and legal, and a graph of every piece of knowledge that was used to make those decisions... that sounds valuable. Yes, I'm sure the stuff we call symbolic AI isn't great for making chat bots and assistants... But there are plenty of other senses of AI where a more deterministic and explicit approach makes sense? That's my admittedly naive take, anyways.
- hutzlibu 3y ago"but if you're running an autonomous vehicle or a factory system or something similar, relying on mysterious weights and fuzziness to make critical decisions sounds like a disaster." When your brain messes up and you have an accident, isn't that a pretty similar scenario? Sometimes people make misstakes - some more than others and we do tests to determine whether a human can do a job good enough by its results, without examining their brains. With autonomous cars it can be the same. Lots of tests - and if it safely can handle complex situations reliable - that would be good enough for me. (But I think we are currently pretty far from it)
- PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago> When your brain messes up and you have an accident, isn't that a pretty similar scenario? When LLM's start going to jail for killing people then we can consider them equivalent. Until that happens, they must be held to a higher standard specifically because the incentives aren't there otherwise.
- real0mar 3y agoI love the art in quanta magazine
- datameta 3y agoMe too. I've been trying to find the piece of art with the earth's kingdoms of life surrounding a macro scale - it used to be my wallpaper but I lost track of it. I'd put some of those artists' works on my wall.
- datameta 3y agoOops, an omission. macro scale atom*
- flobosg 3y agoIs it by any chance this one? https://d2r55xnwy6nx47.cloudfront.net/uploads/2020/12/Quantum-Observers_2880_Lede.jpg https://d2r55xnwy6nx47.cloudfront.net/uploads/2020/12/Quantu... (from https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-theorem-maps-out-the-limits-of-quantum-physics-20201203/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-theorem-maps-out-the-li...)
- IWeldMelons 3y agoVeritasium uses very similar style.
- datadrivenangel 3y ago"In August, a computer scientist developed an even faster variation of Shor’s algorithm, the first significant improvement since its invention. “I would have thought that any algorithm that worked with this basic outline would be doomed,” Shor said. “But I was wrong.”" You have to appreciate the humility.
- elijahbenizzy 3y agoI know LLMs are all the rage, but I’m genuinely shocked at the new fastest path algo for negative weight graphs. That’s awesome!
- ckcheng 3y agoRelevant Quanta article: https://www.quantamagazine.org/finally-a-fast-algorithm-for-shortest-paths-on-negative-graphs-20230118/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/finally-a-fast-algorithm-for-... The CACM article discussed here at the time (just 3 months ago!): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37275676 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37275676 The relevant paper is https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.03456 https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.03456 and an improvement here https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.05279 https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.05279 I wonder if this will become standard curriculum for undergrads sooner rather than later. It's apparently a very simple and approachable method.
- elijahbenizzy 3y agoWonderful! Yeah, admittedly, I haven't sat out and drawn it out (my process for learning algorithms is often just do it by hand until it intuitively makes sense), but it did strike me as pretty straightforward on first glance. Thanks!
- unwise-exe 3y agoI do not understand the Vector AI thing. Doing math on embeddings isn't new, so it can't be that. So what is it?
- tnecniv 3y agoI looked a little into it. Some of it is indeed built on stuff that is quite old. It seems like they’re doing a vector embedding thing but have operations defined on their embedding space that capture certain symbolic reasoning abilities and allow you to perform reasoning using multiple networks (they have a structured way to combine the output of a color network and a shape network to encode “red triangle” even if the networks don’t know about each other)