5 ms·
I wouldn’t expect anything meaningful at what is essentially a year and a half into the practical build cycle. Top to bottom nothing is optimized, use cases not
by fnordpiglet 3y ago
I wouldn’t expect anything meaningful at what is essentially a year and a half into the practical build cycle. Top to bottom nothing is optimized, use cases not fully established.
There’s an awful lot of FUD on HN about this being like crypto. In a decade of trying I never found a meaningful and practical use case for crypto beyond “HODL.” For generative AI we are finding immediately useful applications under nearly every rock we turn over, with increasingly powerful results. These aren’t speculative, they’re allowing us to do things at scales we couldn’t imagine a few years ago. I’m seeing this with most my professional network involved in high end tech. The tool chains suck, and we are limited by GPU capacity as well as inference costs, but these are short term constraints. As patterns solidify the tool chains will too, GPU capacity is ramping up rapidly, and there are plenty of optimizations on the horizon.
I for one see this much more akin to the gold rush of the internet over the 1994-2020 time frame in super fast motion. Will we overshoot? Absolutely. But the effect is real.
- NewJazz 3y agoLotta words to answer no. I also would challenge your "year and a half" timeline... Gen ai has been around.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoYes, but not practically useful in general cases prior to GPT4 level models.
- PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y agoand you'll be saying that about GPT5 when it comes out to. This is what hype looks like.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoYou can choose to believe what you choose. However I’m working with these things at a senior tech lead level at a megacorp and what I’m doing is actually really real, with real material benefits. I don’t know that another order of magnitude performance improvement would matter as much to me as better tooling, performance, context, lower costs, and higher GPU capacity. But if it does, 1000% I’ll be hyping it. I hype things that work and dismiss things that don’t, that’s what an engineer is supposed to do.
- NewJazz 3y agoOK... So care to share what that benefit looks like? This whole thread was about asking for concrete examples of generative AI's utility.
- humansareok1 3y agoGive an LLM the text of a PDF document. Ask the model to extract values in the document or in tables. Input the values into a spreadsheet. This is at minimum a task which costs companies around the world Hundreds of Millions of dollars a year.
- PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y agowhat you're describing is automation and companies have been doing it for years.
- NewJazz 3y agoYeah I'd love to see the results... If anything if there is a multimillion dollar benefit on the table one might argue that companies should publish this data in a more useful format. But no, let's bandaid over outdated practices like PDF-only data and burn GPU cycles to do it, with 92% accurate results.
- humansareok1 3y agoIf it replaces hundreds or thousands of man-hours of expensive labor then yes lets do it.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoA lot of things don’t require 100% accuracy, and raging against the worlds outdated practices doesn’t solve problems faced in the immediate present - and after spending 30 years of my career rating at those practices to absolutely no meaningful effect, a more effective bandaid that has a semantic understanding of the content is probably as good as you get. And GPU cycles are meant to be wasted.