4 ms·

> This feels like an excellent demonstration of the limitation of zero-shot LLMs. It feels like the wrong way to approach this. There is one posted on HN every

> This feels like an excellent demonstration of the limitation of zero-shot LLMs. It feels like the wrong way to approach this. There is one posted on HN every week. How many more do we need to accept the fact this tech is not what it is sold at and we are bored waiting for it get good? I am not say "get better", because it keeps getting better, but somehow doesn't get good.

makk 2y ago
That’s a perception and the problem isn’t the AI it’s human nature: 1. every time AI is able to do a thing we move the goalposts and say, yeah, but it can’t do that other thing over there; 2. We are impatient, so our ability to get bored tends to outpace the rate of change.
- slg 2y ago
  I don’t think the problem is moving the goalposts, but rather there are no actual goalposts. Advocates for this technology imply it can do anything either because they believe it will be true in the near future or they just want others to believe it for a wide range of reasons including to get rich of it. Therefore the general public has no real idea what the ideal use cases are for this technology in its current state so they keep asking it to do stuff it can’t do well. It is really no different than the blockchain in that regard.
  - surfingdino 2y ago
    One of the main issues I see amongst advocates of AI is that they cannot quantify the benefits and ignore provable failings of AI.
- goatlover 2y ago
  The other side of this coin is everyone overhyping what AI can do, and when the inevitable criticism comes, they respond by claiming the goal posts are being moved. Perhaps, but you also told me it could do XYZ, when it can only do X and some Y, but not much Z, and it’s still not general intelligence in the he broad sense.
  - refulgentis 2y ago
    I appreciate this comment because I think it really demonstrates the core problem with what I'll call the "get off my lawn >:|" argument, because it's avowedly about personal emotions. It's not "general intelligence", so it's over hyped, and They get so whiny about the inevitable criticism, and They are ignoring that it's so mindnumbingly boring to have people making the excuse that "designed a circuit board from scratch" wasn't something anyone thinks or claims an LLM should do. Who told you LLMs can design circuit boards? Who told you LLMs are [artificial] general intelligence? I get sick of it constantly being everywhere, but I don't feel the need to intellectualize it in a way that blames the nefarious ???
    - ben_w 2y ago
      > Who told you LLMs are [artificial] general intelligence? *waves* Everyone means a different thing by each letter of AGI, and sometimes also by the combination. I know my opinion is an unpopular one, but given how much more general-purpose they are than most other AI, I count LLMs as "general" AI; and I'm old enough to remember when AI didn't automatically mean "expert level or better", when it was a surprise that Kasparov was beaten (let alone Lee Sedol). LLMs are (currently) the ultimate form of "Jack of all trades, master of none". I'm not surprised that it failed with these tests, even though it clearly knows more about electronics than me. (I once tried to buy a 220 kΩ resistor, didn't have the skill to notice the shop had given me a 220 Ω resistor, the resistor caught fire). I'd still like to call these things "AGI"… except for the fact that people don't agree on what the word means and keep objecting to my usage of the initials as is, so it would't really communicate anything for me to do so.
  - derefr 2y ago
    ML scientists will tell you it can do X and some Y but not much Z. But the public doesn’t listen to ML scientists. Most of what the public hears about AI comes from businessmen trying to market a vision to investors — a vision, specifically, of what their business will be capable of five years from bow given predicted advancements in AI capabilities in the mean time; which has roughly nothing to do with what current models can do.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- 127 2y ago
  What goals were achieved that I missed? Even for creative writing and image creation it still requires significant human guidance and correction.
  - selestify 2y ago
    This is a great example of goalposts shifting. Even having a model that can engage in coherent conversation and synthesize new information on the fly is revolutionary compared to just a few years ago. Now the bar has moved up to creativity without human intervention.
    - doe_eyes 2y ago
      But isn't this goalpost shifting actually reasonable? We discovered this nearly-magical technology. But now the novelty is wearing off, and the question is no longer "how awesome is this?". It's "what can I do with it for today?". And frustratingly, the apparent list of uses is shrinking, mostly because many serious applications come with a footnote of "yeah, it can do that, but unreliably and with failure modes that are hard for most users to spot and correct". So yes, adding "...but without making up dangerous nonsense" is moving the goalposts, but is it wrong?
      - kenjackson 2y ago
        There are a lot of things where being reliable isn’t as important (or it’s easier to be reliable). For example, we are using it to do meeting summaries and it is remarkably good at it. In fact, in comparison to humans we did A/B testing with - usually better. Another thing is new employee ramp. It is able to answer questions and guide new employees much faster than we’ve ever seen before. Another thing I’ve started toying with it with, but have gotten incredible results so far is email prioritization. Basically letting me know which emails I should read most urgently. Again, these were all things where the state of the art was basically useless 3 years ago.
      - selestify 2y ago
        IMO it’s not wrong to want the next improvement (“…but without making up dangerous nonsense”), but it is disingenuous to pretend as if there hasn’t already been a huge leap in capabilities. It’s like being unimpressed with the Wright brothers’ flight because nobody has figured out commercial air travel yet.
- XorNot 2y ago
  No I'd say it's that people are very bad at knowing what they want, and worse at knowing how to get it. While it might be "moving the goal posts" the issue is that the goal posts were arbitrary to start with. In the context of the metaphor we put them on the field so there could be a game, despite the outcome literally not mattering anywhere else. This isn't limited to AI: anyone dealing with customers knows that the worst thing you can do is take what the customer says their problem is at face value, replete with the proposed solution. What the customer knows is they have a problem, but it's very unlikely they want the solution they think they do.
- jodrellblank 2y ago
  > "1. every time AI is able to do a thing we move the goalposts and say, yeah, but it can’t do that other thing over there" So are you happy that a 1940s tic-tac-toe computer "is AI"? And that's going to be your bar for AI forever? "Moving the goalposts is a metaphor, derived from goal-based sports such as football and hockey, that means to change the rule or criterion of a process or competition while it is still in progress, in such a way that the new goal offers one side an advantage or disadvantage." - and the important part about AI is that it be easy for developers to claim they have created AI, and if we move the goalposts then that's bad because ... it puts them at an unfair disadvantage? What is even wrong with "moving the goalposts" in this situation, claiming something is/isn't AI is not a goal-based sport. The metaphor is nonsensical whining.
exe34 2y ago
how long does it take for a child to start doing surgery? publishing novel theorems? how long has the humble transformer been around?
- ben_w 2y ago
  Wall-clock or subjective time? I think it would take a human about 2.6 million (waking) years to actually read Common Crawl[0]; though obviously faster if they simply absorb token streams as direct sensory input. The strength of computers is that transistors are (literally) faster than synapses to the degree to which marathon runners are faster than continental drift; the weakness is they need to, too — current generation AI is only able to be this good due to this advantage allowing it to read far more than any human. How much this difference matters depends on the use-case: if AI were as good at learning as we are, Tesla's FSD would be level 5 autonomy years ago already, even with just optical input. [0] April 2024: 386 TiB; assuming 9.83 bits per word and 250 w.p.m: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=386+TiB+%2F+9.83+bits+per+word+%2F+250+words+per+minute https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=386+TiB+%2F+9.83+bits+p...
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    Subjective time doesn't really matter unless something is experiencing it. It could be 2.6 million years, but if the wall-clock time is half a year, then great - we've managed to brute-force some degree of intelligence in half a year! And we're at the beginning of this journey; there surely are many things to optimize that will decrease both wall-clock and subjective training time. As the saying goes - "make it work, make it right, make it fast".
- surfingdino 2y ago
  Nobody is telling an experienced heart surgeon to step aside and let a child plan an open heart surgery. And yet, AI and LLMs in particular are being sold as the tools that can do complex tasks like that. But let's leave complex tasks and have a look at marketing behind one of the tools that's aimed at business. The messaging of one of the ads I'm seeing promises that the tools in question can summarise a 150-page long document into a 5-slide presentation. Now, that sounds amazing, if we ignore the fact that a person who wrote a 150-page document has already prepared an outline and is perfectly capable of summarising each section of the document. Writing a 150-page document without a plan and not being able to organise would mean that people have evolved into content generators that need machines to help them write tables of contents and reformat them into a presentation. Coming back to your child analogy, why would a child be better at summarising content it knows nothing about that the person who wrote it?
echelon 2y ago
I'm in awe of the progress in AI images, music, and video. This is probably where AI shines the most. Soon everything you see and hear will be built up through a myriad of AI models and pipelines.
- slg 2y ago
  > Soon everything you see and hear will be built up through a myriad of AI models and pipelines. It is so bizarre that some people view this as a positive outcome.
  - echelon 2y ago
    These are tools. Humans driving the tools have heart and soul and create things of value through their lens. Your argument rhymes with: - "Let's keep using horses. They're good enough." - "Photography lacks the artistic merit of portrait art." - "Electronic music isn't music." - "Vinyl is the only way to listen to music." - "Digital photography ruins photography." - "Digital illustration isn't real illustration and tablets are cheating." - "Video games aren't art." - "Javascript developers aren't real programmers." Though I'm paraphrasing, these are all things that have been said. I bet you my right kidney that people will use AI to produce incredible art that will one day (soon) garner widespread praise and accolade. It's just a tool.
    - slg 2y ago
      The specific phrase used was "everything you see and hear" (emphasis mine). You weren't arguing this would be an optional tool that could be used in the creation of art. You were arguing that this will replace all other art. That isn't an argument that photography is an art equal to painting, it is an argument for it to replace painting.
      - echelon 2y ago
        > You were arguing that this will replace all other art. The population of people who want to create art is higher than the people who have the classical skills. By sheer volume, the former will dominate the latter. And eventually most artists will begin to use AI tools when they realize that's what they are -- tools.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
refulgentis 2y ago
There's this odd strain of thought that there's some general thing that will pop for hucksters and the unwashed masses, who are sheep led along by huckster wolves who won't admit LLMs aint ???, because they're profiting off it It's frustrating because it's infantalizing, it derails the potential of an interesting technical discussion (ex. Here, diffusion), and it misses the mark substantially. At the end of the day, it's useful in a thousand ways day to day, and the vast majority of people feel this way. The only people I see vehemently arguing the opposite seem to assume only things with 0 error rate are useful or are upset about money in some form. But is that really it? I'm all ears. I'm on a 5 hour flight. I'm genuinely unclear on whats going on that leads people to take this absolutist position that they're waiting for ??? to admit ??? about LLMs. Yes, the prose machine didnt nail circuit design, that doesn't mean whatever They you're imagining needs to give up and accept ???
- ben_w 2y ago
  > But is that really it? I'm all ears. I'm on a 5 hour flight. I'm genuinely unclear on whats going on that leads people to take this absolutist position that they're waiting for ??? to admit ??? about LLMs. Irony: humans think in very black-and-white terms, one could even say boolean; conversely LLMs display subtly and nuance. When I was a kid, repeats of Trek had Spock and Kirk defeating robots with the liar's paradox, yet today it seems like humans are the ones who are broken by it while the machines are just going "I understood that reference!"
  - refulgentis 2y ago
    Excellent point, it really is what it comes down to. There's people getting hoodwinked and people hoodwinking and then me, the one who sees them for what they are.
  - goatlover 2y ago
    And yet we still don’t have Data or the Holographic Doctor.
    - ben_w 2y ago
aaron695 2y ago
[dead]
Kiro 2y ago
This post supports your case way less than you think. I've sent it to several EE friends and none have expressed your discontent. The general consensus has been "amazing what AI can do nowadays", and I agree. This would have been complete science-fiction just a couple of years ago.

makk 2y ago

That’s a perception and the problem isn’t the AI it’s human nature: 1. every time AI is able to do a thing we move the goalposts and say, yeah, but it can’t do that other thing over there; 2. We are impatient, so our ability to get bored tends to outpace the rate of change.

slg 2y ago
I don’t think the problem is moving the goalposts, but rather there are no actual goalposts. Advocates for this technology imply it can do anything either because they believe it will be true in the near future or they just want others to believe it for a wide range of reasons including to get rich of it. Therefore the general public has no real idea what the ideal use cases are for this technology in its current state so they keep asking it to do stuff it can’t do well. It is really no different than the blockchain in that regard.
- surfingdino 2y ago
  One of the main issues I see amongst advocates of AI is that they cannot quantify the benefits and ignore provable failings of AI.
goatlover 2y ago
The other side of this coin is everyone overhyping what AI can do, and when the inevitable criticism comes, they respond by claiming the goal posts are being moved. Perhaps, but you also told me it could do XYZ, when it can only do X and some Y, but not much Z, and it’s still not general intelligence in the he broad sense.
- refulgentis 2y ago
  I appreciate this comment because I think it really demonstrates the core problem with what I'll call the "get off my lawn >:|" argument, because it's avowedly about personal emotions. It's not "general intelligence", so it's over hyped, and They get so whiny about the inevitable criticism, and They are ignoring that it's so mindnumbingly boring to have people making the excuse that "designed a circuit board from scratch" wasn't something anyone thinks or claims an LLM should do. Who told you LLMs can design circuit boards? Who told you LLMs are [artificial] general intelligence? I get sick of it constantly being everywhere, but I don't feel the need to intellectualize it in a way that blames the nefarious ???
  - ben_w 2y ago
    > Who told you LLMs are [artificial] general intelligence? *waves* Everyone means a different thing by each letter of AGI, and sometimes also by the combination. I know my opinion is an unpopular one, but given how much more general-purpose they are than most other AI, I count LLMs as "general" AI; and I'm old enough to remember when AI didn't automatically mean "expert level or better", when it was a surprise that Kasparov was beaten (let alone Lee Sedol). LLMs are (currently) the ultimate form of "Jack of all trades, master of none". I'm not surprised that it failed with these tests, even though it clearly knows more about electronics than me. (I once tried to buy a 220 kΩ resistor, didn't have the skill to notice the shop had given me a 220 Ω resistor, the resistor caught fire). I'd still like to call these things "AGI"… except for the fact that people don't agree on what the word means and keep objecting to my usage of the initials as is, so it would't really communicate anything for me to do so.
- derefr 2y ago
  ML scientists will tell you it can do X and some Y but not much Z. But the public doesn’t listen to ML scientists. Most of what the public hears about AI comes from businessmen trying to market a vision to investors — a vision, specifically, of what their business will be capable of five years from bow given predicted advancements in AI capabilities in the mean time; which has roughly nothing to do with what current models can do.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
127 2y ago
What goals were achieved that I missed? Even for creative writing and image creation it still requires significant human guidance and correction.
- selestify 2y ago
  This is a great example of goalposts shifting. Even having a model that can engage in coherent conversation and synthesize new information on the fly is revolutionary compared to just a few years ago. Now the bar has moved up to creativity without human intervention.
  - doe_eyes 2y ago
    But isn't this goalpost shifting actually reasonable? We discovered this nearly-magical technology. But now the novelty is wearing off, and the question is no longer "how awesome is this?". It's "what can I do with it for today?". And frustratingly, the apparent list of uses is shrinking, mostly because many serious applications come with a footnote of "yeah, it can do that, but unreliably and with failure modes that are hard for most users to spot and correct". So yes, adding "...but without making up dangerous nonsense" is moving the goalposts, but is it wrong?
    - kenjackson 2y ago
      There are a lot of things where being reliable isn’t as important (or it’s easier to be reliable). For example, we are using it to do meeting summaries and it is remarkably good at it. In fact, in comparison to humans we did A/B testing with - usually better. Another thing is new employee ramp. It is able to answer questions and guide new employees much faster than we’ve ever seen before. Another thing I’ve started toying with it with, but have gotten incredible results so far is email prioritization. Basically letting me know which emails I should read most urgently. Again, these were all things where the state of the art was basically useless 3 years ago.
    - selestify 2y ago
      IMO it’s not wrong to want the next improvement (“…but without making up dangerous nonsense”), but it is disingenuous to pretend as if there hasn’t already been a huge leap in capabilities. It’s like being unimpressed with the Wright brothers’ flight because nobody has figured out commercial air travel yet.
XorNot 2y ago
No I'd say it's that people are very bad at knowing what they want, and worse at knowing how to get it. While it might be "moving the goal posts" the issue is that the goal posts were arbitrary to start with. In the context of the metaphor we put them on the field so there could be a game, despite the outcome literally not mattering anywhere else. This isn't limited to AI: anyone dealing with customers knows that the worst thing you can do is take what the customer says their problem is at face value, replete with the proposed solution. What the customer knows is they have a problem, but it's very unlikely they want the solution they think they do.
jodrellblank 2y ago
> "1. every time AI is able to do a thing we move the goalposts and say, yeah, but it can’t do that other thing over there" So are you happy that a 1940s tic-tac-toe computer "is AI"? And that's going to be your bar for AI forever? "Moving the goalposts is a metaphor, derived from goal-based sports such as football and hockey, that means to change the rule or criterion of a process or competition while it is still in progress, in such a way that the new goal offers one side an advantage or disadvantage." - and the important part about AI is that it be easy for developers to claim they have created AI, and if we move the goalposts then that's bad because ... it puts them at an unfair disadvantage? What is even wrong with "moving the goalposts" in this situation, claiming something is/isn't AI is not a goal-based sport. The metaphor is nonsensical whining.

exe34 2y ago

how long does it take for a child to start doing surgery? publishing novel theorems? how long has the humble transformer been around?

ben_w 2y ago
Wall-clock or subjective time? I think it would take a human about 2.6 million (waking) years to actually read Common Crawl[0]; though obviously faster if they simply absorb token streams as direct sensory input. The strength of computers is that transistors are (literally) faster than synapses to the degree to which marathon runners are faster than continental drift; the weakness is they need to, too — current generation AI is only able to be this good due to this advantage allowing it to read far more than any human. How much this difference matters depends on the use-case: if AI were as good at learning as we are, Tesla's FSD would be level 5 autonomy years ago already, even with just optical input. [0] April 2024: 386 TiB; assuming 9.83 bits per word and 250 w.p.m: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=386+TiB+%2F+9.83+bits+per+word+%2F+250+words+per+minute https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=386+TiB+%2F+9.83+bits+p...
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  Subjective time doesn't really matter unless something is experiencing it. It could be 2.6 million years, but if the wall-clock time is half a year, then great - we've managed to brute-force some degree of intelligence in half a year! And we're at the beginning of this journey; there surely are many things to optimize that will decrease both wall-clock and subjective training time. As the saying goes - "make it work, make it right, make it fast".
surfingdino 2y ago
Nobody is telling an experienced heart surgeon to step aside and let a child plan an open heart surgery. And yet, AI and LLMs in particular are being sold as the tools that can do complex tasks like that. But let's leave complex tasks and have a look at marketing behind one of the tools that's aimed at business. The messaging of one of the ads I'm seeing promises that the tools in question can summarise a 150-page long document into a 5-slide presentation. Now, that sounds amazing, if we ignore the fact that a person who wrote a 150-page document has already prepared an outline and is perfectly capable of summarising each section of the document. Writing a 150-page document without a plan and not being able to organise would mean that people have evolved into content generators that need machines to help them write tables of contents and reformat them into a presentation. Coming back to your child analogy, why would a child be better at summarising content it knows nothing about that the person who wrote it?

echelon 2y ago

I'm in awe of the progress in AI images, music, and video. This is probably where AI shines the most. Soon everything you see and hear will be built up through a myriad of AI models and pipelines.

slg 2y ago
> Soon everything you see and hear will be built up through a myriad of AI models and pipelines. It is so bizarre that some people view this as a positive outcome.
- echelon 2y ago
  These are tools. Humans driving the tools have heart and soul and create things of value through their lens. Your argument rhymes with: - "Let's keep using horses. They're good enough." - "Photography lacks the artistic merit of portrait art." - "Electronic music isn't music." - "Vinyl is the only way to listen to music." - "Digital photography ruins photography." - "Digital illustration isn't real illustration and tablets are cheating." - "Video games aren't art." - "Javascript developers aren't real programmers." Though I'm paraphrasing, these are all things that have been said. I bet you my right kidney that people will use AI to produce incredible art that will one day (soon) garner widespread praise and accolade. It's just a tool.
  - slg 2y ago
    The specific phrase used was "everything you see and hear" (emphasis mine). You weren't arguing this would be an optional tool that could be used in the creation of art. You were arguing that this will replace all other art. That isn't an argument that photography is an art equal to painting, it is an argument for it to replace painting.
    - echelon 2y ago
      > You were arguing that this will replace all other art. The population of people who want to create art is higher than the people who have the classical skills. By sheer volume, the former will dominate the latter. And eventually most artists will begin to use AI tools when they realize that's what they are -- tools.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

refulgentis 2y ago

There's this odd strain of thought that there's some general thing that will pop for hucksters and the unwashed masses, who are sheep led along by huckster wolves who won't admit LLMs aint ???, because they're profiting off it It's frustrating because it's infantalizing, it derails the potential of an interesting technical discussion (ex. Here, diffusion), and it misses the mark substantially. At the end of the day, it's useful in a thousand ways day to day, and the vast majority of people feel this way. The only people I see vehemently arguing the opposite seem to assume only things with 0 error rate are useful or are upset about money in some form. But is that really it? I'm all ears. I'm on a 5 hour flight. I'm genuinely unclear on whats going on that leads people to take this absolutist position that they're waiting for ??? to admit ??? about LLMs. Yes, the prose machine didnt nail circuit design, that doesn't mean whatever They you're imagining needs to give up and accept ???

ben_w 2y ago
> But is that really it? I'm all ears. I'm on a 5 hour flight. I'm genuinely unclear on whats going on that leads people to take this absolutist position that they're waiting for ??? to admit ??? about LLMs. Irony: humans think in very black-and-white terms, one could even say boolean; conversely LLMs display subtly and nuance. When I was a kid, repeats of Trek had Spock and Kirk defeating robots with the liar's paradox, yet today it seems like humans are the ones who are broken by it while the machines are just going "I understood that reference!"
- refulgentis 2y ago
  Excellent point, it really is what it comes down to. There's people getting hoodwinked and people hoodwinking and then me, the one who sees them for what they are.
- goatlover 2y ago
  And yet we still don’t have Data or the Holographic Doctor.
  - ben_w 2y ago

aaron695 2y ago

[dead]

Kiro 2y ago

This post supports your case way less than you think. I've sent it to several EE friends and none have expressed your discontent. The general consensus has been "amazing what AI can do nowadays", and I agree. This would have been complete science-fiction just a couple of years ago.