5 ms·

Some people are just pessimistic rather than unimaginative. It seems like a miserable way to live life but it's fairly common IME.

dartos 2y ago
“I think you’re a downer so you must be miserable” is a really great thing to add to the conversation. Thank you.
- abletonlive 2y ago
  Well the other commentator presumed people were just unimaginative. I was giving an alternative option.
dukeyukey 2y ago
People are burned by crypto, metaverse, web3, and all the other stuff the tech industry came out with over the last few years that crashed and burned. Optimism is great and underrated, but you can't sum up the same enthusiasm for everything. And this is coming from someone thoroughly bullish on AI!
- CharlieDigital 2y ago
  I think there's a distinction here because there's very tangible output from gen AI (content) and we can see it getting better, more advanced, more capable, and more realistic. The applications are obvious: film making, content creation, teaching, etc. This is in contrast to crypto which was/is quite abstract (as is money in the first place) and the metaverse which required investing hundreds of dollars in specialized hardware. In contrast, our world is surrounded by visual content so the applications and utility of gen AI seems far more obvious for the layperson.
  - pona-a 2y ago
    And what we do see is terrible; bland art, more spam and political astroturfing than ever in human history, bad code, and ignorant lessons, all to the tune of a PR campaign to shift the Overton window towards praising incompetence and denigrating hard work. The only real accomplishments of LLMs were how good the proposed use-cases sound on paper under competent implementation, and a theoretical solution to unstructured data parsing that's still too heavy to be worth a tiny bump in performance. Do you want to live in a future where all human thought has been replaced by its surface level reproductions, made by big tech stuffing copyrighted works into a GPU farm with near-zero human labor? We both know it won't benefit you and me, our role is merely transitory in bootstrapping their self-improvement under the guise of a paid product, nor had the relationship between us and these tools been in any shape collaborative in the first place. This fantasy targets the owner class, which can finally dream of labor decoupled from the laborer, the work simply costing no more than the price of electricity, all without the demands for livable compensation or following best practice. Even if the LLMs gained above-human performance in all domains of knowledge shortly followed by institution of a universal basic income, their invention will still have only been a force of stagnation, learned intellectual helpless, and overconsumption.
    - CharlieDigital 2y ago
      > terrible; bland art...bad code Ironically, all of this means that we're not at the apex and there's still a long ways to go both in terms of algorithms and the hardware to run them. > Do you want to live in a future where all human thought has been replaced by its surface level reproductions, made by big tech stuffing copyrighted works into a GPU farm with near-zero human labor? Whether we want to or not, it's the apparent path that will unfold; there's no putting AI back into the box. The race is already on.
      - pona-a 2y ago
        > there's still a long ways to go Sure, in the way that technically this is a computable problem, but maybe not a simple one. Any exponential in the real world is a sigmoid and given all major AI labs, having spent years and incomprehensible sums of cache, have arrived at about GPT-4 performance, including OpenAI's latest release being a smaller model, should tell us something. Be the limiting factor corpus size, model parameters, or an architectural defect, we're clearly loosing momentum, at least until it's to be diagnosed and solved. Deferring to hypothetical futures without meeting the burden of evidence seems ill-advised, especially when it comes to incompetent use today. > there's no putting AI back into the box There's also no complete undoing of an oil spill, nor the practical possibility of unilateral nuclear disarmament. The weights are public, the corps is as well, as much as it had broken the open web to gather it, the architecture is known, ergo today's open-weight models are the baseline of capability for all future models. Still, seeing that LLMs form a natural monopoly given the required compute power to enter the field, we can enforce policies like mandatory statistical fingerprinting on all outputs of proprietary models beyond a certain size. LLM detection is also getting quite good; my hope is that adversarial fine-tuning will work out like Bayesian poisoning for email spammers, only giving the discriminator new stable patterns to look for. We as consumers do have power, however small and unconcentrated, to vote with our wallets, which a study posted here shown many are beginning to do [0]. The copyright question also gives quite a nice kill switch if our society decides this whole industry isn't that beneficial, removing the commercial incentive for training new models while providing some for detection. There's great value from transformer networks, such as state-of-the-art speech recognition, that will make its way into consumer products and will be here to stay. As for the FADs like useless chatbots in every product, that may come under question. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40390375 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40390375

dartos 2y ago

“I think you’re a downer so you must be miserable” is a really great thing to add to the conversation. Thank you.

abletonlive 2y ago
Well the other commentator presumed people were just unimaginative. I was giving an alternative option.

dukeyukey 2y ago

People are burned by crypto, metaverse, web3, and all the other stuff the tech industry came out with over the last few years that crashed and burned. Optimism is great and underrated, but you can't sum up the same enthusiasm for everything. And this is coming from someone thoroughly bullish on AI!

CharlieDigital 2y ago
I think there's a distinction here because there's very tangible output from gen AI (content) and we can see it getting better, more advanced, more capable, and more realistic. The applications are obvious: film making, content creation, teaching, etc. This is in contrast to crypto which was/is quite abstract (as is money in the first place) and the metaverse which required investing hundreds of dollars in specialized hardware. In contrast, our world is surrounded by visual content so the applications and utility of gen AI seems far more obvious for the layperson.
- pona-a 2y ago
  And what we do see is terrible; bland art, more spam and political astroturfing than ever in human history, bad code, and ignorant lessons, all to the tune of a PR campaign to shift the Overton window towards praising incompetence and denigrating hard work. The only real accomplishments of LLMs were how good the proposed use-cases sound on paper under competent implementation, and a theoretical solution to unstructured data parsing that's still too heavy to be worth a tiny bump in performance. Do you want to live in a future where all human thought has been replaced by its surface level reproductions, made by big tech stuffing copyrighted works into a GPU farm with near-zero human labor? We both know it won't benefit you and me, our role is merely transitory in bootstrapping their self-improvement under the guise of a paid product, nor had the relationship between us and these tools been in any shape collaborative in the first place. This fantasy targets the owner class, which can finally dream of labor decoupled from the laborer, the work simply costing no more than the price of electricity, all without the demands for livable compensation or following best practice. Even if the LLMs gained above-human performance in all domains of knowledge shortly followed by institution of a universal basic income, their invention will still have only been a force of stagnation, learned intellectual helpless, and overconsumption.
  - CharlieDigital 2y ago
    > terrible; bland art...bad code Ironically, all of this means that we're not at the apex and there's still a long ways to go both in terms of algorithms and the hardware to run them. > Do you want to live in a future where all human thought has been replaced by its surface level reproductions, made by big tech stuffing copyrighted works into a GPU farm with near-zero human labor? Whether we want to or not, it's the apparent path that will unfold; there's no putting AI back into the box. The race is already on.
    - pona-a 2y ago
      > there's still a long ways to go Sure, in the way that technically this is a computable problem, but maybe not a simple one. Any exponential in the real world is a sigmoid and given all major AI labs, having spent years and incomprehensible sums of cache, have arrived at about GPT-4 performance, including OpenAI's latest release being a smaller model, should tell us something. Be the limiting factor corpus size, model parameters, or an architectural defect, we're clearly loosing momentum, at least until it's to be diagnosed and solved. Deferring to hypothetical futures without meeting the burden of evidence seems ill-advised, especially when it comes to incompetent use today. > there's no putting AI back into the box There's also no complete undoing of an oil spill, nor the practical possibility of unilateral nuclear disarmament. The weights are public, the corps is as well, as much as it had broken the open web to gather it, the architecture is known, ergo today's open-weight models are the baseline of capability for all future models. Still, seeing that LLMs form a natural monopoly given the required compute power to enter the field, we can enforce policies like mandatory statistical fingerprinting on all outputs of proprietary models beyond a certain size. LLM detection is also getting quite good; my hope is that adversarial fine-tuning will work out like Bayesian poisoning for email spammers, only giving the discriminator new stable patterns to look for. We as consumers do have power, however small and unconcentrated, to vote with our wallets, which a study posted here shown many are beginning to do [0]. The copyright question also gives quite a nice kill switch if our society decides this whole industry isn't that beneficial, removing the commercial incentive for training new models while providing some for detection. There's great value from transformer networks, such as state-of-the-art speech recognition, that will make its way into consumer products and will be here to stay. As for the FADs like useless chatbots in every product, that may come under question. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40390375 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40390375