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That is because Mr Hinton is full of shit. He constantly overstates the progress to bolster his position on associated risks. And now someone gave him a bloody

by hggigg 2y ago

That is because Mr Hinton is full of shit. He constantly overstates the progress to bolster his position on associated risks. And now someone gave him a bloody Nobel so he'll be even more intolerable. What is behind the curtain is becoming obvious and while there are some gains in some specific areas, the ability for this technology as it stands today to change society is mostly limited to pretending to be a solution for usual shitty human behaviour of cost cutting and reducing workforce. For example IBM laying off people under the guise of AI when actually it was a standard cost cutting exercise with some marketing smeared over the top while the management told the remaining people to pick up the slack. A McKinsey special! And generating content which is to be consumed by people who can't tell the difference between humans and muck. A fine example is from the mathematics side we are constantly promised huge gains in LLMs but we can't replace a flunked undergrad with anything yet. And this is because it is the wrong tool for the fucking job. Which is the problem in one simple statement: it's mostly the wrong tool for most things. Still I enjoyed the investment ride! I could model that one with my brain fine.

jamal-kumar 2y ago
I think my favorite thing is how people are out there reconsidering their programming careers and doing shit like quitting when you have a bunch of less than quality developers lazily deploying code they pulled out of the ass of an LLM which does no bounds checking, no input validation, none of that basic as can be security shit at all, they just end up deploying all that code to production systems facing the internet and then nobody notices because either the competent developers left for greener pastures or got laid off. I keep on telling people this is going to take like 5 or 10 years to untangle considering how hard it is in a lot of cases to fix code put into tons of stuff like embedded devices mounted up on a light pole or whatever that was considered good enough for a release, but I bet it'll be even more of a pain than that. These are after all security holes in devices that in many cases peoples day or life going well depends on. What it has done so far for me is put copywriters out of a job. I still find it mostly useful for writing drivel that gets used as page filler or product descriptions for my ecommerce side jobs. Lately the image recognition capabilities lets me generate the kind of stuff I'd never write, which is instagram posts with tons of emojis and other things I'd never have the gumption to do myself but increases engagement. I actually used to use markov chain generator for this going back to 2016 though so the big difference here is that at least it can form more coherent sentences.
- hggigg 2y ago
  Oh I'm right in the middle of your first point. I'm going to have on my grave stone: "Never underestimate the reputation and financial damage a competent but lazy software developer can do with an incompetent LLM" So what you're saying is that it's a good bullshit generator for marketing. That is fair :)
  - jamal-kumar 2y ago
    It's really excellent for that. I can give it an image of a product I'm trying to sell, and then say 'describe this thing but use a ton of marketing fluff to increase engagement and conversions' and it does exactly that. There's tools out there to automatically do this with A/B testing and I think even stuff like shopify plugins, but I still do it relatively manually. I'll use it for code sparingly for stuff like data transformations (Take this ridiculously flat, two table database schema and normalize it to the third normal form) but for straight up generating code to be executed I'm way more careful to make sure it isn't giving me or the people who get to use that code garbage. It isn't that bad for basic security audits actually and I suggest any devs reading this re-run their code through it with security related prompting to see if they missed anything obvious. The huge problem is that at least half of devs with deadlines to meet are apparently not doing this, and I get to see it in the drop in quality of pull requests within the past 5 years.
    - hggigg 2y ago
      I find it a distraction on validation tasks. I prefer to know what the hell I am doing first and be able to qualify that as I work with test cases. With respect to other engineers I haven't found any of our ML tools actually pick up anything useful yet from a code review. On engagement, I saw a negative recently where someone started replacing banner images for events with AI generated content and their conversion to tickets plummeted. YMMV. People can spot it a mile off and they are getting better at it. I think the end game is soon.
      - jamal-kumar 2y ago
auggierose 2y ago
I hear existential despair. Mathematics is indeed a great example. Automation (AI) has made great strides in automating theorem proving in the last 30 years, and LLMs are just a cherry on top of that. A cherry though that will accelerate progress even further, by bringing the attention of people like Terence Tao to the cause. It will not change how mathematics is done within 2 years. It will totally revolutionise how mathematics is done within 20 years (and that is a conservative guess).
- hggigg 2y ago
  No it's a terrible example. We have ITPs and ATPs and any progress on ATPs, which are the ones that are currently considered magical, are turning into a fine asymptote. ITPs are useful however but have nothing to do with ML at all. Putting a confident timescale on this stuff is like putting a timescale on UFT 50 years ago. A lie. Oh and lets not forget that we need to start with a conjecture first and we can't get any machine to come up with anything even remotely new there. There is no existential despair. At all.
  - auggierose 2y ago
    I said 30 years, because that's for how long I am a participant in the field. I have a PhD in ITP, and yes, I am pretty confident that automation is a big part of ITP now. Maybe not so much if you are into constructive type theory, that field is always a little bit hesitant to use the full power of anything. The only one lying here is you. To yourself. By the way, AI can come up with conjectures just fine. I might not be interested in most of them, but then again, I am not interested in most conjectures humans come up with.
- meroes 2y ago
  ChatGPT and others can’t reliably sum several integers together still, when is an LLM going to replace anything meaningful in higher math? I spent more time deciphering ChatGPT’s mistakes than programming something in python to sum some integers this week.
  - 2y ago

by hggigg 2y ago

jamal-kumar 2y ago

I think my favorite thing is how people are out there reconsidering their programming careers and doing shit like quitting when you have a bunch of less than quality developers lazily deploying code they pulled out of the ass of an LLM which does no bounds checking, no input validation, none of that basic as can be security shit at all, they just end up deploying all that code to production systems facing the internet and then nobody notices because either the competent developers left for greener pastures or got laid off. I keep on telling people this is going to take like 5 or 10 years to untangle considering how hard it is in a lot of cases to fix code put into tons of stuff like embedded devices mounted up on a light pole or whatever that was considered good enough for a release, but I bet it'll be even more of a pain than that. These are after all security holes in devices that in many cases peoples day or life going well depends on. What it has done so far for me is put copywriters out of a job. I still find it mostly useful for writing drivel that gets used as page filler or product descriptions for my ecommerce side jobs. Lately the image recognition capabilities lets me generate the kind of stuff I'd never write, which is instagram posts with tons of emojis and other things I'd never have the gumption to do myself but increases engagement. I actually used to use markov chain generator for this going back to 2016 though so the big difference here is that at least it can form more coherent sentences.

hggigg 2y ago
Oh I'm right in the middle of your first point. I'm going to have on my grave stone: "Never underestimate the reputation and financial damage a competent but lazy software developer can do with an incompetent LLM" So what you're saying is that it's a good bullshit generator for marketing. That is fair :)
- jamal-kumar 2y ago
  It's really excellent for that. I can give it an image of a product I'm trying to sell, and then say 'describe this thing but use a ton of marketing fluff to increase engagement and conversions' and it does exactly that. There's tools out there to automatically do this with A/B testing and I think even stuff like shopify plugins, but I still do it relatively manually. I'll use it for code sparingly for stuff like data transformations (Take this ridiculously flat, two table database schema and normalize it to the third normal form) but for straight up generating code to be executed I'm way more careful to make sure it isn't giving me or the people who get to use that code garbage. It isn't that bad for basic security audits actually and I suggest any devs reading this re-run their code through it with security related prompting to see if they missed anything obvious. The huge problem is that at least half of devs with deadlines to meet are apparently not doing this, and I get to see it in the drop in quality of pull requests within the past 5 years.
  - hggigg 2y ago
    I find it a distraction on validation tasks. I prefer to know what the hell I am doing first and be able to qualify that as I work with test cases. With respect to other engineers I haven't found any of our ML tools actually pick up anything useful yet from a code review. On engagement, I saw a negative recently where someone started replacing banner images for events with AI generated content and their conversion to tickets plummeted. YMMV. People can spot it a mile off and they are getting better at it. I think the end game is soon.
    - jamal-kumar 2y ago

auggierose 2y ago

I hear existential despair. Mathematics is indeed a great example. Automation (AI) has made great strides in automating theorem proving in the last 30 years, and LLMs are just a cherry on top of that. A cherry though that will accelerate progress even further, by bringing the attention of people like Terence Tao to the cause. It will not change how mathematics is done within 2 years. It will totally revolutionise how mathematics is done within 20 years (and that is a conservative guess).

hggigg 2y ago
No it's a terrible example. We have ITPs and ATPs and any progress on ATPs, which are the ones that are currently considered magical, are turning into a fine asymptote. ITPs are useful however but have nothing to do with ML at all. Putting a confident timescale on this stuff is like putting a timescale on UFT 50 years ago. A lie. Oh and lets not forget that we need to start with a conjecture first and we can't get any machine to come up with anything even remotely new there. There is no existential despair. At all.
- auggierose 2y ago
  I said 30 years, because that's for how long I am a participant in the field. I have a PhD in ITP, and yes, I am pretty confident that automation is a big part of ITP now. Maybe not so much if you are into constructive type theory, that field is always a little bit hesitant to use the full power of anything. The only one lying here is you. To yourself. By the way, AI can come up with conjectures just fine. I might not be interested in most of them, but then again, I am not interested in most conjectures humans come up with.
meroes 2y ago
ChatGPT and others can’t reliably sum several integers together still, when is an LLM going to replace anything meaningful in higher math? I spent more time deciphering ChatGPT’s mistakes than programming something in python to sum some integers this week.
- 2y ago