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Embeddings are the only aspect of modern AI I'm excited about because they're the only one that gives more power to humans instead of taking it away. They're th

by mrob 2y ago

Embeddings are the only aspect of modern AI I'm excited about because they're the only one that gives more power to humans instead of taking it away. They're the "bicycle for our minds" of Steve Jobs fame; intelligence amplification not intelligence replacement. IMO, the biggest improvement in computer usability in my lifetime was the introduction of fast and ubiquitous local search. I use Firefox's "Find in Page" feature probably 10 or more times per day. I use find and grep probably every day. When I read man pages or logs, I navigate by search. Git would be vastly less useful without git grep. Embeddings have the potential to solve the biggest weakness of search by giving us fuzzy search that's actually useful.

gwervc 2y ago
I agee with this view. Generative AI robs us of something (thinking, practicing) which is the long term ability to practice a skill and improve oneself in exchange of an immediate (often crappy) result. Embeddings is a tech that can help us solve problem, ut we still have to do most of the work.
- wussboy 2y ago
  I’m not sure it robs us. It makes it possible, but many people including myself find the artistic products of AI to be utterly without value for the reasons you list. I will always cherish the product of lifelong dedication and human skill
  - jacobr1 2y ago
    It doesn't diminish - but I do find it interesting how it influences. Realism became less important, less interesting, though still valued to a lesser degree, with the ubiquity of photography. Where will human creativity move towards when certain task become trivially machine replicable? Where will human ingenuity _enabled_ by new technology make new art possible?
- larve 2y ago
  I ask LLMs to give me exercises, tutorials then write up my experience into "course notes", along with flashcards. I ask it to simulate a teacher, I ask it to simulate students that I have to teach, etc... I haven't found a tool that is more effective in helping me learn.
  - greentxt 2y ago
    Great for learning for learning sake. Learning with the intention of pursuing a career requires the economic/job model too, which is the problem.
- stocknoob 2y ago
  Does a player piano rob you of playing music yourself? A car from walking? A wheelbarrow from working out? It’s up to you if you want to stop practicing! Chess has become even more popular despite computers that can “rob us” of the joy. They’re even better practice partners.
  - crashabr 2y ago
    An individual car doesn't stop you from walking but a culture that centers cars leads to cities where walking is outright dangerous. Most car owners would never say outright "I want a car-centric culture". But car manufacturers lobbied for it, and step by step, we got both the deployment of useful car infrastructure, and the destruction or ignoring of all amenities useful for people walking or cycling. Now let's go back to the period where cars start to become enormously popular, and cities start to build neighborhoods without sidewalks. There was probably someone at the time complaining about the risk of cars overtaking walking and leading to stores being more far away etc. And in front of them was probably someone like you calling them a luddite and being oblivious of second order effects.
    - stocknoob 2y ago
      Land is a shared, zero-sum resource: a parking lot is not a park. Your software development methodology is your own. Why does someone else’s use of a tool deprive you of doing things the way you want?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
TeMPOraL 2y ago
So you're saying, embeddings are fine, as long as we refrain from making full use of their capabilities? We've hit on a mathematical construct that seems to be able to capture understanding, and you're saying that the biggest models are too big, we need to scale down, only use embeddings for surface-level basic similarities? I too think embeddings are vastly underutilized, and chat interface is not the be-all, end-all (not to mention, "chat with your program/PDF/documentation" just sounds plain stupid). However, whether current AI tools are replacing or amplifying your intelligence, is entirely down to how you use them. As for search, yes, that was a huge breakthrough and powerful amplifier. 2+ decades ago. At this point it's computer use 101 - which makes it sad when dealing with programs or websites that are opaque to search, and "ubiquitous local search" is still not here. Embeddings can and hopefully will give us better fuzzy/semantic searching, but if you push this far enough, you'll have to stop and ask - if the search tool is now capable to understand some aspects of my data, why not surface this understanding as a different view into data, instead of just invoking it in the background when user makes a search query?
- autokad 2y ago
  I have found that embeddings + LLM is very successful. I'm going to make the words up as to not yield my work publicly, but I had to classify something into 3 categories. I asked a simple llm to label it, it was 95% accurate. taking the min distance from the word embeddings to the mean category embeddings was about 96%. When I gave gave the LLM the embedding prediction, the LLM was 98% accurate. There were issues an embedding model might not do well on where as the LLM could handle. for example: These were camel case words, like WoodPecker, AquafinaBottle, and WoodStock (I changed the words to not reveal private data). WoodPecker and WoodStock would end up with close embedding values because the word Wood dominated the embedding values, but these were supposed to go into 2 different categories.
  - bravura 2y ago
    Some of the best performing embedding models (https://huggingface.co/spaces/mteb/leaderboard https://huggingface.co/spaces/mteb/leaderboard) are LLMs. Have you tried them?
inbread 2y ago
I've been experimenting with using embeddings for finding the relevant git commits, as I often don't know or remember the exact word that was used. So I created my own little tool for embedding and finding commits by commit messages. Maybe you'll also find it useful: https://github.com/adrianmfi/git-semantic-similarity https://github.com/adrianmfi/git-semantic-similarity
- chamomeal 2y ago
  Very cool, I’ll try this out!
- porridgeraisin 2y ago
  Nice! Let me try this out
mgraczyk 2y ago
All modern AI technology can give more power to humans, you just have to use the right tools. Every AI tool I can think of has made me more productive. LLMs help me write code faster and understand new libraries, image generation helps me build sites and emails faster, etc
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
attentive 2y ago
there is fzf, depending on your definition of "useful"

by mrob 2y ago

gwervc 2y ago

I agee with this view. Generative AI robs us of something (thinking, practicing) which is the long term ability to practice a skill and improve oneself in exchange of an immediate (often crappy) result. Embeddings is a tech that can help us solve problem, ut we still have to do most of the work.

wussboy 2y ago
I’m not sure it robs us. It makes it possible, but many people including myself find the artistic products of AI to be utterly without value for the reasons you list. I will always cherish the product of lifelong dedication and human skill
- jacobr1 2y ago
  It doesn't diminish - but I do find it interesting how it influences. Realism became less important, less interesting, though still valued to a lesser degree, with the ubiquity of photography. Where will human creativity move towards when certain task become trivially machine replicable? Where will human ingenuity _enabled_ by new technology make new art possible?
larve 2y ago
I ask LLMs to give me exercises, tutorials then write up my experience into "course notes", along with flashcards. I ask it to simulate a teacher, I ask it to simulate students that I have to teach, etc... I haven't found a tool that is more effective in helping me learn.
- greentxt 2y ago
  Great for learning for learning sake. Learning with the intention of pursuing a career requires the economic/job model too, which is the problem.
stocknoob 2y ago
Does a player piano rob you of playing music yourself? A car from walking? A wheelbarrow from working out? It’s up to you if you want to stop practicing! Chess has become even more popular despite computers that can “rob us” of the joy. They’re even better practice partners.
- crashabr 2y ago
  An individual car doesn't stop you from walking but a culture that centers cars leads to cities where walking is outright dangerous. Most car owners would never say outright "I want a car-centric culture". But car manufacturers lobbied for it, and step by step, we got both the deployment of useful car infrastructure, and the destruction or ignoring of all amenities useful for people walking or cycling. Now let's go back to the period where cars start to become enormously popular, and cities start to build neighborhoods without sidewalks. There was probably someone at the time complaining about the risk of cars overtaking walking and leading to stores being more far away etc. And in front of them was probably someone like you calling them a luddite and being oblivious of second order effects.
  - stocknoob 2y ago
    Land is a shared, zero-sum resource: a parking lot is not a park. Your software development methodology is your own. Why does someone else’s use of a tool deprive you of doing things the way you want?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

TeMPOraL 2y ago

So you're saying, embeddings are fine, as long as we refrain from making full use of their capabilities? We've hit on a mathematical construct that seems to be able to capture understanding, and you're saying that the biggest models are too big, we need to scale down, only use embeddings for surface-level basic similarities? I too think embeddings are vastly underutilized, and chat interface is not the be-all, end-all (not to mention, "chat with your program/PDF/documentation" just sounds plain stupid). However, whether current AI tools are replacing or amplifying your intelligence, is entirely down to how you use them. As for search, yes, that was a huge breakthrough and powerful amplifier. 2+ decades ago. At this point it's computer use 101 - which makes it sad when dealing with programs or websites that are opaque to search, and "ubiquitous local search" is still not here. Embeddings can and hopefully will give us better fuzzy/semantic searching, but if you push this far enough, you'll have to stop and ask - if the search tool is now capable to understand some aspects of my data, why not surface this understanding as a different view into data, instead of just invoking it in the background when user makes a search query?

autokad 2y ago
I have found that embeddings + LLM is very successful. I'm going to make the words up as to not yield my work publicly, but I had to classify something into 3 categories. I asked a simple llm to label it, it was 95% accurate. taking the min distance from the word embeddings to the mean category embeddings was about 96%. When I gave gave the LLM the embedding prediction, the LLM was 98% accurate. There were issues an embedding model might not do well on where as the LLM could handle. for example: These were camel case words, like WoodPecker, AquafinaBottle, and WoodStock (I changed the words to not reveal private data). WoodPecker and WoodStock would end up with close embedding values because the word Wood dominated the embedding values, but these were supposed to go into 2 different categories.
- bravura 2y ago
  Some of the best performing embedding models (https://huggingface.co/spaces/mteb/leaderboard https://huggingface.co/spaces/mteb/leaderboard) are LLMs. Have you tried them?

inbread 2y ago

I've been experimenting with using embeddings for finding the relevant git commits, as I often don't know or remember the exact word that was used. So I created my own little tool for embedding and finding commits by commit messages. Maybe you'll also find it useful: https://github.com/adrianmfi/git-semantic-similarity https://github.com/adrianmfi/git-semantic-similarity

chamomeal 2y ago
Very cool, I’ll try this out!
porridgeraisin 2y ago
Nice! Let me try this out

mgraczyk 2y ago

All modern AI technology can give more power to humans, you just have to use the right tools. Every AI tool I can think of has made me more productive. LLMs help me write code faster and understand new libraries, image generation helps me build sites and emails faster, etc

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

attentive 2y ago

there is fzf, depending on your definition of "useful"