2 ms·

They probably said the same thing when the printing press came out. “How can you really know the book if you didn’t copy it down yourself during a reading?” But

They probably said the same thing when the printing press came out. “How can you really know the book if you didn’t copy it down yourself during a reading?” But the printing press won out in the end.

azinman2 2y ago
The printing press takes your ideas that you already wrote and increases distribution. Deep research is writing the text for you. That’s completely different.
- seanmcdirmid 2y ago
  I disagree, it’s just another step in the automation of knowledge distribution that’s been going on for a long long time. Every step someone has lamented that we lost something, maybe starting with speech itself, and the invention of writing taking away from oral tradition, scrolls, books, the printing press, the World Wide Web, etc… I was just wowing to myself the other day that a local 70b 4q 40GB model on my Mac basically replaces Wikipedia for me and can be used offline in an airplane. A whole library can be replaced with a cube of knowledge that is just a wrapper around an LLM. Of course there is going to be resistance to any move up, there has never not been resistance.
  - beeflet 2y ago
    It's like wikipedia except it spits out incorrect information at an alarming rate and has no references. Still, impressive that it only weighs 10s of GB when wikipedia alone is on the order of ~100GB
    - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
      Wikipedia isn’t a completely reliable source either. The LLM also includes a search engine. It’s weird since before I started playing around with it I thought it was just a fancy search engine and was grabbing sources from somewhere to shove into its context … but no, it’s all built in (although as deep research shows, it can do a lot better when it stuffs its context via research).
  - porridgeraisin 2y ago
    Just saying that for 24GB you can get all of wikipedia losslessly compressed on your laptop.
  - Foobar8568 2y ago
    While the 400B "knowledge" is reliable and replaces most of my googling, the 70B are not, nor their "reasoning". So until we can have these models locally, running at 10-20token /sec minimum... I am fairly hype up over gen AI but we are only at the start of this revolution, and will require a few more years for niche domains, or company knowledge (RAG doesn't cut it, fine tuning too expensive) and we aren't tackling all the media related. And because of hallucinations,which they require to work, they can't be reliable at 100% or be truly use without supervision. I feel it looks like internet back in the 90s, we were saying it as a new way to connect people, share knowledge, only to have echo chambers and porn distribution as few take away. I kid I kid.
giaour 2y ago
People didn't read books by making copies of them. Producing new copies of manuscripts was a skilled occupation.
- seanmcdirmid 2y ago
  Nope, that’s not true. You had monks copying books of course (mostly bibles), and very rich people could afford very expensive books made by scribes, but students at universities were expected to make their own copy during a reading/lecture run by a reader/professor. The words are still used in some older universities.
  - giaour 2y ago
    I was a medievalist before moving into tech, and I was always taught that students usually could not afford parchment on which to take notes, much less to copy down every word read out to them. Please cite a source for this claim. Also, people bought books to read them outside of the context of universities.
    - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
      Most students couldn’t afford books. Here is one ref, which revisits pre-printing press university education in a piece about the last step people complained about (the internet) https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/6104 https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/6104 > Before the printing press, faculty had to assume that none of their students had books. This led to a widely adopted practice known as dictation, in which faculty slowly read out the text for students so that they could make their own handwritten copies. (This was, of course, not the only mode of instruction. But it was a common one.) Blair writes that dictation was widely believed to have pedagogical merit, as “the act of copying out a text was often considered an essential part of mastering it” (p. 46). She provides a wide range of support for this view, going all the way back to Demosthenes and St. Jerome. However, others argued that dictation hurt student learning as the focus on writing distracted students from paying closer attention to the faculty themselves. (Presumably no one likes to stand in front of an audience and have them all looking down at their phones parchment the entire time.) > You may be unsurprised to learn that there is a strong economic undercurrent to the conversation about dictation, and that it often pit students against faculty and others. Blair notes that students saw it as “a cheaper way of procuring oneself a classroom text” (p.45). Consequently, a ban on dictations by Arts Faculty at the University of Paris in 1355 “anticipated vehement student resistance to the ban.”
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

azinman2 2y ago

The printing press takes your ideas that you already wrote and increases distribution. Deep research is writing the text for you. That’s completely different.

seanmcdirmid 2y ago
I disagree, it’s just another step in the automation of knowledge distribution that’s been going on for a long long time. Every step someone has lamented that we lost something, maybe starting with speech itself, and the invention of writing taking away from oral tradition, scrolls, books, the printing press, the World Wide Web, etc… I was just wowing to myself the other day that a local 70b 4q 40GB model on my Mac basically replaces Wikipedia for me and can be used offline in an airplane. A whole library can be replaced with a cube of knowledge that is just a wrapper around an LLM. Of course there is going to be resistance to any move up, there has never not been resistance.
- beeflet 2y ago
  It's like wikipedia except it spits out incorrect information at an alarming rate and has no references. Still, impressive that it only weighs 10s of GB when wikipedia alone is on the order of ~100GB
  - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
    Wikipedia isn’t a completely reliable source either. The LLM also includes a search engine. It’s weird since before I started playing around with it I thought it was just a fancy search engine and was grabbing sources from somewhere to shove into its context … but no, it’s all built in (although as deep research shows, it can do a lot better when it stuffs its context via research).
- porridgeraisin 2y ago
  Just saying that for 24GB you can get all of wikipedia losslessly compressed on your laptop.
- Foobar8568 2y ago
  While the 400B "knowledge" is reliable and replaces most of my googling, the 70B are not, nor their "reasoning". So until we can have these models locally, running at 10-20token /sec minimum... I am fairly hype up over gen AI but we are only at the start of this revolution, and will require a few more years for niche domains, or company knowledge (RAG doesn't cut it, fine tuning too expensive) and we aren't tackling all the media related. And because of hallucinations,which they require to work, they can't be reliable at 100% or be truly use without supervision. I feel it looks like internet back in the 90s, we were saying it as a new way to connect people, share knowledge, only to have echo chambers and porn distribution as few take away. I kid I kid.

giaour 2y ago

People didn't read books by making copies of them. Producing new copies of manuscripts was a skilled occupation.

seanmcdirmid 2y ago
Nope, that’s not true. You had monks copying books of course (mostly bibles), and very rich people could afford very expensive books made by scribes, but students at universities were expected to make their own copy during a reading/lecture run by a reader/professor. The words are still used in some older universities.
- giaour 2y ago
  I was a medievalist before moving into tech, and I was always taught that students usually could not afford parchment on which to take notes, much less to copy down every word read out to them. Please cite a source for this claim. Also, people bought books to read them outside of the context of universities.
  - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
    Most students couldn’t afford books. Here is one ref, which revisits pre-printing press university education in a piece about the last step people complained about (the internet) https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/6104 https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/6104 > Before the printing press, faculty had to assume that none of their students had books. This led to a widely adopted practice known as dictation, in which faculty slowly read out the text for students so that they could make their own handwritten copies. (This was, of course, not the only mode of instruction. But it was a common one.) Blair writes that dictation was widely believed to have pedagogical merit, as “the act of copying out a text was often considered an essential part of mastering it” (p. 46). She provides a wide range of support for this view, going all the way back to Demosthenes and St. Jerome. However, others argued that dictation hurt student learning as the focus on writing distracted students from paying closer attention to the faculty themselves. (Presumably no one likes to stand in front of an audience and have them all looking down at their phones parchment the entire time.) > You may be unsurprised to learn that there is a strong economic undercurrent to the conversation about dictation, and that it often pit students against faculty and others. Blair notes that students saw it as “a cheaper way of procuring oneself a classroom text” (p.45). Consequently, a ban on dictations by Arts Faculty at the University of Paris in 1355 “anticipated vehement student resistance to the ban.”

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]