5 ms·

It's mostly because of how they were initially marketed. In an effort to drive hype 'we' were promised the world. Remember the "leaks" from Google about an engi

It's mostly because of how they were initially marketed. In an effort to drive hype 'we' were promised the world. Remember the "leaks" from Google about an engineer trying to get the word out that they had created a sentient intelligence? In reality Bard, let alone whatever early version he was using, is about as sentient as my left asscheek. OpenAI did similar things by focusing to the point of absurdity on 'safety' for what was basically a natural language search engine that has a habit of inventing nonsensical stuff. But on that same note (and also as you alluded to) - I do agree that LLMs have a lot of use as natural language search engines in spite of their proclivity to hallucinate. Being able to describe a e.g. function call (or some esoteric piece of history) by description and then often get the precise term/event that I'm looking for is just incredibly useful. But LLMs obviously are not sentient, are not setting us on the path to AGI, or any other such nonsense. They're arguably what search engines should have been 10 or 15 years ago, but anti-competitive monopolization of the industry meant that search engine technology progress basically stalled out, if not regressed for the sake of ads (and individual 'entrepreneurs' becoming better at SEO), about the time Google fully established itself.

emsign 2y ago
They have their value in analyzing huge amounts of data for example scientific papers or raw observations, but the popular public ones are mostly trained on stolen/pirated texts offthe internet and from social media clouds the companies control. So this means: bullshit in -> bullshit out. I don't need machines for that the regular human bullshitters do this job just fine.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  > the popular public ones are mostly trained on stolen/pirated texts offthe internet You mean like actual literature, textbooks and scientific papers? You can't get them in bulk without pirating. Thank intellectual property laws. > from social media clouds the companies control I.e. conversations of real people about matters of real life. But if it satisfies your elitist, ivory-towerish vision of "healthy information diet" for LLMs, then consider that e.g. Twitter is where, until now, you'd get most updates from the best minds in several scientific fields. Or that besides r/All, the Reddit dataset also contains r/AskHistorians and other subreddits where actual experts answer questions and give first-hand accounts of things. The actually important bit though, is that LLM training manages to extract value from both the "bullshit" and whatever you'd call "not bullshit", as the model has to learn to work with natural language just as much as it has to learn hard facts or scientific theories.
  - agentcoops 2y ago
    Yes, I find the biggest issue in discussing the present state of AI with people outside the field, whether technical or not, is that "machine learning" had only just entered popular understanding: i.e. everyone seems ready today to talk about the limits of training a machine learning model on X limited data set, unable to extrapolate beyond it. The difference between "learning the best binary classifier on a labelled training set" and "exploring the set of all possible programs representable by a deep neural network of whatever architecture to find that which best generates all digitally recorded traces of human beings throughout history" is very far from intuitive to even specialists. I think Ilya's old public discussions of this question are the most insightful for a popular audience, explaining how and why a world model and not simply a Markov chain is necessary to solve the seemingly trivial problem of "predicting the next word in a sequence."
- brookst 2y ago
  A lot of irony in that comment.
thaumasiotes 2y ago
> OpenAI did similar things by focusing to the point of absurdity on 'safety' for what was basically a natural language search engine that has a habit of inventing nonsensical stuff. The focus on safety, and the concept of "AI", preexisted the product. An LLM was just the thing they eventually made; it wasn't the thing they were hoping to make. They applied their existing beliefs to it anyway.
fifticon 2y ago
I am worried about them as a substitute for search engines. My reasoning is that classic google web-scraping and SEO, as shitty as it may be, is 'open-source' (or at least, 'open-citation') in nature - you can 'inspect the sh*t it's built from'. Whereas LLMs, to me seem like a chinese - or western - totalitarian political system wet dream - 'we can set up an inscrutable source of "truth" for the people to use, with the _truths_ we intend them to receive'. We already saw how weird and unsane this was, when they were configured to be woke under the previous regime. Imagine it being configured for 'the other post-truth' is a nightmare.
f6v 2y ago
> Remember the "leaks" from Google about an engineer trying to get the word out that they had created a sentient intelligence? No, first time I hear about it. I guess the secret to happiness is not following leaks. I had very low expectations before trying LLMs and I’m extremely impressed now.
- decimalenough 2y ago
  This was three years ago: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/12/google-engineer-ai-bot-sentient-blake-lemoine https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/12/google-en... He was fired and a casual browse of his blog makes it quite clear that he was a few fries short of a Happy Meal all along.
- mdp2021 2y ago
  > """happiness""" Not following leaks, or just the news, not living in the real world, not caring of the consequences of reality: anybody can think he's """happy""" with psychedelia and with just living in private world. But it is the same kind of "happy" that comes with "just smile". If you did not get information that there are severe pitfalls - which is by the way so unrelated to the "it's sentient thing", as we are talking about the faults in the products, not the faults in human fools -, you are supposed to see them from your own judgement.
jibal 2y ago
> Remember the "leaks" from Google about an engineer trying to get the word out that they had created a sentient intelligence? That's not what happened. Google stomped hard on Lemoine, saying clearly that he was wrong about LaMDA being sentient ... and then they fired him for leaking the transcripts. Your whole argument here is based on false information and faulty logic.
- hatefulmoron 2y ago
  I think you're missing the point. He's pointing out what the atmosphere was/is around LLMs in these discussions, and how that impacts stories like with Lemoine. I mean, you're right that he's silly and Google didn't want to be part of it, but it was (and is?) taken seriously that: LLMs are nascent AGI, companies are pouring money to get there first, we might be a year or two away. Take these as true, it's at least possible that Google might have something chained up in their basement. In retrospect, Google dismissed him because he was acting in a strange and destructive way. At the time, it could be spun as just further evidence: they're silencing him because he's right. Could it have created such hysteria and silliness if the environment hadn't been so poisoned by the talk of imminent AGI/sentience?
  - brookst 2y ago
    Sure, but does any of that support the claim that LLMs were marketed as superintelligence?
    - hatefulmoron 2y ago
      Which comment claimed that LLMs were marketed as super-intelligence? I'm looking up the chain and I can't see it. I don't think they were, but I think it's pretty clear they were marketed as being the imminent path to super-intelligence, or something like it. OpenAI were saying GPT-(n-1) is as intelligent as a high school student, GPT-(n) is a university student, GPT-(n+1) will be.. something.
      - jibal 2y ago
TeMPOraL 2y ago
Nobody promised the world. The marketing underpromised and LLMs overdelivered. Safety worries didn't come from marketing, it came from people who were studying this as a mostly theoretical worry for the next 50+ years, only to see major milestones crossed a decade or more before they expected. Did many people overhype LLMs? Yes, like with everything else (transhumanist ideas, quantum physics). It helps being more picky who one listens to, and whether they're just painting pretty pictures with words, or actually have something resembling a rational argument in there.
chimprich 2y ago
> Remember the "leaks" from Google about an engineer trying to get the word out that they had created a sentient intelligence? I presume you are referring to this Google engineer, who was sacked for making the claim. Hardly an example of AI companies overhyping the tech; precisely the opposite, in fact. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-62275326 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-62275326 It seems to be a common human hallucination to imagine that large organisations are conspiring against us.
- dsr_ 2y ago
  There is no difference between an organization and a conspiracy. Organizing to do something is the same as conspiring to do something. That leaves the question of whether the organization is commensal, symbiotic or predatory towards any given "us".
- MindBeams 2y ago
  Corporations are motivated by profit, not doing what's best for humanity. If you need an example of "large organizations conspiring against us," I can give you twenty.
  - chimprich 2y ago
    I agree that sometimes organisations conspire against people. My point was, in case it wasn't apparent, the irony that somenameforme was talking about how LLMs were of little use because they hallucinate, whilst apparently hallucinating a conspiracy by AI companies to overhype the technology. I wasn't making a political point. You see similar evidence-free allegations against international organisations and national government bodies.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
babyent 2y ago
Bro AGI as a marketing term is too stale already. We are now at Artificial SUPER Intelligence. I’m waiting for Artificial Pro Max Super Duper Intelligence.
- latentsea 2y ago
  You wait, someday they'll come out with something they start calling AI 2.0

emsign 2y ago

They have their value in analyzing huge amounts of data for example scientific papers or raw observations, but the popular public ones are mostly trained on stolen/pirated texts offthe internet and from social media clouds the companies control. So this means: bullshit in -> bullshit out. I don't need machines for that the regular human bullshitters do this job just fine.

TeMPOraL 2y ago
> the popular public ones are mostly trained on stolen/pirated texts offthe internet You mean like actual literature, textbooks and scientific papers? You can't get them in bulk without pirating. Thank intellectual property laws. > from social media clouds the companies control I.e. conversations of real people about matters of real life. But if it satisfies your elitist, ivory-towerish vision of "healthy information diet" for LLMs, then consider that e.g. Twitter is where, until now, you'd get most updates from the best minds in several scientific fields. Or that besides r/All, the Reddit dataset also contains r/AskHistorians and other subreddits where actual experts answer questions and give first-hand accounts of things. The actually important bit though, is that LLM training manages to extract value from both the "bullshit" and whatever you'd call "not bullshit", as the model has to learn to work with natural language just as much as it has to learn hard facts or scientific theories.
- agentcoops 2y ago
  Yes, I find the biggest issue in discussing the present state of AI with people outside the field, whether technical or not, is that "machine learning" had only just entered popular understanding: i.e. everyone seems ready today to talk about the limits of training a machine learning model on X limited data set, unable to extrapolate beyond it. The difference between "learning the best binary classifier on a labelled training set" and "exploring the set of all possible programs representable by a deep neural network of whatever architecture to find that which best generates all digitally recorded traces of human beings throughout history" is very far from intuitive to even specialists. I think Ilya's old public discussions of this question are the most insightful for a popular audience, explaining how and why a world model and not simply a Markov chain is necessary to solve the seemingly trivial problem of "predicting the next word in a sequence."
brookst 2y ago
A lot of irony in that comment.

thaumasiotes 2y ago

> OpenAI did similar things by focusing to the point of absurdity on 'safety' for what was basically a natural language search engine that has a habit of inventing nonsensical stuff. The focus on safety, and the concept of "AI", preexisted the product. An LLM was just the thing they eventually made; it wasn't the thing they were hoping to make. They applied their existing beliefs to it anyway.

fifticon 2y ago

I am worried about them as a substitute for search engines. My reasoning is that classic google web-scraping and SEO, as shitty as it may be, is 'open-source' (or at least, 'open-citation') in nature - you can 'inspect the sh*t it's built from'. Whereas LLMs, to me seem like a chinese - or western - totalitarian political system wet dream - 'we can set up an inscrutable source of "truth" for the people to use, with the _truths_ we intend them to receive'. We already saw how weird and unsane this was, when they were configured to be woke under the previous regime. Imagine it being configured for 'the other post-truth' is a nightmare.

f6v 2y ago

> Remember the "leaks" from Google about an engineer trying to get the word out that they had created a sentient intelligence? No, first time I hear about it. I guess the secret to happiness is not following leaks. I had very low expectations before trying LLMs and I’m extremely impressed now.

decimalenough 2y ago
This was three years ago: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/12/google-engineer-ai-bot-sentient-blake-lemoine https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/12/google-en... He was fired and a casual browse of his blog makes it quite clear that he was a few fries short of a Happy Meal all along.
mdp2021 2y ago
> """happiness""" Not following leaks, or just the news, not living in the real world, not caring of the consequences of reality: anybody can think he's """happy""" with psychedelia and with just living in private world. But it is the same kind of "happy" that comes with "just smile". If you did not get information that there are severe pitfalls - which is by the way so unrelated to the "it's sentient thing", as we are talking about the faults in the products, not the faults in human fools -, you are supposed to see them from your own judgement.

jibal 2y ago

> Remember the "leaks" from Google about an engineer trying to get the word out that they had created a sentient intelligence? That's not what happened. Google stomped hard on Lemoine, saying clearly that he was wrong about LaMDA being sentient ... and then they fired him for leaking the transcripts. Your whole argument here is based on false information and faulty logic.

hatefulmoron 2y ago
I think you're missing the point. He's pointing out what the atmosphere was/is around LLMs in these discussions, and how that impacts stories like with Lemoine. I mean, you're right that he's silly and Google didn't want to be part of it, but it was (and is?) taken seriously that: LLMs are nascent AGI, companies are pouring money to get there first, we might be a year or two away. Take these as true, it's at least possible that Google might have something chained up in their basement. In retrospect, Google dismissed him because he was acting in a strange and destructive way. At the time, it could be spun as just further evidence: they're silencing him because he's right. Could it have created such hysteria and silliness if the environment hadn't been so poisoned by the talk of imminent AGI/sentience?
- brookst 2y ago
  Sure, but does any of that support the claim that LLMs were marketed as superintelligence?
  - hatefulmoron 2y ago
    Which comment claimed that LLMs were marketed as super-intelligence? I'm looking up the chain and I can't see it. I don't think they were, but I think it's pretty clear they were marketed as being the imminent path to super-intelligence, or something like it. OpenAI were saying GPT-(n-1) is as intelligent as a high school student, GPT-(n) is a university student, GPT-(n+1) will be.. something.
    - jibal 2y ago

TeMPOraL 2y ago

Nobody promised the world. The marketing underpromised and LLMs overdelivered. Safety worries didn't come from marketing, it came from people who were studying this as a mostly theoretical worry for the next 50+ years, only to see major milestones crossed a decade or more before they expected. Did many people overhype LLMs? Yes, like with everything else (transhumanist ideas, quantum physics). It helps being more picky who one listens to, and whether they're just painting pretty pictures with words, or actually have something resembling a rational argument in there.

chimprich 2y ago

> Remember the "leaks" from Google about an engineer trying to get the word out that they had created a sentient intelligence? I presume you are referring to this Google engineer, who was sacked for making the claim. Hardly an example of AI companies overhyping the tech; precisely the opposite, in fact. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-62275326 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-62275326 It seems to be a common human hallucination to imagine that large organisations are conspiring against us.

dsr_ 2y ago
There is no difference between an organization and a conspiracy. Organizing to do something is the same as conspiring to do something. That leaves the question of whether the organization is commensal, symbiotic or predatory towards any given "us".
MindBeams 2y ago
Corporations are motivated by profit, not doing what's best for humanity. If you need an example of "large organizations conspiring against us," I can give you twenty.
- chimprich 2y ago
  I agree that sometimes organisations conspire against people. My point was, in case it wasn't apparent, the irony that somenameforme was talking about how LLMs were of little use because they hallucinate, whilst apparently hallucinating a conspiracy by AI companies to overhype the technology. I wasn't making a political point. You see similar evidence-free allegations against international organisations and national government bodies.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

babyent 2y ago

Bro AGI as a marketing term is too stale already. We are now at Artificial SUPER Intelligence. I’m waiting for Artificial Pro Max Super Duper Intelligence.

latentsea 2y ago
You wait, someday they'll come out with something they start calling AI 2.0