5 ms·

Not sure why this has drawn silence and attacks - whence the animus to Ng? His high-level assessments seem accurate, he's a reasonable champion of AI, and he s

by w10-1 1y ago

Not sure why this has drawn silence and attacks - whence the animus to Ng? His high-level assessments seem accurate, he's a reasonable champion of AI, and he speaks credibly based on advising many companies. What am I missing? (He does fall on the side of open models (as input factors): is that the threat?) He argues that landscape is changing (at least quarterly), and that services are (best) replaceable (often week-to-week) because models change, but that orchestration is harder to replace, and that there are relatively few orchestration platforms. So: what platforms are available? Are there other HN posts that assess the current state of AI orchestration? (What's the AI-orchestration acronym? not PAAS but AIOPAAS? AOP? (since aspect-oriented programming is history))

tomrod 1y ago
No need to add AI to the name, especially if it works. PaaS and IaaS are sufficient.
lloeki 1y ago
> AOP? (since aspect-oriented programming is history) AOP is very much alive, people that do AOP have just forgotten what the name is, and many have simply reinvented it poorly.
- nivertech 1y ago
  AOP always felt like a hack. I used it with C++ early on, and it was a preprocessor inserting ("weaving") aspects in the function entries/exits. Mostly was useful for logging. But that can be somewhat emulated using C++ constructors/destructors. Maybe it can be also useful for DbC (Design-by-Contract) when sets of functions/methods have common pre/post-conditions and/or invariants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspect-oriented_programming#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspect-oriented_programming#Cr...
  - lloeki 1y ago
    > AOP always felt like a hack. I used it with C++ Colour me surprised that a language which is the practical definition of bolted-on features has an implementation that feels like a bolted-on hack ;) > early on Also the "early" AOP was very much focused on a formal definition and a specific approach, further entrenched by how Java did it. But you don't need to do AOP "by the letter" to do AOP: as long as you have cross-cutting concerns that you sprinkle over your code you're doing AOP, even if you're not calling that pointcut and stuff. Python decorators, C# attributes, Ruby's whole "monkey patching" (e.g alias method chaining pattern, or simply modules combined with the ancestor system and message passing) are all pretty much variations that fit well with the AOP paradigm. I'd argue that a lot of people are doing AOP without ever realising it.
- alex_smart 1y ago
  Also very much alive and called that in the Java/Spring ecosystem
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
handfuloflight 1y ago
We've defined agents. Let's now define orchestration.
- ramraj07 1y ago
  Bold claim. I am not convinced anyone's done a good job defining agents and if they did 99% of the population has a different interpretation.
  - handfuloflight 1y ago
    Okay. We've tried to define agents. Now let's try to define orchestration.
    - lhuser123 1y ago
      And make it more complicated than K8s
      - jliptzin 1y ago
        Not possible
        vajrabum 1y ago
        The platforms I've seen live on top of kubernetes so I'm afraid it is possible. nvidia-docker, all the cuda libraries and drivers, nccl, vllm,... Large scale distributed training and inference are complicated beasties and the orchestration for them is too.
stego-tech 1y ago
> So: what platforms are available? I couldn't tell you, but what I can contribute to that discussion is that orchestration of AI in its current form would focus on one of two approaches: consistent output despite the non-deterministic state of LLMs, or consistent inputs that leans into the non-deterministic state of LLMs. The problem with the former (output) is that you cannot guarantee the output of an AI on a consistent basis, so a lot of the "orchestration" of outputs is largely just brute-forcing tokens until you get an answer within that acceptable range; think the glut of recent "Show HN" stuff where folks built a slop-app by having agents bang rocks together until the code worked. On the input side of things, orchestration is less about AI itself and more about ensuring your data and tooling is consistently and predictably accessible to the AI such that the output is similarly predictable or consistent. If you ask an AI what 2+2 is a hundred different ways, you increase the likelihood of hallucinations; on the other hand, ensuring the agent/bot gets the same prompt with the same data formats and same desired outputs every single time makes it more likely that it'll stay on task and not make shit up. My engagement with AI has been more of the input-side, since that's scalable with existing tooling and skillsets in the marketplace instead of the output side, which requires niche expertise in deep learning, machine learning, model training and fine-tuning, etc. In other words, one set of skills is cheaper and more plentiful while also having impacts throughout the organization (because everyone benefits from consistent processes and clean datasets), while the other is incredibly expensive and hard to come by with minimal impacts elsewhere unless a profound revolution is achieved. One thing to note is that Dr. Ng gives the game away at the Q&A portion fairly early on: "In the future, the people who are the most powerful are the people who can make computers do exactly what you want it to do." In that context, the current AI slop is antithetical to what he's pitching. Sure, AI can improve speed on execution, prototyping, and rote processes, but the real power remains in the hands of those who can build with precision instead of brute-force. As we continue to hit barriers in the physical capabilities of modern hardware and wrestle with the effects of climate change and/or poor energy policies, efficiency and precision will gradually become more important than speed - at least that's my thinking.
- handfuloflight 1y ago
  This is great thinking, thank you for writing this.
lubujackson 1y ago
I'm guessing because this is basically an AI for Dummies overview, while half of HN is deep in the weeds with AI already. Nothing wrong with the talk! Except his focus on "do everything" agents already feels a bit stale as the move seems to be going in the direction of limited agents with a much stronger focus on orchestration of tools and context.
- fullstackchris 1y ago
  > deep in the weeds with AI already I doubt even 10% have written a custom MCP tool... and probably some who don't even know what that means
- hakanderyal 1y ago
  From the recent threads, it feels like the other half is totally, willfully ignorant. Hence the responses.
  - rhizome31 1y ago
    As someone who is part of that other half, I agree.
- davorak 1y ago
  > I'm guessing because this is basically an AI for Dummies I second this, for the silence at least, I listened to the talk because it was Andrew Ng and it is good or at least fun to listen to talks by famous people, but I did not walk away with any new key insights, which is fine, most talks are not that.
jart 1y ago
I like Andrew Ng. He's like the Mister Rogers of AI. I always listen when he has something to say.
- koakuma-chan 1y ago
  Is he affiliated with nghttp?
  - dmoy 1y ago
    No? ng*, ng-*, or *-ng is typically "Next Generation" in software nomenclature. Or, star trek (TNG). Alternatively, "ng-" is also from angular-js. Ng in Andrew Ng is just his name, like Wu in Chinese.
    - janderson215 1y ago
      Wu from Wu-Tang?
      - yorwba 1y ago
        No, Wu-Tang ultimately derives from the Wudang Mountains, with the corresponding Cantonese being Moudong https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%AD%A6%E7%95%B6%E5%B1%B1 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%AD%A6%E7%95%B6%E5%B1%B1
        57473m3n7Fur7h3 1y ago
        And between that and the rap group there’s this important movie: Shaolin and Wu Tang (1983) > The film is about the rivalry between the Shaolin (East Asian Mahayana) and Wu-Tang (Taoist Religion) martial arts schools. […] > East Coast hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan has cited the film as an early inspiration. The film is one of Wu-Tang Clan founder RZA's favorite films of all time. Founders RZA and Ol' Dirty Bastard first saw the film in 1992 in a grindhouse cinema on Manhattan's 42nd Street and would found the group shortly after with GZA. The group would release its debut album Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), featuring samples from the film's English dub; the album's namesake is an amalgamation of Enter the Dragon (1973), Shaolin and Wu Tang, and The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (1978). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaolin_and_Wu_Tang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaolin_and_Wu_Tang
fjjckj 1y ago
[flagged]

by w10-1 1y ago

tomrod 1y ago

No need to add AI to the name, especially if it works. PaaS and IaaS are sufficient.

lloeki 1y ago

> AOP? (since aspect-oriented programming is history) AOP is very much alive, people that do AOP have just forgotten what the name is, and many have simply reinvented it poorly.

nivertech 1y ago
AOP always felt like a hack. I used it with C++ early on, and it was a preprocessor inserting ("weaving") aspects in the function entries/exits. Mostly was useful for logging. But that can be somewhat emulated using C++ constructors/destructors. Maybe it can be also useful for DbC (Design-by-Contract) when sets of functions/methods have common pre/post-conditions and/or invariants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspect-oriented_programming#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspect-oriented_programming#Cr...
- lloeki 1y ago
  > AOP always felt like a hack. I used it with C++ Colour me surprised that a language which is the practical definition of bolted-on features has an implementation that feels like a bolted-on hack ;) > early on Also the "early" AOP was very much focused on a formal definition and a specific approach, further entrenched by how Java did it. But you don't need to do AOP "by the letter" to do AOP: as long as you have cross-cutting concerns that you sprinkle over your code you're doing AOP, even if you're not calling that pointcut and stuff. Python decorators, C# attributes, Ruby's whole "monkey patching" (e.g alias method chaining pattern, or simply modules combined with the ancestor system and message passing) are all pretty much variations that fit well with the AOP paradigm. I'd argue that a lot of people are doing AOP without ever realising it.
alex_smart 1y ago
Also very much alive and called that in the Java/Spring ecosystem

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

handfuloflight 1y ago

We've defined agents. Let's now define orchestration.

ramraj07 1y ago
Bold claim. I am not convinced anyone's done a good job defining agents and if they did 99% of the population has a different interpretation.
- handfuloflight 1y ago
  Okay. We've tried to define agents. Now let's try to define orchestration.
  - lhuser123 1y ago
    And make it more complicated than K8s
    - jliptzin 1y ago
      Not possible
      - vajrabum 1y ago
        The platforms I've seen live on top of kubernetes so I'm afraid it is possible. nvidia-docker, all the cuda libraries and drivers, nccl, vllm,... Large scale distributed training and inference are complicated beasties and the orchestration for them is too.

stego-tech 1y ago

> So: what platforms are available? I couldn't tell you, but what I can contribute to that discussion is that orchestration of AI in its current form would focus on one of two approaches: consistent output despite the non-deterministic state of LLMs, or consistent inputs that leans into the non-deterministic state of LLMs. The problem with the former (output) is that you cannot guarantee the output of an AI on a consistent basis, so a lot of the "orchestration" of outputs is largely just brute-forcing tokens until you get an answer within that acceptable range; think the glut of recent "Show HN" stuff where folks built a slop-app by having agents bang rocks together until the code worked. On the input side of things, orchestration is less about AI itself and more about ensuring your data and tooling is consistently and predictably accessible to the AI such that the output is similarly predictable or consistent. If you ask an AI what 2+2 is a hundred different ways, you increase the likelihood of hallucinations; on the other hand, ensuring the agent/bot gets the same prompt with the same data formats and same desired outputs every single time makes it more likely that it'll stay on task and not make shit up. My engagement with AI has been more of the input-side, since that's scalable with existing tooling and skillsets in the marketplace instead of the output side, which requires niche expertise in deep learning, machine learning, model training and fine-tuning, etc. In other words, one set of skills is cheaper and more plentiful while also having impacts throughout the organization (because everyone benefits from consistent processes and clean datasets), while the other is incredibly expensive and hard to come by with minimal impacts elsewhere unless a profound revolution is achieved. One thing to note is that Dr. Ng gives the game away at the Q&A portion fairly early on: "In the future, the people who are the most powerful are the people who can make computers do exactly what you want it to do." In that context, the current AI slop is antithetical to what he's pitching. Sure, AI can improve speed on execution, prototyping, and rote processes, but the real power remains in the hands of those who can build with precision instead of brute-force. As we continue to hit barriers in the physical capabilities of modern hardware and wrestle with the effects of climate change and/or poor energy policies, efficiency and precision will gradually become more important than speed - at least that's my thinking.

handfuloflight 1y ago
This is great thinking, thank you for writing this.

lubujackson 1y ago

I'm guessing because this is basically an AI for Dummies overview, while half of HN is deep in the weeds with AI already. Nothing wrong with the talk! Except his focus on "do everything" agents already feels a bit stale as the move seems to be going in the direction of limited agents with a much stronger focus on orchestration of tools and context.

fullstackchris 1y ago
> deep in the weeds with AI already I doubt even 10% have written a custom MCP tool... and probably some who don't even know what that means
hakanderyal 1y ago
From the recent threads, it feels like the other half is totally, willfully ignorant. Hence the responses.
- rhizome31 1y ago
  As someone who is part of that other half, I agree.
davorak 1y ago
> I'm guessing because this is basically an AI for Dummies I second this, for the silence at least, I listened to the talk because it was Andrew Ng and it is good or at least fun to listen to talks by famous people, but I did not walk away with any new key insights, which is fine, most talks are not that.

jart 1y ago

I like Andrew Ng. He's like the Mister Rogers of AI. I always listen when he has something to say.

koakuma-chan 1y ago
Is he affiliated with nghttp?
- dmoy 1y ago
  No? ng*, ng-*, or *-ng is typically "Next Generation" in software nomenclature. Or, star trek (TNG). Alternatively, "ng-" is also from angular-js. Ng in Andrew Ng is just his name, like Wu in Chinese.
  - janderson215 1y ago
    Wu from Wu-Tang?
    - yorwba 1y ago
      No, Wu-Tang ultimately derives from the Wudang Mountains, with the corresponding Cantonese being Moudong https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%AD%A6%E7%95%B6%E5%B1%B1 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%AD%A6%E7%95%B6%E5%B1%B1
      - 57473m3n7Fur7h3 1y ago
        And between that and the rap group there’s this important movie: Shaolin and Wu Tang (1983) > The film is about the rivalry between the Shaolin (East Asian Mahayana) and Wu-Tang (Taoist Religion) martial arts schools. […] > East Coast hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan has cited the film as an early inspiration. The film is one of Wu-Tang Clan founder RZA's favorite films of all time. Founders RZA and Ol' Dirty Bastard first saw the film in 1992 in a grindhouse cinema on Manhattan's 42nd Street and would found the group shortly after with GZA. The group would release its debut album Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), featuring samples from the film's English dub; the album's namesake is an amalgamation of Enter the Dragon (1973), Shaolin and Wu Tang, and The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (1978). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaolin_and_Wu_Tang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaolin_and_Wu_Tang

fjjckj 1y ago

[flagged]