3 ms·

I'd like to "reclaim" both AI and machine learning as relatively emotionally neutral terms of art for useful software we have today or see a clearly articulated

I'd like to "reclaim" both AI and machine learning as relatively emotionally neutral terms of art for useful software we have today or see a clearly articulated path towards. Trying to get the most out of tools that sit somewhere between "the killer robots will eradicate humanity", " there goes my entire career", "fuck that guy with the skill I don't want to develop, let's take his career", and "I'm going to be so fucking rich if we can keep the wheels on this" is exhausting. And the cognitive science thing.

neutronicus 1y ago
I don't think that's achievable with all the science fiction surrounding "AI" specifically. You wouldn't be "reclaiming" the term, you'd be conquering an established cultural principality of emotionally-resonant science fiction. Which is, of course, the precise reason why stakeholders are so insistent on using "AI" and "LLM" interchangeably. Personally I think the only reasonable way to get us out of that psycho-linguistic space is just say "LLMs" and "LLM agents" when that's what we mean (am I leaving out some constellation of SotA technology? no, right?)
- benreesman 1y ago
  I personally regard posterior/score-gradient/flow-match style models as the most interesting thing going on right now, ranging from rich media diffusers (the extended `SDXL` family tree which is now MMDiT and other heavy transformer stuff rapidly absorbing all of 2024's `LLM` tune ups) all the way through to protein discovery and other medical applications (tomography, it's a huge world). LLM's are very useful, but they're into the asymptote of expert-labeling and other data-bounded stuff (God knows why the GB200-style Blackwell build-out is looking like a trillion bucks when Hopper is idle all over the world and we don't have a second Internet to pretrain a bigger RoPE/RMSNorm/CQA/MLA mixture GPT than the ones we already have).

neutronicus 1y ago

I don't think that's achievable with all the science fiction surrounding "AI" specifically. You wouldn't be "reclaiming" the term, you'd be conquering an established cultural principality of emotionally-resonant science fiction. Which is, of course, the precise reason why stakeholders are so insistent on using "AI" and "LLM" interchangeably. Personally I think the only reasonable way to get us out of that psycho-linguistic space is just say "LLMs" and "LLM agents" when that's what we mean (am I leaving out some constellation of SotA technology? no, right?)

benreesman 1y ago
I personally regard posterior/score-gradient/flow-match style models as the most interesting thing going on right now, ranging from rich media diffusers (the extended `SDXL` family tree which is now MMDiT and other heavy transformer stuff rapidly absorbing all of 2024's `LLM` tune ups) all the way through to protein discovery and other medical applications (tomography, it's a huge world). LLM's are very useful, but they're into the asymptote of expert-labeling and other data-bounded stuff (God knows why the GB200-style Blackwell build-out is looking like a trillion bucks when Hopper is idle all over the world and we don't have a second Internet to pretrain a bigger RoPE/RMSNorm/CQA/MLA mixture GPT than the ones we already have).