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If anyone trains a model on https://simonwillison.net/tags/pelican-riding-a-bicycle/ https://simonwillison.net/tags/pelican-riding-a-bicycle/ they're going to g
by simonw 9mo ago
If anyone trains a model on https://simonwillison.net/tags/pelican-riding-a-bicycle/ https://simonwillison.net/tags/pelican-riding-a-bicycle/ they're going to get some VERY weird looking pelicans.
- suddenlybananas 9mo agoWhy would they train on that? Why not just hire someone to make a few examples.
- simonw 9mo agoI look forward to them trying. I'll know when the pelican riding a bicycle is good but the ocelot riding a skateboard sucks.
- suddenlybananas 9mo agoBut they could just train on an assortment of animals and vehicles. It's the kind of relatively narrow domain where NNs could reasonably interpolate.
- simonw 9mo agoThe idea that an AI lab would pay a small army of human artists to create training data for $animal on $transport just to cheat on my stupid benchmark delights me.
- suddenlybananas 9mo agoWhen you're spending trillions on capex, paying a couple of people to make some doodles in SVGs would not be a big expense.
- simonw 9mo agoThe embarrassment of getting caught doing that would be expensive.
- jononor 9mo agoThey were caught using all the data on the internet without asking for permission or compensating anyone. And it has cost them nothing and earned them billions so far.
- red75prime 9mo agoVetting them for the potential for whistleblowing might be a bit more involved. But conspiracy theories have an advantage because the lack of evidence is evidence for the theory.
- toraway 9mo agoHuh? AI labs are routinely spending millions to billions to various 3rd party contractors specializing in creating/labeling/verifying specialized content for pre/post-training. This would just be one more checkbox buried in hundreds of pages of requests, and compared to plenty of other ethical grey areas like copyright laundering with actual legal implications, leaking that someone was asked to create a few dozen pelican images seems like it would be at the very bottom of the list of reputational risks.
- red75prime 9mo agoHow do you think who's in on that? Not only pelicans, I mean, the whole thing. CEOs, top researchers, select mathematicians, congressmen? Does China participate in maintaining the bubble? I, myself, prefer the universal approximation theorem and empirical finding that stochastic gradient descent is good enough (and "no 'magic' in the brain", of course).
- usefulposter 9mo ago
- dontwannahearit 9mo agoWould it not be better to have 100 such tests "Pelican on bicycle", "Tiger on stilts"..., and generate them all for every new model but only release a new one each time. That way you could show progression across all models, attempts at benchmaxxing would be more obvious. Given the crazy money and vying for supremacy among AI companies right now it does seem naive to belive that no attempt at better pelicans on bicycles is being made. You can argue "but I will know because of the quality of ocelots on skateboards" but without a back catalog of ocelots on skateboards to publish its one datapoint and leaves the AI companies with too much plausible deniability. The pelicans-on-bicycles is a bit of fun for you (and us!) but it has become a measure of the quality of models so its serious business for them. There is an assymetry of incentives and high risk you are being their useful idiot. Sorry to be blunt.
- Applejinx 9mo agoOr indeed do the Markov chain conceptual slip. Pelican on bicycle, badger on stool, tiger on acid. Pelican on bicycle is definitely cooked, though: people know it and it's talked about in language.