lsy

7 ms·

31.
by lsy 1y ago
If you’re really confident that AI is the future, what’s the use of belittling people who aren’t there yet? This kind of response feels more defensive than anything else.
32.
by lsy 1y ago
Part of the reason the debate over usefulness is so exhausting is because there is an element of randomness, anecdote, and special pleading built into the use of the tool. One person has a good experience in their context, one person has a
33.
by lsy 1y ago
I think people hear "next token prediction" and think someone is saying the prediction is simple or linear, and then argue there is a possibility of "intelligence" because the prediction is complex and has some level of
34.
by lsy 1y ago
It’s honestly a little discouraging to me that the state of “research” here is to make up sci fi scenarios, get shocked that, e.g., feeding emails into a language model results in the emails coming back out, and then write about it with suc
35.
by lsy 1y ago
One thought technology for understanding "hallucination" is that LLMs can only predict a fact statistically using all of the syntax available in its training data. This means that when you ask for a fact, you are really asking the
36.
by lsy 1y ago
I feel like people in the comments are misunderstanding the findings in the article. It’s not that people save time with AI and then turn that time to novel tasks; it’s that perceived savings from using AI are nullified by new work which
37.
by lsy 1y ago
While the technology is indeed incredible, the question is not whether someone, somewhere, will find it useful for something, but whether the sorts of things it's useful for will economically justify the massive expenditure in both fin
38.
by lsy 1y ago
What's astonishing to me is the number of companies that will supposedly hire someone and give them credentials without even seeing them on camera. The proliferation of this narrative seems somewhat real and somewhat calculated to furt
39.
by lsy 1y ago
The point is well-made that truly revolutionary technologies don't need top-down mandates to drive adoption, and it's certainly a bad sign for the AI industry that we are in this phase of the hype cycle. But it also seems likely t
40.
by lsy 1y ago
This is unnecessarily self-congratulating. The problem is that vulnerabilities are found in cars after they are on the market for a while and already purchased, so existing owners get their rates hiked, but the manufacturer never fixes th
41.
by lsy 1y ago
I don’t see a palpable effect from “AI”, I think software as an industry is just extremely sensitive to interest rates. When money is cheap every company in every industry can soak up engineers to make speculative or vanity apps and website
42.
by lsy 2y ago
The article puts scare quotes around "understand" etc. to try to head off critiques around the lack of precision or scientific language, but I think this is a really good example of where casual use of these terms can get pretty m
43.
by lsy 2y ago
The fact that it was ever seriously entertained that a "chain of thought" was giving some kind of insight into the internal processes of an LLM bespeaks the lack of rigor in this field. The words that are coming out of the model a
44.
by lsy 2y ago
Assuming this result holds, and knowing that LLMs (including 4o) nevertheless remain incapable of standing in for people in most cases that require intelligence, this seems like a damning indictment of the test as an indicator of genuine in
45.
by lsy 2y ago
In addition to Kamshak's note about parallel inference accumulating float errors differently due to order of operations, which makes LLMs theoretically non-deterministic at temperature 0, there is the issue of them being practically
46.
by lsy 2y ago
One effect of this technology being almost totally opaque, non-explainable, and also nondeterministic is that most of the arguments for it (and maybe most against it?) take on an anecdotal character. I was surprised to hear Dr. Bubeck, who
47.
by lsy 2y ago
Thanks for commenting, I like the example because it's simple enough to discuss. Isn't it more accurate to say not that Claude " realizes it's going to say astronomer" or " knows that it's going to sa
48.
by lsy 2y ago
The natural-language chat box (or voice command) is seductive as an interface because it elides the question of how somebody will use a product. It makes a product that uses it seem more potentially capable, because you can imagine asking
49.
by lsy 2y ago
Going back to the original "Bitter Lesson" article, I think the analogy to chess computers could be instructive here. A lot of institutional resources were spent trying to achieve "superhuman" chess performance, it was a
50.
by lsy 2y ago
For CS-related books, I think the original 1979 Hopcroft and Ullman is better than its successor editions.
51.
by lsy 2y ago
I don't know, the expiration of low interest rates seems to fully explain the slump in the software industry, without considering the advent of chatbot-assisted coding. The job market is just much smaller and new entrants will unfortun
52.
by lsy 2y ago
I'm also put off by the author's condescension towards people who aren't convinced after using the technology. It's not the user's job to find a product useful, it's a product's job to be useful for the us
53.
by lsy 2y ago
Adopting this perspective would improve the quality of efforts around this technology. Instead of thinking of it as somehow creating an "intelligence", seeing it as a complex lens on the training data that is controlled by the pro
54.
by lsy 2y ago
I don't know that this is super well-founded: It seems similar to the "Fremen Mirage" [1], and misses that in most cases the society that escapes war for longer will have time and energy to build infrastructure and accumulate
55.
by lsy 2y ago
What a bizarre fixation for a national paper, the follow-on letter from Will Lewis is even more transparently fixated on the daily appearance of the "pillars" [1]. "Personal liberties" appears to be a new construction
56.
by lsy 2y ago
Research skills involve not just combining multiple pieces of data, but also being able to apply very subtle skills to determine whether a source is trustworthy, to cross-check numbers where their accuracy is important (and to determine wh
57.
by lsy 2y ago
It's hinted at in the article, but so far, it seems that 95%+ of use cases are satisfied by free-tier models, and will imminently be satisfied by local, open-weight models. It's not clear that people or businesses will ever be wil
58.
by lsy 2y ago
I'd actually say that in contrast to debates over informal "reasoning", it's trivially true that a system which only produces outputs as logits—i.e. as probabilities— cannot engage in *logical* reasoning, which is defin
59.
by lsy 2y ago
I think part of this is that you can't trust the "thinking" output of the LLM to accurately convey what is going on internally to the LLM. The "thought" stream is just more statistically derived tokens based on the
60.
by lsy 2y ago
Something like this seems expected, right? If you tune a statistical model to very high accuracy in "addition" over tokens, then the resulting structure of the model must correspond to some structure in the training data. And four

More ›