Artificial intelligence still has some way to go

Message Bookmarked
Bookmark Removed
Not all messages are displayed: show all messages (6082 of them)

They are as much about your ability to answer standard questions under time constraints as anything, and human time constraints are meaningless to a computer.

immodesty blaise (jimbeaux), Tuesday, 14 March 2023 19:15 (two years ago)

I mean, I'm impressed.

It's telling though that OpenAI isn't bragging about how many parameters GPT-4 has compared to GPT-3 (basically, how big/complex the model is.)

One reason they might not brag about that is: they actually DID use a ton more parameters, like 10x as many. But performance didn't improve anywhere close to that much, suggesting that the current approach with LLMs is approaching a plateau.

Of course even if I'm right that plateau is going to be enough to wreak havoc (in both good and terrible ways.)

official representative of Roku's Basketshit in at least one alternate u (lukas), Tuesday, 14 March 2023 19:22 (two years ago)

jimbeaux is otm. iirc a primary reason we built computers was to store information and retrieve it quickly. GPT is an impressive feat of interface design not doomsday for human brains

rob, Tuesday, 14 March 2023 19:28 (two years ago)

These technologies are going to make 90% of human labor obsolete. I spent two years writing travel itineraries for rich people—that job could easily be replaced with chat gpt. My current job, teaching, cannot be, because forming relationships with students is just as important as grading essays, which i assume chat gpt can do or will be able to do. But my side hustle, freelance writing/art criticism, could be done by chat gpt. Not “as well,” I flatter myself by saying, but maybe as well.

treeship., Tuesday, 14 March 2023 19:59 (two years ago)

Releasing this stuff under current capitalist conditions seems like a nightmare. We need a radically new way of understanding the value of human lives in light of this technology. We can no longer say that people unable to generate value are disposable because that is all of us.

treeship., Tuesday, 14 March 2023 20:01 (two years ago)

lol cmon man

lag∞n, Tuesday, 14 March 2023 20:12 (two years ago)

how many people does it take to write travel itineraries for rich people in this economy

mh, Tuesday, 14 March 2023 20:16 (two years ago)

a computer program can’t ever do my job cuz I’m a genius at it boom take that computers

Clay, Tuesday, 14 March 2023 20:17 (two years ago)

a computer program cant do my job i am a computer program

lag∞n, Tuesday, 14 March 2023 20:18 (two years ago)

not sure if I mentioned it before but if you want to see something cool that's probably more impactful:
https://www.deepmind.com/research/highlighted-research/alphafold

mh, Tuesday, 14 March 2023 20:19 (two years ago)

tl;dr you give this model a protein sequence and it's insanely good (95%+) at telling you what the structure would look like

mh, Tuesday, 14 March 2023 20:21 (two years ago)

yeah formal problems like that are clearly the real "ai" application, making ai talk is just pr to juice openais valuation

lag∞n, Tuesday, 14 March 2023 20:23 (two years ago)

feel like it's gotta be good for some climate stuff too

frogbs, Tuesday, 14 March 2023 20:37 (two years ago)

don't worry treeship, rich people won't be satisfied exploiting and dominating AIs

rob, Tuesday, 14 March 2023 20:44 (two years ago)

Keep it busy with the three body problem.

immodesty blaise (jimbeaux), Tuesday, 14 March 2023 20:45 (two years ago)

making ai talk is just pr to juice openais valuation

I dunno! If it replaces Google (or if Google replaces Google with it) that's a pretty impact right there.

At a minimum, it's going to change how we interact with computers quite a bit. How long have we been talking about interacting with computers using natural language, forever right? And GPT is good at ingesting a bunch of documents and answering questions about them, so you can do things like give it your web history and ask it "what was that article I read about a forest with unusually ancient trees" and it'll be able to give you the URL.

Or say if you're a lawyer and your work is sort of mechanical text transformations anyway, having AI draft something for you to review will save you time (although you will have to review it as if written by a very clever stupid person.)

LLMs ain't all hype.

official representative of Roku's Basketshit in at least one alternate u (lukas), Tuesday, 14 March 2023 20:46 (two years ago)

sure search is a nice application for it too but thats pretty different than the generative performances that are getting all the press, doubt chatgpt will replace google tho im sure they have something better in house

lag∞n, Tuesday, 14 March 2023 20:50 (two years ago)

also worth questioning if searching with ai will be much different than whats going on now, the problem with the holy grail of natural language interface is that natural language just isnt that precise, you see people interacting with these programs now and theyre not talking like humans theyre figuring out how to talk computer same as always

lag∞n, Tuesday, 14 March 2023 21:00 (two years ago)

google already uses very sophisticated programs for search but thats not "ai" because were not pretending the computer is learning or that it somehow resembles a brain its kind of semantics at some point

lag∞n, Tuesday, 14 March 2023 21:03 (two years ago)

for simple stuff nah, it's pretty good (if you're asking it to do something in its capabilities and not treating it like an infallible oracle)

for complicated stuff yeah, but for the complicated stuff it's still wayyyyy less work than writing code to do the same thing

xp

official representative of Roku's Basketshit in at least one alternate u (lukas), Tuesday, 14 March 2023 21:04 (two years ago)

literally it has problems finding movie showtimes and doing long division currently

lag∞n, Tuesday, 14 March 2023 21:06 (two years ago)

yeah you have to know what it's good at and what it's not

but like i fed it a bunch of my emails and asked it "what were alex and lukas talking about in 1999" and it gave me a really good summary

that's amazing1 and like I didn't have to try multiple prompts to get something to work. it just worked.

official representative of Roku's Basketshit in at least one alternate u (lukas), Tuesday, 14 March 2023 21:10 (two years ago)

a bunch of friends are using it to write code. and it works! not 100% of the time. but overall it's a ridiculous time saver.

code is good because, like law, it's so regular.

official representative of Roku's Basketshit in at least one alternate u (lukas), Tuesday, 14 March 2023 21:11 (two years ago)

well my calculator is really bad at generating infinite episodes of The Big Bang Theory

frogbs, Tuesday, 14 March 2023 21:12 (two years ago)

I cant even get it to spell Bazinga

frogbs, Tuesday, 14 March 2023 21:12 (two years ago)

idk searching an extremely small data set thats already tagged by name and date for two names and a date xp

lag∞n, Tuesday, 14 March 2023 21:13 (two years ago)

... and summarizing it really well. without me needing to like, find a good text summarization library and write code. it's just ... one more thing it can do out of the box.

official representative of Roku's Basketshit in at least one alternate u (lukas), Tuesday, 14 March 2023 21:14 (two years ago)

a bunch of friends are using it to write code. and it works! not 100% of the time. but overall it's a ridiculous time saver.

code is good because, like law, it's so regular.

― official representative of Roku's Basketshit in at least one alternate u (lukas), Tuesday, March 14, 2023 5:11 PM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

its a time saver until you have to debug it and you have no idea how the program works

lag∞n, Tuesday, 14 March 2023 21:18 (two years ago)

tho i guess it does save time over cutting and pasting from stack overflow

lag∞n, Tuesday, 14 March 2023 21:18 (two years ago)

you proceed step-by-step, having it write small functions you can understand, like this: https://the.scapegoat.dev/llms-a-paradigm-shift-for-the-pragmatic-programmer/

it's not like handing a bunch of requirements to a human, but still a huge time saver.

official representative of Roku's Basketshit in at least one alternate u (lukas), Tuesday, 14 March 2023 21:20 (two years ago)

the conversation about how this stuff intersects with programming is actually pretty interesting imo, like why would you want it to write code code is for humans computers dont need code you could just have it write the binaries that human readable code compile to, then of course you wouldnt be able to alter it, but if you want to alter it then you need to understand it, and if you want to understand it you kind of have to write it, i mean it might save you some typing but tying isnt what takes time in programming, there are all sorts of code completion tools that are helpful, some of them are even "ai" like githubs copilot, but these are quality of life things more than things that write programs

lag∞n, Tuesday, 14 March 2023 21:25 (two years ago)

Does it also comment the code?

nickn, Tuesday, 14 March 2023 21:26 (two years ago)

if you ask it to it will

official representative of Roku's Basketshit in at least one alternate u (lukas), Tuesday, 14 March 2023 21:27 (two years ago)

the idea of it replacing google makes me wonder what people are using google for

on one hand, people will search for a phrase instead of entering a url because they don't know it or are lazy (and it's not in recent autocomplete) and it's not useful for that

I guess for finding specific facts like movie times or w/e it's useful but I pre-buy tickets from my phone half the time so once again, I'm using google to go to the theater website anyway

for configuring software I guess it could be a shortcut to give a quick answer ("override the default password by doing X and Y") but when I'm looking that up, I probably want to go to a full reference guide

if it's some quick factoid like the number of countries in the EU or something I guess it's good?

mh, Tuesday, 14 March 2023 21:27 (two years ago)

"is there a new episode of law & order on tv this week"

mh, Tuesday, 14 March 2023 21:28 (two years ago)

feel like if I want "small functions I can understand" I'm probably a lot better off just writing them myself. if I was writing some tool from scratch though yeah I can see how this would be very useful. but having it do things within the 500k line application I work on sounds like a nightmare

frogbs, Tuesday, 14 March 2023 21:30 (two years ago)

do you enjoy writing tests, or do you want the computer to do it for you

(and then you have to read it before you check it in)

official representative of Roku's Basketshit in at least one alternate u (lukas), Tuesday, 14 March 2023 21:36 (two years ago)

the thing is the typing isnt the hard part, its the understanding, i doth ink being able to ask the ai how it would do it is useful but its not that different than googling and is worse in that theres not a human explaining the code on the other end

lag∞n, Tuesday, 14 March 2023 21:40 (two years ago)

having a code completion tool like copilot is good for things that you more or less understand but dont necessarily remember the syntax so can start and then be like oh thats how you do it

lag∞n, Tuesday, 14 March 2023 21:42 (two years ago)

tho in fairness there is something psychologically painful about typing so i could see it as a quality of life thing, thats why people get so obsessed with their programming environments not because they actually help them work that much better its more about comfort feeling good

lag∞n, Tuesday, 14 March 2023 21:44 (two years ago)

being in the zone we all just want the zone does ai understand the zone

lag∞n, Tuesday, 14 March 2023 21:45 (two years ago)

yeah relevant to this discussion is the fact that in college if you do comp sci you will take tests which require you to memorize some exact syntax and coding practices. and that if you "plagiarize" code from Google or another student they can fail you. and then you get a job doing exactly what you studied for and it turns out all the syntax and coding styles are built into the developer and that plaigarism is actually kinda encouraged

frogbs, Tuesday, 14 March 2023 21:48 (two years ago)

if you could feed an unfamiliar codebase to an ai and it would explain it to you now that would be a fuckin trick

lag∞n, Tuesday, 14 March 2023 21:51 (two years ago)

you can do that!

official representative of Roku's Basketshit in at least one alternate u (lukas), Tuesday, 14 March 2023 21:51 (two years ago)

this is what I use for feeding it a bunch of text and asking it questions: https://github.com/jerryjliu/gpt_index

official representative of Roku's Basketshit in at least one alternate u (lukas), Tuesday, 14 March 2023 21:52 (two years ago)

nb I have tested toy scenarios only

official representative of Roku's Basketshit in at least one alternate u (lukas), Tuesday, 14 March 2023 21:53 (two years ago)

try it, come back and report, join the hype train

official representative of Roku's Basketshit in at least one alternate u (lukas), Tuesday, 14 March 2023 21:53 (two years ago)

im not talking about a lil function here im saying like i could direct it to this for instance not even every big program and itll explain how it works https://github.com/lichess-org/lila

lag∞n, Tuesday, 14 March 2023 21:54 (two years ago)

looks like that's about 7MB of Scala, would cost you maybe $20 to generate embeddings so you could ask questions about it

official representative of Roku's Basketshit in at least one alternate u (lukas), Tuesday, 14 March 2023 22:00 (two years ago)

I'll do it if I have time tonight, I'm not going to ask you to spend $20 so I can try to win an argument with you

official representative of Roku's Basketshit in at least one alternate u (lukas), Tuesday, 14 March 2023 22:01 (two years ago)


You must be logged in to post. Please either login here, or if you are not registered, you may register here.