Artificial intelligence still has some way to go

lol
I mean

ollss

resopionsics

the practice of reply opinions, very important for online tech

scadillity is often undervalued in a bot, but i select only high-scadillity models

I thought that said, resopsionics, which sounds awesome.

I know we all struggle to emphasize the Flecalibibtss in our daily lives.

Oh no someone's tripped while carrying a plate of Fallout past ChatGPT's input hopper.

has anybody used Whisper for dictation? there's a Mac app that will run it locally - https://goodsnooze.gumroad.com/l/macwhisper

it's amazingly good. the built-in Apple dictation engine is like, just basically pathetic next to it, especially if you're doing multi-person transcription. i really can see how stuff like subtitles is being thoroughly transformed (cf Fizzles' great explanation earlier). with MacWhisper you can export the file as a subtitles file - and you can even do an automatic translation of it

this is the sort of thing I mean a few months ago when i tried to counter the narrative that AI is actually just a bunch of hooey - i really don't think it is, for tasks like this, where suddenly there is this just far superior way of doing something repetitive and tedious

That's an excellent example of a very sophisticated computerized tool for automating a nearly mindless task, but calling it "artificial intelligence" seems like the wrong box to put it in. It's just massaging input and spitting out another version of it. A much cruder example of the exact same idea is converting html into bbcode.

it is AI - that's my point, is that it is literally using a neural net in order to be this good. it is exactly the right box to put it in. the actual useful things that AI is going to accomplish for us are going to be things like this imo, not, like, i dunno mixing martinis and starting nuclear wars or whatever it is that people think AI is

https://openai.com/research/whisper

it is literally using a neural net in order to be this good

it's a powerful technique, but I think calling it a "neural" is misleading. a "neural net" doesn't involve neurons. this would be irrelevant, except for the fact that while research neurologists can examine neurons down to a molecular level, they can't actually tell you how neurons produce intelligence. otoh, a computer scientist can describe how a "neural net" is constructed and how it functions to produce its outputs. so, the presumption that "neural nets" function using an identical model to organic neural activity can't be substantiated.

but, yeah, that software is amazingly good at the job it was programmed for.

lol i didn't just make up that word Aimless

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_network_(machine_learning)

this tech is qualitatively different from "a computer program" that spits out the same result each time

thanks for the tip, but I knew that long ago. they've been bruited around since before the first PC came off the assembly line. but they are programmed, just as much as other software is programmed, but using different tools on a different model than something like Excel or an operating system. the name has always been misleading from the beginning, because strong AI advocates have always made claims for their ideas that far outstripped reality, and neural nets have that kind of claim purposely embedded in their name from the start.

AI is a marketing term and you can play “no true AI” all day. The reason it’s called Artificial Intelligence is the same reason aspartame is an artificial sweetener. It might taste sweet but you’re not even chasing after the flavor of real sugar anymore and half the audience doesn’t care or they’re willing to accept it as close enough.

that is to say, I don’t think splitting hairs about terminology is useful because it’s an argument based in pedantry and not in the evaluation of product. and yes, the results have always been exaggerated

One thing that comes up at my work on a regular basis is that when we propose selling AI chatbot services to a client, we are not to use the term "generative" because the chatbot application does not come up with answers to issues based on a generative learning model, the solutions are pre-scripted based on the client environment.

sounds like a legacy product to me 😉

Yeah, who knows how much AI is really in it, but we are making a big push to sell it right now.

good article by Ed Zitron about the Reddit IPO and how AI is permanently and perhaps irreversibly destroying the human-generated portion of the the internet:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/are-we-watching-the-internet-die/

ai is a terrible term that doesnt mean anything but ai is an amazing term that doesnt mean anything, depending on how you look at it

neural net is possibly even dumber cause at least ai isnt making specific claims i mean what is intelligence after all no one knows, however how does a brain work also no one knows but it is at least a physical thing

ranking ais

1 neural net: is good at chess
2 generative ai: makes horrible writing and pictures
3 im not sure what the other ais are

neural net is fine imo, it's just a catchy way to describe graphs. it's like ford selling the bronco, no one thinks there's more than a tenuous link to horses

you know thats not true

just goofing

lol

saw someone in a twitter thread getting very mad cause someone said a brain isnt a computer

people are the weirdest is what i always say

https://media1.tenor.com/m/4MJrhjQSRJUAAAAC/gi-joe-i%27m-a-computer.gif

thats right

there’s always someone dropping in with “we used to call people who did the calculations computers though”

sure yeah that was a thing if you want to drop into the philosophy of “what is a computer” but I mostly think of modern programmable digital computers. breaking it down etc

back when machines were the hottest tech the brain was often described as a one with lil gears and what not and some people even thought that it was

yeah that’s been a problem for me, thinking “no one actually believes this, or that these are comparable things outside of thought exercises” but nope, people exist that think there’s a little guy pulling levers in their heads. that little guy? god

hes the one

this is cute you guys but neural networks are a thing that exists. you may not like the name but they do in fact use principles from neurological modelling. there are extremely smart people who have looked at the computational aspects of that to create algos that are now actually really changing the way things get done. my case in point is a 20-year-old recorded conversation between my mom and her mother, recorded poorly, my grandmother with her strong georgia accent, interrupting herself constantly etc and i can just run the soundfiles through this thing - which is free - and it's like 95% accurate, even proper names. it's mindblowing. there's a lil ol company called apple you may have heard of it that includes dictation software with its premium computing devices and that dictation software just blows in comparison, like just throw it in the garbage

yes those are weighted graphs that were somewhat inspired by what we knew about the function of biological neurons. we’re talking about the dinguses who think “inspired by” means “functions the same, brains are biological or digital”

obviously the new research that indicates biological neural nets may have a quantum component means we’ll only have real electric brains when we get better at quantum computing (yes this is me doing a bit)

which model are you using with MacWhisper btw? I was somewhat surprised their large model is only 3GB-ish but I guess that’s still pretty big

fwiw I think the neural net name is fine and sounds cool but I tire of the dinguses

also, I found my graph theory book from college the other day so I’m waving it at the screen right now

i’m using Medium

this is cute you guys but neural networks are a thing that exists. you may not like the name but they do in fact use principles from neurological modelling...

― Humanitarian Pause (Tracer Hand), Monday, March 11, 2024 2:28 PM (thirteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

lol this is the exact conversation i had with my 80 year old father where his argument was "there is a computer program thats good"

similar software too he was talking about text translation

nice

I'm kind of surprised there aren't more consumer apps like that, just taking the free stuff from OpenAI (or w/e) and grafting a decent UI on top. Instead we get eight zillion chatbots and a lot of github pages with scripts. And the cloud providers doing "but you can run it in the cloud for $5/hour" grifts

the funny thing about the translation programs is they are actually very bad, but certainly way better than nothin

no idea if apple's specifically looking at making their live transcription better. kind of two different use cases that are merging into one. using the same voice recognition that lets you tell the computer to turn on the lights for live transcription of people dictating documents or carrying on conversations probably doesn't help their image that much

my guess would be that the live voice to text stuff is so-so because the more context you have, the better. we're not at the point where it's just doing word-to-word swaps now but sometimes it sure feels like it

we used to call people who did the calculations mentats

Apple has also started requiring that podcast publishers either supply their own transcription or use Apple's own; i hope their own is better than what they ship with macOS ...

the ideal way to listen to a podcast is have it transcribed and then read by the machines

especially if its a comedy one thats just three guys riffin

spellcheckmate dinguses

eventually we could get the computers to listen to them so we don't have to