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Comment by mdp2021 | Hacker News Reader

mdp2021

> it is worth thinking of this as an entirely new era

In this case, we could considered the «Early Days of AI» as not having happened yet. It is absurd to forget a past that worked to celebrate a present that largely does not, to sensible understanding of the goal. Tools must be reliable.

> and discontinuity from the past

Let us hope this is a bump on the road, a phase, better if organic and eventually productive of something good.

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Definitely not my intention to forgot or denigrate the past. Obviously all this exists due to deep learning and prior architectures. What I have been running into is many people and companies are interpreting this as "just more of the same" for prior ML waves, when really this is an entirely new capability set.

To the (bad) analogy on cars versus planes - both have wheels and can drive on the ground, but planes open up an entirely new dimension / capability set that can transform transportation, logistics, defense and other areas that cars were important, but different enough in.

I'm finding the comparison to the previous wave of ML absolutely fascinating.

I tinkered with ML for a few years, and it took a LOT of work to get anything useful out of it at all.

Now with LLMs I can literally type out a problem in English and there's a reasonably good chance I'll get a useful result!

It really does feel like an entirely new set of capabilities to me.

That's the big difference in this round. Before you had to have the ML expertise and the expertise to understand the implication of say a MNIST classifier example. Now anyone can "get" it because you're prompting and getting inference back in English. Underneath the fundamentals aren't all that different though, it has the same novelty factor and the same limitations apply.

I think the fundamentals are radically different, just due to the ease of applying this stuff.

I used to be able to train and deploy a ML model to help solve a problem... if I put aside a full week to get that done.

Now I tinker with LLMs five minutes at a time, or maybe for a full hour if I have something harder - and get useful results. I use them on a daily basis.

Exactly. LLMs are useful out of the box—and that enables tons of use-cases that just weren't economical (or even possible) with older models.

The only "entirely new dimension / capability set" that i saw at this new AI hype is its use in propaganda.

Microsoft is not capable of basic testing of its software so i don't see what AI will bring to the table besides more bugs.

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