There is one posted on HN every week. How many more do we need to accept the fact this tech is not what it is sold at and we are bored waiting for it get good? I am not say "get better", because it keeps getting better, but somehow doesn't get good.
It's frustrating because it's infantalizing, it derails the potential of an interesting technical discussion (ex. Here, diffusion), and it misses the mark substantially.
At the end of the day, it's useful in a thousand ways day to day, and the vast majority of people feel this way. The only people I see vehemently arguing the opposite seem to assume only things with 0 error rate are useful or are upset about money in some form.
But is that really it? I'm all ears. I'm on a 5 hour flight. I'm genuinely unclear on whats going on that leads people to take this absolutist position that they're waiting for ??? to admit ??? about LLMs.
Yes, the prose machine didnt nail circuit design, that doesn't mean whatever They you're imagining needs to give up and accept ???
Irony: humans think in very black-and-white terms, one could even say boolean; conversely LLMs display subtly and nuance.
When I was a kid, repeats of Trek had Spock and Kirk defeating robots with the liar's paradox, yet today it seems like humans are the ones who are broken by it while the machines are just going "I understood that reference!"
When we get to that level, we're all out of work.
In the meantime, LLMs are already basically as good as the scriptwriters made the TNG-VOY era starship computers act.
At the same time I do appreciate the actual performance and potential future promise of this tech. I have to remind myself that the wolf and sheep show is a side attraction, but for some people it’s clearly the main attraction.
The problem with everything today is not only that it’s hype-centric, but that that carries away those who were otherwise reasonable. AI isn’t any special in this regard, it’s just “crypto” of this decade.
I see this trend everywhere, in tech, socio, markets. Everything is way too fake, screamy and blown out of proportion.
I'm sure you see it, I'd just love for someone to pause their internal passion play long enough to explain what they're seeing. Because I refuse to infantalize, I refuse to believe it's just grumbling because its not 100% accurate 100% of the time, and doesn't do 100% of everything.
The problem with hype is that it can become a pathological form of social proof.
fwiw if someone's really into Google minutae: I'm not so sure it is relatively okay anymore, it's kinda freaky how many posts there are on Blind along the lines of "wow I left X for here, assumed i'd at least be okay, but I am deeply unhappy. its much worse than average-white-collar job I left"
in general id recommend Ian Hickson's blog post on leaving. I can't remember the exact quote that hit hard, something like decisions moved from being X to Y to Z to being for peoples own benefit.
I'd also add there was some odd corrupting effects from CS turning into something an aimless Ivy Leaguer would do if they didn't feel like finance.
Why? Is this naive engineering refusing to acknowledge the same old design flaws? Nefarious management fast tracking enshittification? Or do users actually want their write-a-naughty-limerick goofs to get mixed up with their serious effort to fast track circuit design? I wouldn’t want to appear cynical but one of these explanations just makes more sense than the others!
The core tech such as it is is fine, great even. But it’s not hard to see many different ways that it’s already spiraling out of control.
It's not "general intelligence", so it's over hyped, and They get so whiny about the inevitable criticism, and They are ignoring that it's so mindnumbingly boring to have people making the excuse that "designed a circuit board from scratch" wasn't something anyone thinks or claims an LLM should do.
Who told you LLMs can design circuit boards?
Who told you LLMs are [artificial] general intelligence?
I get sick of it constantly being everywhere, but I don't feel the need to intellectualize it in a way that blames the nefarious ???
*waves*
Everyone means a different thing by each letter of AGI, and sometimes also by the combination.
I know my opinion is an unpopular one, but given how much more general-purpose they are than most other AI, I count LLMs as "general" AI; and I'm old enough to remember when AI didn't automatically mean "expert level or better", when it was a surprise that Kasparov was beaten (let alone Lee Sedol).
LLMs are (currently) the ultimate form of "Jack of all trades, master of none".
I'm not surprised that it failed with these tests, even though it clearly knows more about electronics than me. (I once tried to buy a 220 kΩ resistor, didn't have the skill to notice the shop had given me a 220 Ω resistor, the resistor caught fire).
I'd still like to call these things "AGI"… except for the fact that people don't agree on what the word means and keep objecting to my usage of the initials as is, so it would't really communicate anything for me to do so.
We discovered this nearly-magical technology. But now the novelty is wearing off, and the question is no longer "how awesome is this?". It's "what can I do with it for today?".
And frustratingly, the apparent list of uses is shrinking, mostly because many serious applications come with a footnote of "yeah, it can do that, but unreliably and with failure modes that are hard for most users to spot and correct".
So yes, adding "...but without making up dangerous nonsense" is moving the goalposts, but is it wrong?
For example, we are using it to do meeting summaries and it is remarkably good at it. In fact, in comparison to humans we did A/B testing with - usually better.
Another thing is new employee ramp. It is able to answer questions and guide new employees much faster than we’ve ever seen before.
Another thing I’ve started toying with it with, but have gotten incredible results so far is email prioritization. Basically letting me know which emails I should read most urgently.
Again, these were all things where the state of the art was basically useless 3 years ago.
While it might be "moving the goal posts" the issue is that the goal posts were arbitrary to start with. In the context of the metaphor we put them on the field so there could be a game, despite the outcome literally not mattering anywhere else.
This isn't limited to AI: anyone dealing with customers knows that the worst thing you can do is take what the customer says their problem is at face value, replete with the proposed solution. What the customer knows is they have a problem, but it's very unlikely they want the solution they think they do.
So are you happy that a 1940s tic-tac-toe computer "is AI"? And that's going to be your bar for AI forever?
"Moving the goalposts is a metaphor, derived from goal-based sports such as football and hockey, that means to change the rule or criterion of a process or competition while it is still in progress, in such a way that the new goal offers one side an advantage or disadvantage." - and the important part about AI is that it be easy for developers to claim they have created AI, and if we move the goalposts then that's bad because ... it puts them at an unfair disadvantage? What is even wrong with "moving the goalposts" in this situation, claiming something is/isn't AI is not a goal-based sport. The metaphor is nonsensical whining.
I think it would take a human about 2.6 million (waking) years to actually read Common Crawl[0]; though obviously faster if they simply absorb token streams as direct sensory input.
The strength of computers is that transistors are (literally) faster than synapses to the degree to which marathon runners are faster than continental drift; the weakness is they need to, too — current generation AI is only able to be this good due to this advantage allowing it to read far more than any human.
How much this difference matters depends on the use-case: if AI were as good at learning as we are, Tesla's FSD would be level 5 autonomy years ago already, even with just optical input.
[0] April 2024: 386 TiB; assuming 9.83 bits per word and 250 w.p.m: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=386+TiB+%2F+9.83+bits+p...
As the saying goes - "make it work, make it right, make it fast".
Soon everything you see and hear will be built up through a myriad of AI models and pipelines.
It is so bizarre that some people view this as a positive outcome.
Your argument rhymes with:
- "Let's keep using horses. They're good enough."
- "Photography lacks the artistic merit of portrait art."
- "Electronic music isn't music."
- "Vinyl is the only way to listen to music."
- "Digital photography ruins photography."
- "Digital illustration isn't real illustration and tablets are cheating."
- "Video games aren't art."
- "Javascript developers aren't real programmers."
Though I'm paraphrasing, these are all things that have been said.
I bet you my right kidney that people will use AI to produce incredible art that will one day (soon) garner widespread praise and accolade.
It's just a tool.
The population of people who want to create art is higher than the people who have the classical skills. By sheer volume, the former will dominate the latter. And eventually most artists will begin to use AI tools when they realize that's what they are -- tools.
1. (real illustration vs digital illustration)
2. (composing on sheet music vs composing in a DAW)
and
3. illustration vs Stable Diffusion
4. composing vs generative music models such as Suno
What's different is the wide disparity between input and output. Generally, art has traditionally had a closer connection between the "creator" and the "creation". Generative models have married two conventionally highly disparate mediums together, e.g. text to image / text to audio.
If you have zero artistic ability, you'd have about as much success using Photoshop as you would with traditional pencil and paper.
Whereas any doofus can type in the description of something along with words like "3D", "trending on artstation", "hyper-realistic,", and "4K" and then proceed to generate thousands of images in automatic1111 which they can flood DeviantArt with in a single day.
The same applies to music composition whether you are laboriously notating with sheet music or dropping notes using a horizontal tracker in a DAW like Logic. If you're not a musician, the fanciest DAW in the world won't make you one.
I spent 48 hours two weeks back (with only a few hours of sleep) making an AI film. I used motion capture, rotoscoping, and a whole host of other tools to accomplish this.
I know people who have spent months making AI music videos. People who painstakingly mask and pose skeletons. People who design and comp shots between multiple workflows.
These are tools.
Many times this also happens with artists themselves. After a point, you are getting way more commissions than you can produce yourself, so you employ a small army of understudies that learn your techniques and make your pieces for you. So what you describe has existed for hundreds of years.
A short list could include old ones like Rembrandt or Rubens and a new ones like Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst.
Artists and "creative" people have long held a monopoly on this ability and are now finally paying the price now that we've automated them away and made their "valuable" skill a commodity.
I've seen a lot of schadenfreude towards artists recently, as if they're somehow gatekeeping art and stopping the rest of us from practicing it.
I really struggle to understand it; the barrier of entry to art is basically just buying a paper and pencil and making time to practice. For most people the practice time could be spent on many things which would have better economic outcomes.
> monopoly
Doesn't this term imply an absence of competition? There seems to be a lot of competition. Anyone can be an artist, and anyone can attempt to make a living doing art. There is no certification, no educational requirements. I'm sure proximity to wealth is helpful but this is true of approximately every career or hobby.
Tangentially, there seem to be positive social benefits to everyone having different skills and depending on other people to get things done. It makes me feel good when people call me up asking for help with something I'm good at. I'm sure it feels the same for the neighborhood handyman when they fix someone's sink, the artist when they make profile pics for their friends, etc. I could be wrong but I don't think it'll be entirely good for people when they can just have an AI or a robot do everything for them.
The Facebook feed is AI; Google PageRank is AI; anti-spam filters are AI; A/B testing is AI; recommendation systems are AI.
It's been a long time since computers took over from humans with designing transistor layouts in CPUs — I was hearing about the software needing to account for quantum mechanics nearly a decade ago already.