berniedurfee

I’d love to have a chat with their LLM. Must be absolutely astonishing what it knows.

I actually do get a bit of motion sickness when I get off a treadmill. It takes me a couple minutes to get my bearings after stopping.

Caltrop?

Or make those darn new fangled vertical TikTok style videos watchable!

Not sure, my contract ended a year later.

Waterfail FTW

I remember being on a team that spent a little over 2 weeks doing detailed project planning and estimating. We said the project would take 8 months.

The leadership team came back and said upon further review, the project would take 3 months.

I was so relieved to hear we could get 8 months of work done in just 3!

That’s why executives get paid the big bucks!

Governments have the most to gain. The NSA’s LLMs will be light years ahead of anything commercially produced if more data makes better models.

Who, in the US, has more training data than the NSA?

Not saying it’s right, but I could imagine the temptation to get effectively unlimited data into an LLM is too much to resist. Especially given the near certainty that content owners have a strong case for protecting their content from free use.

I always figure the major difference between software engineering and engineering physical things, is that software is virtual and fluid.

Once a physical thing is built or being manufactured, the cost of change is exponentially higher than with software.

So software engineers can experiment more frequently and can get away with low quality, as it can always be fixed later.

Of course, this same mentality can carry into industries where the stakes are life and death, which is where accountability is very much lacking.

There’s a local lumber yard near us with an operational rail line on site. They’ve survived the onslaught of big box stores and are thriving.

I imagine that rail line makes a big difference in being able to keep up with the logistics advantages of 6 big box stores within 30 minutes.

What if you took away 3/4 of the training data though? If NYT et al wins their case, training data won’t be free anymore.

Content owners will decide on the price and even who to license to.

Content owners will be asking exorbitant amounts for licensing fees and will likely strike exclusive deals with LLM owners.

Maybe Microsoft actually bought GitHub for the content?

I also think that profit for LLM-based businesses without massive data troves is now solidly capped.

Content owners are moving quickly to monetize their hordes of data. The days of free training data are over. If you don’t own it already, you probably can’t afford it.

I think the interesting side effect is that LLMs will end up as bifurcated as the internet. Each only being trained on some subset of content based on which subset the LLM builder chooses or is able to license for training.

LLM agents will all be hamstrung and biased in various ways based on fragmented training sets.

There will be no singularity.

There will be many LLM agents that learned to think based on the information their creators could afford or chose to provide it.

These agents will have biased, inaccurate and incomplete world views, yet will be very confident they know everything. How very human!

Yep. I made that rookie mistake early in my career.

Same. Amazon used to be great. But just about everything I receive now is clearly a hastily reboxed return (including shoes and earbuds) or garbage.

I’ve been more and more ordering elsewhere. I order direct from the manufacturer when I can.

Isn’t this just a thinly veiled ad?

That’s the way I read it, until I stopped when I realized it was another ad.

I feel like these posts should be tagged with [Advertisement] like they used to do in magazines.

I think also car crashes are generally caused by operator error. Plane crashes are more likely (maybe?) to be caused by mechanical malfunction.

The equivalent would be car crashes caused by mechanical failure where even an expert driver couldn’t have avoided catastrophe.

Though, maybe that’s balanced out by some large percentage of car crash deaths being the driver and/or passengers in the “other” car who were struck unexpectedly by a driver who was reckless, distracted or impaired.

Either way, I agree, it seems like a stretch to call plane and car crashes equivalent.

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eduCLIMBER is a tool that helps schools implement a robust Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS) practice to ensure that all students are provided with the resources they need to succeed.

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No mention of Hudi? I really liked using Hudi in a recent project. It feels so close to hitting that maturity level where it’s viable for a small team to maintain without introducing too many living parts.

Overall, I like the whole concept of the Lakehouse because it can be done cheaply.

Most datalakes turn into swamps pretty quickly, so cheaper is better.

Let it sit unused for a while in S3 and then quietly nuke it without burning money on a big compute environment.

I’m actually sort of impressed it recognized its mistakes and was able to do some rudimentary math at all.

Actually, the hairless apes are in control. They’re the ones behind the curtain wildly pulling the levers.

Turns out grownups are just older children. More powerful toys and bigger words, but just as reckless and immature.

We’re still an incredibly primitive species who have gotten _way_ out over our skis, so to speak.

We always err on the side of caution, because that’s a base instinct.

New technology is always existential, until it isn’t.

Awful empires and totalitarian states are hideous, but have a limited shelf life, which unfortunately often lasts many generations.

I think we give ourselves far too much credit when it comes to our ability to control our world, including society.

Power seekers will always try, but will eventually fail, even if it’s their legacy that fails sometime in the future.

That doesn’t help much in the span of a single lifetime, but I’m personally confident that we will slowly evolve to become a sustainable species.

Ah, gotcha, no worries, thanks for the reply!

Lol, at least then your comment wouldn’t have bothered me so much!

I’ve also heard it said that “apparent” intelligence is good enough to be called “real” intelligence if it’s indistinguishable from the real thing. That’s where I have a strong feeling that we’re missing the true meaning of intelligence, reasoning and consciousness.

As you said, we may very well be a couple iterations away from a chatbot that is truly indistinguishable from a human, but I still strongly assert that even a perfectly coherent chatbot is nothing more than an automaton and we humans are not automatons.

The fact that a couple replies in this thread made me feel defensive and a bit discouraged with their condescending tone is to me an internal reaction that an LLM or similar system will never have. Maybe an appropriate emotional reaction can be calculated and simulated, but I think the nature of the experience itself is truly beyond our current comprehension.

Maybe I’m grasping at the metaphysical to rationalize my fear that we’re on the cusp of understanding consciousness… and it turns out to be pretty boring and will be included with Microsoft O365 in a couple years.

Yes, I suppose my assertion is that LLMs may be a step toward our understanding of what is required to create AGI. But, the technology (the algorithms) will not be part of the eventual solution.

Having said that, I do agree that LLMs will be transformative technology. As important perhaps as the transistor or the wheel.

I think LLMs will accelerate our ability as a species to solve problems even more than the calculator, computer or internet has.

I think the boost in human capability provided by LLMs will help us more rapidly discover the true nature of reasoning, intelligence and consciousness.

But, like the wheel, transistor, calculator, computer and internet; I feel strongly that LLMs will prove to be just another tool and not a foundational technology for AGI.

They were paid when the original content was to be printed or posted on the internet.

Subsequently selling (or extracting compensation for) those works to AI companies is an emergent revenue stream.

I suppose the NYT isn’t legally obligated to share that revenue fairly with the authors, but it’d be awful nice if they did.

The conclusion that AGI will happen in 2040 is what I’m arguing against. I think 4020 is maybe a better estimate.

I don’t feel like we’re anywhere close given that we can’t even yet meaningfully define reasoning or consciousness… or as another commenter put it, what is it that differentiates us so significantly from other animals.

Lol, yes, in fact, I was reacting to the article.

The point I was trying to make is that I think better LLMs won’t lead to AGI. The article focused on the mechanics and technology, but I feel that’s missing the point.

The point being, AGI is not going to be a direct outcome of LLM development, regardless of the efficiency or volume of data.

I think that is what I mean by reason. I set the bar for reasoning and AGI pretty high.

Though, I will admit, a system that acts in a way that’s indistinguishable from a human will be awful hard to classify as anything but AGI.

Maybe I’m conflating AGI and consciousness, though given that we don’t understand consciousness and there’s no clear definition of AGI, maybe they ought to be inclusive of each other until we can figure out how to differentiate them.

Still, one interesting outcome, I think, should consciousness be included in the definition of AGI, is that LLMs are deterministic, which, if conscious, would (maybe) eliminate the notion of free will.

I feel like this whole exercise may end up representing a tiny, microscopic scratch on the surface of what it will actually take to build AGI. It feels like we’re extrapolating the capabilities of LLMs far too easily from capable chat bots to full on artificial beings.

We humans are great at imagining the future, but not so good at estimating how long it will take to get there.

I strongly disagree. Kids, even infants, show a remarkable degree of sophistication in relation to an LLM.

I admit that humans don’t progress much behaviorally, outside of intellect, past our teen years; we’re very instinct driven.

But still, I think even very young children have a spark that’s something far beyond rote token generation.

I think it’s typical human hubris (and clever marketing) to believe that we can invent AGI in less than 100 years when it took nature millions of years to develop.

Until we understand consciousness, we won’t be able to replicate it and we’re a very long way from that leap.