Consider the web in 1994

Posted Jul 24, 2024 7:47 UTC (Wed) by b7j0c (guest, #27559)
In reply to: Consider the web in 1994 by LtWorf
Parent article: Imitation, not artificial, intelligence

True, but AI can be utilized more like a tutor, accelerating the learning process.

AI will eventually become deeply contextual, so progress and learning over time will be reflected.

Having an expert at your side at all times will change industries.

Consider the web in 1994

Posted Jul 24, 2024 7:58 UTC (Wed) by rgb (subscriber, #57129) [Link] (10 responses)

LLMs are not experts! At best they are a bayesian database that can be queried using human language.

Consider the web in 1994

Posted Jul 24, 2024 8:00 UTC (Wed) by b7j0c (guest, #27559) [Link] (9 responses)

What's the difference? This is a reductionist take that has no value

My car is a an explosion box. My house is a sand pile. etc etc

Putting a label on something does not remove its utility.

Consider the web in 1994

Posted Jul 24, 2024 8:18 UTC (Wed) by rgb (subscriber, #57129) [Link] (4 responses)

The distinction might seem petty to you, but it is actually crucial. A CEO or middle management hears that this LLM is actually an "expert". Why should they still employ human experts then? This is a pitty for the human experts who are losing their jobs of course. But it is an even bigger pitty for the rest of us who are now putting their fate into the hands of bayesian parrots.

Consider the web in 1994

Posted Jul 24, 2024 8:29 UTC (Wed) by b7j0c (guest, #27559) [Link] (3 responses)

CEOs will play the risk/reward game like they always have

if a CEO prematurely replaces humans with AI tech that isn't ready, the company could lose in the market

if a CEO clings to humans when automation is ready, the company could lose in the market

in a competitive landscape, society gets closer to a state is prefers through its choices

no different than any tech since the industrial revolution

Consider the web in 1994

Posted Jul 24, 2024 12:06 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> CEOs will play the risk/reward game like they always have

More accurately: They will go with the cheapest option they think they can get away with.

> if a CEO prematurely replaces humans with AI tech that isn't ready, the company could lose in the market

More accurately: All that matters is that the financials look good *now* and any negative consequences come "later"

The economy is screwed

Posted Jul 26, 2024 15:42 UTC (Fri) by immibis (subscriber, #105511) [Link] (1 responses)

We don't have a competitive landscape any more. We have a hierarchical landscape where certain people are in charge and have locked themselves into the position of being in charge. It doesn't matter if the company will eventually fold 5 years after making a wrong decision (and it's questionable whether wrong decisions make companies more likely to fold than right decisions), because we still have to deal with the fallout of the wrong decision immediately and for the next 5 years, and then for another year until a sufficient replacement is available.

Look at all the world's information being locked on Reddit, which has just closed its doors (to every consumer of that information except for Google, who pays a lot of money to not be excluded). Reddit will surely go bankrupt due to this... in some years. It's already been over a year since Reddit started down this track. Reddit has almost never been profitable, so you could argue it's been making wrong decisions for ~20 years and still not failed. Meanwhile Facebook is occupied by almost exclusively Russian bots, and still has a high stock valuation. The markets are 99.9% disconnected from reality.

The economy is screwed

Posted Jul 26, 2024 17:11 UTC (Fri) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link]

AFAIK reddit is there to allow the USA government to run their bots. It appears that it isn't just russia doing that.

Remember the deleted post that stated that a USA airbase was the most reddit addicted city?

Consider the web in 1994

Posted Jul 25, 2024 4:01 UTC (Thu) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (3 responses)

> This is a reductionist take that has no value

I think a reductionist view has value because an LLM is not an intelligence, it is a thoroughly lobotomized parody of speech and writing, that only works because people are _very_ willing to extend the theory of mind to anything making vaguely human-sounding noises, even eliza was taken to be intelligent to some people, LLMs are only a little more sophisticated, but with just great gobs of training data the LLM can spit out something plausible sounding given a wide variety of inputs.

An LLM can't train someone in programming because it doesn't know how to program and it doesn't know how to teach and it has no way to model the state of the learner and adjust a pedagogy based on a feedback loop consulting hundreds or thousands of different neural networks in your brain. An LLM hardly has any feedback loops of any kind and barely one network.

An LLM can spit out text real good but it doesn't have enough varied systems to have the intelligence of a fruit fly. All it has are the strings of symbols that people have used to communicate with each other and with the computer and all it can do is combine those symbols in abstract and pleasing ways. People will invent a theory of mind when talking to it, but people are capable of anthropomorphism far less animate objects than computers.

It may well be that some day an artificial mind is created, it's not like brains are made out of magic unobtainium, they obey and rely on the physics of the same universe that allows computers to function, but there is just nowhere near the complexity and interlocking learning and feedback systems present in modern "AI" that are present in _any_ vertebrate, let alone human intelligence.

Consider the web in 1994

Posted Jul 25, 2024 16:33 UTC (Thu) by rgb (subscriber, #57129) [Link]

Well said. There really isn't enough pushback against this delirious narcissistic AGI drivel.
BTW here is a related piece I couldn't agree more with:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/07/op...

Consider the web in 1994

Posted Jul 25, 2024 19:47 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> but there is just nowhere near the complexity and interlocking learning and feedback systems present in modern "AI" that are present in _any_ vertebrate, let alone human intelligence.

The scary thing is there isn't the feedback in modern AI that is present in very basic lifeforms - even the humble fruitfly. And even the human brain probably has less raw processing power than a 6502! (Dunno how much we do have, but I know we achieve much more, with much less resource, than a computer).

Cheers,
Wol

Consider the web in 1994

Posted Jul 26, 2024 15:43 UTC (Fri) by immibis (subscriber, #105511) [Link]

IIRC, ELIZA was taken to be intelligent by *most* people, including people who understood how it worked. Its creator found this quite shocking.

Consider the web in 1994

Posted Jul 24, 2024 13:47 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (5 responses)

LLMs are not experts, they're bullshitting machines. They use statistical inference to create plausible looking stuff. E.g.:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240101002023/https://www.ny...

(Example given in the "ChatGPT is bullshit" paper, which someone else had linked to in the Zuck / Meta LLaMa article).

Consider the web in 1994

Posted Jul 24, 2024 14:32 UTC (Wed) by Paf (subscriber, #91811) [Link] (4 responses)

They’re incredibly, absurdly useful for this stuff. They do not need to be 100% accurate to be incredibly useful.

Most tutorials online are also a bit wrong or out of date. The LLM synthesizes from many and is generally, in my experience, stronger and more accurate than most individual articles.

It’s easy to say things like Bayesian parrot, but whatever label you attach they are in practice *really good* at this stuff. That’s from substantial personal experience.

Consider the web in 1994

Posted Jul 24, 2024 17:10 UTC (Wed) by legoktm (subscriber, #111994) [Link] (2 responses)

I'll echo this. LLMs are, to my surprise, quite good at generating code, and crucially, code is something we have extensive tooling and practices to verify the correctness of.

I feel people are falling into the AI effect trap: "The AI effect occurs when onlookers discount the behavior of an artificial intelligence program as not 'real' intelligence." No, LLMs are not anywhere close to human intelligence, that doesn't stop them from being quite useful regardless.

Consider the web in 1994

Posted Jul 25, 2024 4:08 UTC (Thu) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (1 responses)

There may be some kinds of repetitive boilerplate code which is well represented in a training data set which can then be reproduced by an LLM more or less correctly, but for anything else the LLM isn't going to be able to understand the requirements or the goals and may struggle to make a response that is syntactically valid, let alone solving your problem. Even when the response superficially seems correct, you will end up maintaining and refactoring the code produced, that you didn't write and may not really understand, when you have to find the bugs when the output is incorrect. This may _feel_ very productive in the beginning and generate great gobs of code but once the tech debt bill comes due it may not be that productive after all.

Consider the web in 1994

Posted Jul 29, 2024 0:27 UTC (Mon) by Paf (subscriber, #91811) [Link]

I strongly encourage you to actually *try* these tools. It is very apparent from your comments about boilerplate code that you have not. Seriously - I’m a programmer with 12 years of pretty successful work experience, largely on an out of tree distributed file system. I wondered if they might be limited to boilerplate. While they are *extremely* good at boilerplate, they absolutely are not limited to it. Sure, they can’t really do much kernel work of length, but they are wildly good at even moderately complex scripting and helping you use unfamiliar APIs. Yes, the API part is sort of boilerplate, but it doesn’t have to be common stuff - it can be obscure ones, including kernel APIs.

Consider the web in 1994

Posted Jul 25, 2024 10:02 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Yes, I'm sure they're useful for stuff like code, and other fields where it's often required to produce volumes of material that fit to already established patterns in the field, and tailor parts of them to the current task. IF you get the AI to produce the material for an expert to review, correct, and tweak; then you can save the time of that expert having to do the initial trawl and production. Sure, that's a time save.

It's a big IF though. Cause some people who are not experts will use it to produce reams of material that /look plausible/. Worse, people who are experts but are a bit lazy (or are doing their "homework" a bit too late) may /fail/ to do the review, correct and tweak step and instead present the AI generated bullshit as the work of their own expertise! (The article I linked to being a case in point - how much money did the defendant have to expend on legal fees to prove it was bullshit! Had they not had those resources, they may have had to fold and settle or lost the case - and then been on the hook for the costs!).

So yes, useful. With caveats. And the problem is some will be ignorant of or just ignore the caveats - like in the article!