[HN Gopher] Early Days of AI ___________________________________________________________________ Early Days of AI Author : todsacerdoti Score : 72 points Date : 2023-08-21 18:01 UTC (4 hours ago) (HTM) web link (blog.eladgil.com) (TXT) w3m dump (blog.eladgil.com) | mdp2021 wrote: | > _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. | eladgil wrote: | 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. | simonw wrote: | 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. | andy99 wrote: | 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. | simonw wrote: | 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. | joewferrara wrote: | The author has more experience in the field than me, so gotta | defer to him for the most part, and while I generally agree with | the post, I disagree strongly with one point. The author frames | this new era of AI about using transformer models (and diffusion | models) but transformer models have been around for a while and | have been useful from before GPT3, the model the author claims as | the starting point for this new AI. BERT is a transformer model | that came out in 2018 and is a very useful transformer style | model, which showed the promise of transformers before GPT3. | | Edit: Going back through the post, the author's slide has | Transformers labeled as 2017, so he is aware of the history and | he's just emphasizing that GPT3 was the first transformer model | that he thinks had something interesting and related to the | current AI explosion. I think BERT style models would be worth a | mention in the post as the first transformer models found to be | widely useful. | whimsicalism wrote: | From the article, | | > The biggest inklings that something interesting was afoot | came kicked with GPT-3 launching in June 2020 | | Yes, I agree with you that if you were in this field, this is | quite late to the realization. Most of my grad seminar in NLP | in 2018 imagined ChatGPT-style tech would be possible as | "language modeling is essentially world modeling." | eladgil wrote: | 100% agree the theory on AI is old and actually dates back to | the early days of "cybernetics". But the real difference is | at what point do we considered it sufficiently reduced to | practice? I chose GPT-3 but undoubtedly people can point to | earlier examples as glimpses of what was coming for sure. | dvt wrote: | > There is enormous potential for this new wave of tech to impact | humanity. For example, Google's MedPaLM2 model outperforms human | physicians to such a strong degree that having medical experts | RLHF the model makes it worse (!). | | Wow, what a ridiculously disingenuous cherry-picked claim. If you | actually _read_ the paper you 'll find this gem: "However, for | one of the axes, including inaccurate or irrelevant information, | Med-PaLM 2 answers were not as favorable as physician answers." | Typical AI hype blog post donning the HN front page. At this | point, I'm ready to put on my tinfoil hat and say that a16z, etc. | is heavily pushing all these narratives because the next round of | investments for the great majority of AI startups will almost | certainly be the bagholder round. | gumby wrote: | I think in five years, LLMs will be like expert systems: largely | considered not really "AI" but sitting around in the back end of | all sorts of random systems. | eladgil wrote: | The bar for what is "AI" keeps moving. For example plane | autopilots would be "AI" in the 1980s, the ability for a | machine to win at chess, go, and other games etc. | [deleted] | TMWNN wrote: | | disagree with the legions of experts who last year denounced | Blake Lemoine and his claims. I know enough to know, though, | of the AI effect <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect>, a | longstanding tradition/bad habit of advances being dismissed | by those in the field itself as "not real AI". Anyone, expert | or not, in 1950, 1960, or even 1970 who was told that before | the turn of the century a computer would defeat the world | chess champion would conclude that said feat must have come | as part of a breakthrough in AGI. Same if told that by 2015 | many people would have in their homes, and carry around in | their pockets, devices that can respond to spoken queries on | a variety of topics. | | To put another way, I was hesitant to be as self-assuredly | certain about how to define consciousness, intelligence, and | sentience--and what it takes for them to emerge--as the | experts who denounced Lemoine. The recent GPT breakthroughs | have made me more so. | | I found this recent Sabine Hossenfelder video interesting. | <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cP5zGh2fui0> | calderknight wrote: | I don't think those things have ever been widely considered | AI. It may have widely thought that those things would | require AI, though. | beambot wrote: | Chess is featured in Peter Norvig's "Artificial | Intelligence: A Modern Approach" dating back to the 1st | edition (1995) and at least up until the 3rd edition | (2009). Algorithms such as alpha-beta pruning were | definitely considered AI at the time. | calderknight wrote: | Yeah AI has multiple denotations, those things have never | been considered "real" AI tho | [deleted] | robotresearcher wrote: | The MIT AI Group, including Marvin Minsky, were the | mainstream of AI more than 50 years ago, and begat the MIT | AI Lab. They and everyone else at the time called their | work AI. | TMWNN wrote: | | disagree with the legions of experts who last year denounced | Blake Lemoine and his claims. I know enough to know, though, | of the AI effect <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect>, a | longstanding tradition/bad habit of advances being dismissed | by those in the field itself as "not real AI". Anyone, expert | or not, in 1950, 1960, or even 1970 who was told that before | the turn of the century a computer would defeat the world | chess champion would conclude that said feat must have come | as part of a breakthrough in AGI. Same if told that by 2015 | many people would have in their homes, and carry around in | their pockets, devices that can respond to spoken queries on | a variety of topics. | | To put another way, I was hesitant to be as self-assuredly | certain about how to define consciousness, intelligence, and | sentience--and what it takes for them to emerge--as the | experts who denounced Lemoine. The recent GPT breakthroughs | have made me more so. | | I found this recent Sabine Hossenfelder video interesting. | <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cP5zGh2fui0> | TMWNN wrote: | | disagree with the legions of experts who last year denounced | Blake Lemoine and his claims. I know enough to know, though, | of the AI effect <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect>, a | longstanding tradition/bad habit of advances being dismissed | by those in the field itself as "not real AI". Anyone, expert | or not, in 1950, 1960, or even 1970 who was told that before | the turn of the century a computer would defeat the world | chess champion would conclude that said feat must have come | as part of a breakthrough in AGI. Same if told that by 2015 | many people would have in their homes, and carry around in | their pockets, devices that can respond to spoken queries on | a variety of topics. | | To put another way, I was hesitant to be as self-assuredly | certain about how to define consciousness, intelligence, and | sentience--and what it takes for them to emerge--as the | experts who denounced Lemoine. The recent GPT breakthroughs | have made me more so. | | I found this recent Sabine Hossenfelder video interesting. | <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cP5zGh2fui0> | TMWNN wrote: | As a non-expert in the field I was hesitant at the time to | disagree with the legions of experts who last year denounced | Blake Lemoine and his claims. I know enough to know, though, | of the AI effect <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect>, a | longstanding tradition/bad habit of advances being dismissed | by those in the field itself as "not real AI". Anyone, expert | or not, in 1950, 1960, or even 1970 who was told that before | the turn of the century a computer would defeat the world | chess champion would conclude that said feat must have come | as part of a breakthrough in AGI. Same if told that by 2015 | many people would have in their homes, and carry around in | their pockets, devices that can respond to spoken queries on | a variety of topics. | | To put another way, I was hesitant to be as self-assuredly | certain about how to define consciousness, intelligence, and | sentience--and what it takes for them to emerge--as the | experts who denounced Lemoine. The recent GPT breakthroughs | have made me more so. | | I found this recent Sabine Hossenfelder video interesting. | <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cP5zGh2fui0> | ShamelessC wrote: | You should check out the WaPo article that originally | published his concerns. He frequently makes many errors | audibly with a reporter who is trying rather hard to see | his point of view. I'm not trying to be rude, but he came | off like kind of a sucker that would fall for a lot of | scammer tactics. There were usually some form of | strangeness such as him deciding when the content limit of | the conversation began and ended. Further, he asks only | leading questions, which would be fine if transformers | didn't specifically train to output the maximum likelihood | text tokens from the distribution of their training set, | which was internet text created by humans. | | He was frequently cited as an engineer but I don't think he | actually had a strong background in engineering but rather | in philosophy. | Animats wrote: | > LLMs will be like expert systems | | No. LLMs actually work. Expert systems were a flop. | | I went through Stanford CS in the mid-1980s, just when it was | becoming clear that expert systems were a flop. The faculty was | in denial about that. It was sad to see. | | We're at the beginning of LLMs, and systems which use LLMs as | components. This is the fun time for the technology. Ten years | out, it will be boring, like Java. | | The next big thing is figuring out the best ways to couple LLMs | to various sources of data, so they can find and use more | information specifically relevant to the problem. | | And someone has to fix the hallucination problem. We badly need | systems that know what they don't know. | dragonwriter wrote: | > LLMs actually work. Expert systems were a flop. | | Expert systems actually work and, while we don't normally | even call them "expert systems" any more, are important in | basically every domain - "business rules engines" are | generalized expert system platforms, and are widely used in | business process automation.) | | Despite how well they work, and early optimism resulting from | that about how much further they'd be able to go, they ran | into limits; it is not implausible that the same will turn | out to be true for LLMs (or even transformer-based models | more generally.) | | > We're at the beginning of LLMs, and systems which use LLMs | as components. This is the fun time for the technology. Ten | years out, it will be boring, like Java. | | ...and expert systems. (And, quite possibly, by then they | will have revealed their fundamental, intractable | llimitations, like expert systems.) | whimsicalism wrote: | > I went through Stanford CS in the mid-1980s, just when it | was becoming clear that expert systems were a flop. The | faculty was in denial about that. It was sad to see. | | It's interesting how this appears to be a recurring cycle - | when I attended school, it appeared that the faculty were in | denial about the death of probabilistic graphical models and | advanced bayesian techniques in favor of simple linear | algebra with unsupervised learning. Even when taught about | deep ML, there was heavy emphasis on stuff like VAE which had | fun bayesian interpretations. | vasilipupkin wrote: | ML in general has been in production in many places/companies for | a while now. Specifically GPt-4 is useful as a coding assistant | and a reference tool. However, it's hard to know whether what | it's telling you is accurate or fake and if you want to be | thorough you need to double check it. So, it's already useful but | in a limited way and it remains to be seen how much better it's | likely to get in the near future. | | But let's not confuse that in general with AI or Machine Learning | which is already used heavily in lots of places. | | the specific type of architecture that gpt-4 uses for next word | prediction is not the only possible architecture and is not | what's used for many real world tasks. There a lot of different | problems being addressed by ML and next word prediction is just | one of them, although quite important. | eladgil wrote: | Agreed on ML being in production in a lot of places and has | been quite valuable, particularly for large incumbents. I write | about this a bit here: https://blog.eladgil.com/p/ai-startup- | vs-incumbent-value | | I think the difference this time is the types of capabilities | provided by transformers vs prior waves of AI are sufficiently | different to allow many more types of startups to emerge, as | well as big changes in some types of enterprise software by | incumbents - in ways that were not enabled by pre-existing ML | approaches. | galaxytachyon wrote: | While I largely agree with this blog, I would like to point out | one thing that often come up in HN: an inherent weakness or flaw | in the current AI architecture that prevent it from widespread | adoption. Right now it is either scaling hardware or | hallucination. But there can be something deeper that we yet to | see in public, for example, the inability to adapt to some | specific, but critical, reasoning logic. | | I don't see the post address this possibility even though it is | very likely. Microsoft promised AI powered Office a while ago and | we are still waiting. GPT4 is supposed to be able to look at | images and solve problems but we still haven't seen that yet. | Something is preventing these big companies from implementing | these features and this is supposed to be a solved problem. How | can we be sure that there is no serious roadblocks in the future | that plunge the field into another AI winter? | alooPotato wrote: | It's been like 4 months | galaxytachyon wrote: | In term of AI research and development, that was a long time | ago. Microsoft is also pivoting hard into AI. They treat it | as a cornerstone technology and I am sure they are not | skimping on the cost of implementing it into their main | products. Yet the only thing they have is Bing. Mind you they | have early access to this tech. Bing uses GPT4 before the | paper for GPT4 even came out so it is not like they only had | it for 4 months. | phillipcarter wrote: | What's really special about this new era of ML is its | accessibility. | | Every business had problems with probabilistic solutions. ML is | the way to do that. But the barrier to entry has been so high for | so long. And so you had to be in big tech or a highly specialized | shop to play. | | Now all you need is an API key and one line of code to call the | most powerful models in the world. | joe_the_user wrote: | I think this view, that present day AI is something absolutely | new, is actually the dominant view. | | I don't believe the "absolutely new" view is very enlightening | very often. Notably, it seems like "the dawn of a new era of | tech" offers little insight to the process of change (but much | hype). Even something like the explosion of the Internet is | usefully compared to earlier technologies and what gave it's | uniqueness wasn't incomparability but an explosion of scale. | abatilo wrote: | The highlight of the fact that large org adoption is slow feels | really valuable here. Especially when we just recently had all of | the articles that claimed that ChatGPT was "over" when it appears | that this is mostly because of things like summer vacations with | students. The adoption and understanding of these products and | the risk involved with hallucinations is something that will take | time to understand. | | I recently joined one of the LLM provider companies and watching | these phases over the next few years will be really interesting. | Especially combined with what's going on with regulation and the | like. | | Random aside, hi Elad! I think you're reading some of these | comments. I just left Color after ~2.5 years. I hope to get to | formally introduce myself to you one day. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-08-21 23:00 UTC)