It’s so funny how all this is only a problem within a capitalist frame of reference.
The hype should go the other way. Instead of bigger and bigger models that do more and more - have smaller models that are just as effective. Get them onto personal computers; get them onto phones; get them onto Arduino minis that cost $20 - and then have those models be as good as the big LLMs and Image gen programs.
This has already started to happen. The new llama3.2 model is only 3.7GB and it WAAAAY faster than anything else. It can thow a wall of text at you in just a couple of seconds. You’re still not running it on $20 hardware, but you no longer need a 3090 to have something useful.
That would be innovation, which I’m convinced no company can do anymore.
It feels like I learn that one of our modern innovations was already thought up and written down into a book in the 1950s, and just wasn’t possible at that time due to some limitation in memory, precision, or some other metric. All we did was do 5 decades of marginal improvement to get to it, while not innovating much at all.
Are you talking about something specific?
This is why you’re seeing news articles from Sam Altman saying that AGI will blow past us without any societal impact. He’s trying to lessen the blow of the bubble bursting for AI/ML.
It’s been 5 minutes since the new thing did a new thing. Is it the end?
As I use copilot to write software, I have a hard time seeing how it’ll get better than it already is. The fundamental problem of all machine learning is that the training data has to be good enough to solve the problem. So the problems I run into make sense, like:
- Copilot can’t read my mind and figure out what I’m trying to do.
- I’m working on an uncommon problem where the typical solutions don’t work
- Copilot is unable to tell when it doesn’t “know” the answer, because of course it’s just simulating communication and doesn’t really know anything.
2 and 3 could be alleviated, but probably not solved completely with more and better data or engineering changes - but obviously AI developers started by training the models on the most useful data and strategies that they think work best. 1 seems fundamentally unsolvable.
I think there could be some more advances in finding more and better use cases, but I’m a pessimist when it comes to any serious advances in the underlying technology.
Not copilot, but I run into a fourth problem:
4. The LLM gets hung up on insisting that a newer feature of the language I’m using is wrong and keeps focusing on “fixing” it, even though it has access to the newest correct specifications where the feature is explicitly defined and explained.Oh god yes, ran into this asking for a shell.nix file with a handful of tricky dependencies. It kept trying to do this insanely complicated temporary pull and build from git instead of just a 6 line file asking for the right packages.
Huh?
The smartphone improvements hit a rubber wall a few years ago (disregarding folding screens, that compose a small market share, improvement rate slowed down drastically), and the industry is doing fine. It’s not growing like it use to, but that just means people are keeping their smartphones for longer periods of time, not that people stopped using them.
Even if AI were to completely freeze right now, people will continue using it.
Why are people reacting like AI is going to get dropped?
People are dumping billions of dollars into it, mostly power, but it cannot turn profit.
So the companies who, for example, revived a nuclear power facility in order to feed their machine with ever diminishing returns of quality output are going to shut everything down at massive losses and countless hours of human work and lifespan thrown down the drain.
This will have an economic impact quite large as many newly created jobs go up in smoke and businesses who structured around the assumption of continued availability of high end AI need to reorganize or go out of business.
Search up the Dot Com Bubble.
Because in some eyes, infinite rapid growth is the only measure of success.
People pay real money for smartphones.
People pay real Money for AIaaS as well…
Because novelty is all it has. As soon as it stops improving in a way that makes people say “oh that’s neat”, it has to stand on the practical merits of its capabilities, which is, well, not much.
I’m so baffled by this take. “Create a terraform module that implements two S3 buckets with cross-region bidirectional replication. Include standard module files like linting rules and enable precommit.” Could I write that? Yes. But does this provide an outstanding stub to start from? Also yes.
And beyond programming, it is otherwise having positive impact on science and medicine too. I mean, anybody who doesn’t see any merit has their head in the sand. That of course must be balanced with not falling for the hype, but the merits are very real.
There’s a pretty big difference between chatGPT and the science/medicine AIs.
And keep in mind that for LLMs and other chatbots, it’s not that they aren’t useful at all but that they aren’t useful enough to justify their costs. Microsoft is struggling to get significant uptake for Copilot addons in Microsoft 365, and this is when AI companies are still in their “sell below cost and light VC money on fire to survive long enough to gain market share” phase. What happens when the VC money dries up and AI companies have to double their prices (or more) in order to make enough revenue to cover their costs?
Hope?
I am so tired of the ai hype and hate. Please give me my gen art interest back please just make it obscure again to program art I beg of you
It’s still quite obscure to actually mess with AI art instead of just throwing prompts at it, resulting in slop of varying quality levels. And I don’t mean controlnet, but github repos with comfyui plugins with little explanation but a link to a paper, or “this is absolutely mathematically unsound but fun to mess with”. Messing with stuff other than conditioning or mere model selection.
I know, it’s actually still a beautiful community but much harder to talk to outsiders about
Theres no bracing for this, OpenAI CEO said the same thing like a year ago and people are still shovelling money at this dumpster fire today.
It’s had all the signs of a bubble for the last few years.
Good. I look forward to all these idiots finally accepting that they drastically misunderstood what LLMs actually are and are not. I know their idiotic brains are only able to understand simple concepts like “line must go up” and follow them like religious tenants though so I’m sure they’ll waste everyone’s time and increase enshitification with some other new bullshit once they quietly remove their broken (and unprofitable) AI from stuff.
Sigh I hope LLMs get dropped from the AI bandwagon because I do think they have some really cool use cases and love just running my little local models. Cut government spending like a madman, write the next great American novel, or eliminate actual jobs are not those use cases.
so long, see you all in the next hype. Any guesses?
AI vagina Fleshlight beds. You just find your sleep inside one and it will do you all night long! Telling you stories of any topic. Massaging you in every possible way. Playing your favorite music. It’s like a living room! Oh I’m sleeping in the living room again. Yeah I’m in the dog house. But that’s why you need an AI vagina Fleshlight bed!
Get a few more hours of sleep
I woke up at 4 this morning. The fridge made a big ice maker noise that sounded like a door getting slammed. Anyway here I am shit posting and reading shit posts.
Until Open AI announces a new 5t model or something and then the hype refreshes
Nice, looking forward to it! So much money and time wasted on pipe dreams and hype. We need to get back to some actually useful innovation.
AI was 99% a fad. Besides OpenAI and Nvidia, none of the other corporations bullshitting about AI have made anything remotely useful using it.
Absolutely not true. Disclaimer, I do work for NVIDIA as a forward deployed AI Engineer/Solutions Architect—meaning I don’t build AI software internally for NVIDIA but I embed with their customers’ engineering teams to help them build their AI software and deploy and run their models on NVIDIA hardware and software.
To state this as simply as possible: I wouldn’t have a job if our customers weren’t seeing tremendous benefit from AI technology. The companies I work with typically are very sensitive to CapX and OpX costs of AI—they self-serve in private clouds. If it doesn’t help them make money (revenue growth) or save money (efficiency), then it’s gone—and so am I. I’ve seen it happen; entire engineering teams laid off because a technology just couldn’t be implemented in a cost-effective way.
LLMs are a small subset of AI and Accelerated-Compute workflows in general.
To state this as simply as possible: I wouldn’t have a job if our customers weren’t seeing tremendous benefit from AI technology.
Right because corporate management doesn’t ever blindly and stupidly overinvest in fads that blow up in their faces…
I work with typically are very sensitive to CapX and OpX costs of AI—they self-serve in private clouds. If it doesn’t help them make money (revenue growth) or save money (efficiency), then it’s gone—and so am I.
You clearly have no clue what you’re on about. As someone with a degrees and experience in both CS and Finance all I have to say is that’s not at all how these things work. Plenty of companies lose money on these things in the hopes that their FP&A projection fever dreams will come true. And they’re wrong much more often than you seem to think. FP&A is more art than science and you can get financial models to support any argument you want to make to convince management to keep investing in what you think they should. And plenty of CEOs and boards are stupid enough to buy it. A lot of the AI hype has been bought and sold that way in the hopes that it would be worthwhile eventually or that other alternatives can’t be just as good or better.
I’ve seen it happen; entire engineering teams laid off because a technology just couldn’t be implemented in a cost-effective way.
This is usually what happens once they finally realize spending money on hype doesn’t pay off and go back to more established business analytics, operations research, and conventional software which never makes mistakes if it’s programmed correctly.
LLMs are a small subset of AI and Accelerated-Compute workflows in general.
No one ever said otherwise. And we’re talking about AI only, no moving the goalposts to accelerated computing, which is a mechanism through which to implement a wide range of solutions and not a specific one in and of itself.
That’s fair. I see what I see at an engineering and architecture level. You see what you see at the business level.
That said. I stand by my statement because I and most of my colleagues in similar roles get continued, repeated and expanded-scope engagements. Definitely in LLMs and genAI in general especially over the last 3-5 years or so, but definitely not just in LLMs.
“AI” is an incredibly wide and deep field; much more so than the common perception of what it is and does.
Perhaps I’m just not as jaded in my tech career.
operations research, and conventional software which never makes mistakes if it’s programmed correctly.
Now this is where I push back. I spent the first decade of my tech career doing ops research/industrial engineering (in parallel with process engineering). You’d shit a brick if you knew how much “fudge-factoring” and “completely disconnected from reality—aka we have no fucking clue” assumptions go into the “conventional” models that inform supply-chain analytics, business process engineering, etc. To state that they “never make mistakes” is laughable.
That’s fair. I see what I see at an engineering and architecture level. You see what you see at the business level.
I respect that. Finance was my old career and I hated it. I liked coding more so I went back got my M.S. in CS and now do embedded software which I love. I left finance specifically because of what both of us have talked about. It’s all about using nunber to tell whatever story you want and it’s filled with corporate politics. I hated that world. It was disgusting and people were terrible two faced assholes.
That said. I stand by my statement because I and most of my colleagues in similar roles get continued, repeated and expanded-scope engagements. Definitely in LLMs and genAI in general especially over the last 3-5 years or so, but definitely not just in LLMs.
“AI” is an incredibly wide and deep field; much more so than the common perception of what it is and does.
So I think I need to amend what I said before. AI as a whole is definitely useful for various things but what makes it a fad is that companies are basically committing the hammer fallacy with it. They’re throwing it at everything even things where it may not be a good solution just to say hey look we used AI. What I respect about you guys at Nvidia is that you all make really awesome AI based tools and software that actually does solve problem that other types of software and tools either cannot do or cannot do well and that’s how it should be.
At the same time I’m also a gamer and I really hope Uncle Jensen doesn’t forget about us and how we literally were his core market for most of Nvidia’s history as a business.
Now this is where I push back. I spent the first decade of my tech career doing ops research/industrial engineering (in parallel with process engineering). You’d shit a brick if you knew how much “fudge-factoring” and “completely disconnected from reality—aka we have no fucking clue” assumptions go into the “conventional” models that inform supply-chain analytics, business process engineering, etc. To state that they “never make mistakes” is laughable.
What I said was that traditional software if programmed correctly doesn’t make mistakes. As for operations research and supply chain optimization and all the rest of it, it’s not different that what I said about finance. You can make the models tell any story you want and it’s not even hard but the flip side is that the decision makers in your organization should be grilling you as an analyst on how you came up with your assumptions and why they make sense. I actually think this is an area where AI could be useful because if trained right it has no biases unlike human analysts.
The other thing to sort of take away from what I said is the “if it is programmed correctly” part which is also a big if. Humans make mistakes and we see it a lot in embedded where in some cases we need to flash our code onto a product and deploy it in a place where we won’t be able to update it for a long time or maybe ever and so testing and making sure the code works right and is safe is a huge thing. Tool like Rust help to an extent but even then errors can leak through and I’ve actually wondered how useful AI based tools could eventually be in proving the correctness of traditional software code or finding potential bugs and sources of unsafety. I think a deep learning based tool could make formal verification of software a much cheaper and more commonplace practice and I think on the hardware side they already have that sort of thing. I know AMD/Xilinx use machine learning in their FPGA tools to synthesize designs so I don’t see why we couldn’t use such a thing for software that needs to be correct the first time as well.
So that’s really it. My only gripe at all with AI and DL in particular is when executive who have no CS or engineering background throw around the term AI like it’s the magic solution to everything or always the best option when the reality is that sometimes it is and other times it isn’t and they need to have a competent technology professional make that call.
I would say LLMs specifically are in that ball park. Things like machine vision have been boringly productive and relatively un hyped.
There’s certainly some utility to LLMs, but it’s hard to see through all the crazy over estimations and being shoved everywhere by grifters.
Nvidia made money, but I’ve not seen OpenAI do anything useful, and they are not even profitable.
ChatGPT is basically the best LLM of its kind. As for Nvidia I’m not talking about hardware I’m talking about all of the models it’s trained to do everything from DLSS and ACE to creating virtual characters that can converse and respond naturally to a human being.
