is this where we get to explain again why its not really ai?
He is writing about LLM mainly, and that is absolutely AI, it’s just not strong AI or general AI (AGI).
You can’t invent your own meaning for existing established terms.
LLMs are AI in the same way that the lane assist on my car is AI. Tech companies, however, very carefully and deliberately play up LLMs as being AGI or close to it. See for example toe convenient fear-mongering over the “risks” of AI, as though ChatGPT will become Skynet.
LLMs are AI as it is defined in Computer Science, not SciFi. And the lane assist on your car might also be, although it may just be a well tuned PID for all I know.
You should research the definition of AI then. Even the A* pathfinding algorithm was historically considered AI. It’s a remarkably broad field.
I have to do similar things when it comes to ‘raytracing’. It meant one thing, and then a company comes along and calls something sorta similar the same thing, then everyone has these ideas of what it should be vs. what it actually is doing. Then later, a better version comes out that nearly matches the original term, but there’s already a negative hype because it launched half baked and misnamed. Now they have to name the original thing something new new to market it because they destroyed the original name with a bad label and half baked product.
I wish just once we could have some kind of tech innovation without a bunch of douchebag techbros thinking it’s going to solve all the world’s problems with no side effects while they get super rich off it.
… bunch of douchebag techbros thinking it’s going to solve all the world’s problems with no side effects…
one doesn’t imagine any of them even remotely thinks a technological panacaea is feasible.
… while they get super rich off it.
because they’re only focusing on this.
Oh they definitely exist. At a high level the bullshit is driven by malicious greed, but there are also people who are naive and ignorant and hopeful enough to hear that drivel and truly believe in it.
Like when Microsoft shoves GPT4 into notepad.exe. Obviously a terrible terrible product from a UX/CX perspective. But also, extremely expensive for Microsoft right? They don’t gain anything by stuffing their products with useless annoying features that eat expensive cloud compute like a kid eats candy. That only happens because their management people truly believe, honest to god, that this is a sound business strategy, which would only be the case if they are completely misunderstanding what GPT4 is and could be and actually think that future improvements would be so great that there is a path to mass monetization somehow.
No no, I disagree I think that shoving AI into all these apps is a solid plan on their behalf. People are going to stop recall and shut it off. So instead they put AI components into every app, It now has the right to overview everything you’re doing and every app collects data on you sending it home to update their personalized models for you so they can better sell you products.
Yeah my management was all gungho about exploiting AI to do all sorts of stuff.
Like read. Not generative AI crap, but read. They came to us and said quite literally: “how can we use something like ChatGPT and make it read.”
I don’t know who or how they convinced them to use something that wasn’t generative AI, but it did convince me that managers think someone being convincing and confident is correct all the time.
That’s not what’s happening here. Microsoft management are well aware that AI isn’t making them any money, but the company made a multi billion dollar bet on the idea that it would, and now they have to convince shareholders that they didn’t epicly fuck up. Shoving AI into stuff like notepad is basically about artificially inflating “consumer uptake” numbers that they can then show to credulous investors to suggest that any day now this whole thing is going to explode into an absolute tidal wave of growth, so you’d better buy more stock right now, better not miss out.
Some are just opportunists, but there are certainly true believers — either in specific technologies, or pedal-to-the-metal growth as the only rational solution to the world’s problems.
Andreessen is pretty open about it: https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/
I think Andreessen is lying and the “techno optimist manifesto” is a ruse for PR.
a16z has been involved in various crypto pump and dumps. They are smart enough to know that something like “play to earn” is not sustainable and always devolves into a pyramid scheme. Doesn’t stop them from getting in early and dumping worthless tokens on the marks.
The manifesto honestly reads like it was written by a teenager. The style, the tone, the excessive quotes from economists. This is pretty typical stuff for American oligarch polemics, no?
Because nobody could have possibly saw that coming. /s
No shit. This was obvious from day one. This was never AGI, and was never going to be AGI.
Institutional investors saw an opportunity to make a shit ton of money and pumped it up as if it was world changing. They’ll dump it like they always do, it will crash, and they’ll make billions in the process with absolutely no negative repercussions.
Turns out AI isn’t real and has no fidelity.
Machine learning could be the basis of AI but is anyone even working on that when all the money is in LLMs?
I’m not an expert, but the whole basis of LLM not actually understanding words, just the likelihood of what word comes next basically seems like it’s not going to help progress it to the next level… Like to be an artificial general intelligence shouldn’t it know what words are?
I feel like this path is taking a brick and trying to fit it into a keyhole…
learning is the basis of all known intelligence. LLMs have learned something very specific, AGI would need to be built by generalising the core functionality of learning not as an outgrowth of fully formed LLMs.
and yes the current approach is very much using a brick to open a lock and that’s why it’s … ahem … hit a brick wall.
shouldn’t it know what words are?
Not necessarily, but it should be smart enough to associate symbols with some form of meaning. It doesn’t do that, it juts associates symbols with related symbols, so if there’s nothing similar that already exists, it’s not going to be able to come back with anything sensible.
I think being able to create new content with partial sample data is necessary to really be considered general AI. That’s what humans do, and we don’t necessarily need the words to describe it.
