Is there anything actually useful or novel about "AI"? - eviltoast

Feel like we’ve got a lot of tech savvy people here seems like a good place to ask. Basically as a dumb guy that reads the news it seems like everyone that lost their mind (and savings) on crypto just pivoted to AI. In addition to that you’ve got all these people invested in AI companies running around with flashlights under their chins like “bro this is so scary how good we made this thing”. Seems like bullshit.

I’ve seen people generating bits of programming with it which seems useful but idk man. Coming from CNC I don’t think I’d just send it with some chatgpt code. Is it all hype? Is there something actually useful under there?

  • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    It’s not bullshit. It routinely does stuff we thought might not happen this century. The trick is we don’t understand how. At all. We know enough to build it and from there it’s all a magical blackbox. For this reason it’s hard to be certain if it will get even better, although there’s no reason it couldn’t.

    Coming from CNC I don’t think I’d just send it with some chatgpt code.

    That goes back to the “not knowing how it works” thing. ChatGPT predicts the next token, and has learned other things in order to do it better. There’s no obvious way to force it to care if it’s output is right or just right-looking, though. Until we solve that problem somehow, it’s more of an assistant for someone who can read and understand what it puts out. Kind of like a calculator but for language.


    Honestly crypto wasn’t totally either. It was a marginally useful idea that turned into a Beanie-Babies-like craze. If you want to buy or sell illegal stuff (which could be bad or could be something like forbidden information on democracy) it’s still king.

    • v_krishna@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      There’s no obvious way to force it to care if it’s output is right or just right-looking, though

      Putting some expert system in front of LLMs seems to be working pretty well. Basically modeling how a human agent would interact with it.

      • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 year ago

        We’ll see how that goes, I guess. I’m not involved enough to comment.

        I’m guessing the expert system would be a classical algorithm?