[Lerc]

Even though I don't think GPT-4 is up to the task, it does seem like now is the right time to be working on these things. Pretty soon GPT-4 will not be the best in the field. The next generation will perform much better.

Possibly the most frustrating thing I find about GPT-4 is how close it gets with it's wrong answers. It's easy to dismiss a lesser answer when it responds with a laughably out-of-band idea. GPT-4 often shows that it has a general idea of what you want but misses a small but critical aspect which results in a solution to something else that is similar but not what you wanted.

I have mixed results on iterating on it's own mistakes. It will too often try and change the world to match it's answer, rather than fixing the answer. The best approach I have found to stop this is by getting it to create unit tests. I imagine there is a lot of training data for it to understand the intention behind fixing a failing test. It's a very specific problem for it to look at and generally changing the test is not considered the correct solution.

[withinboredom]

Oh man. When it’s so close but wrong it’s amazing for creative endeavors! For technical ones, it is quite a bad thing. It’s like being a Star Wars fan but the AI just wants to talk about Star Trek.

I think this is why the non-tech people see AI as so amazing. For anything human and non-technical, the “almost but not quite” nature is a good thing.

I was using an AI to help me debug a weird thing (mainly summarizing log splats hundreds of lines long) and I eventually got pretty close to identifying the issue when I asked “wtaf is this message. Never seen anything like it.” It then went on about how it was offended that I used vulgar language. I had to apologize for saying “wtaf!” Anyway, I found a bug in a linker, so that was fun; thanks Al.

[layer8]

What’s frustrating is that the one reason I ever wanted AI is to have a Lt. Cdr. Data or ship computer equivalent that is logical and correct to a fault and that helps me reason through things, but what we got now is almost exactly the opposite, we have to help it reason through things and have to double-check everything for correctness.

[__loam]

I think it's equally shit at creative work too, that's just harder to dismiss as "wrong". It's still wrong, it's just harder to see.

[jaggederest]

Rapidly expose the issue by asking it to write something funny. Can't tell a joke, even when prompted for really elementary stuff like knock knock jokes or chicken crossing the road, let alone anything sophisticated.

[berkes]

> Pretty soon GPT-4 will not be the best in the field. The next generation will perform much better.

What makes you believe that progress is linear, or at least a line forever going up?

I keep seeing people predicting rapidly improving AI, based on how rapid it improved over the last x months.

But why is that not an outlier? How do we know we haven't hit a ceiling and stagnating? Isn't progress typically very bumpy and sudden?

[Lerc]

>What makes you believe that progress is linear, or at least a line forever going up?

I assume neither of those things. I have however read a lot of the papers published since GPT-4 was trained. There have been a lot of advances since then, so much so that simply saying "a lot" seems to be a massive understatement.

I think it is a reasonable assumption that at least a portion of those advancements would be able to build upon the existing technology of GPT-4 to produce something greater.

I am not assuming discoveries yet to be made. I am considering existing discoveries that have not yet made it into the top level of production.

[teaearlgraycold]

Technological innovation is not truly an exponential. It is instead a series of logistics. If we do not have further breakthroughs then AI technology will plateau. I do think we'll have those breakthroughs but it's impossible to say when they will happen.

[bugglebeetle]

I would say that Microsoft/OpenAI’s attacks on open source, whether it be through “AGI safety” BS as a front for regulating their way to a monopoly, or attempting Embrace, Exentend, Extinguish on companies like Mistral, and Cold War-style fear mongering about China, are the greatest near-term risks to linear progress. And it’s worth noting on that latter point that China is not similarly constrained and so could end up outcompeting the U.S., regardless

[anileated]

It’d be a bit hypocritical on the part of Microsoft/ClosedAI if they try to restrict AI tech in the name of safety while stepping around the fact that they themselves built it while essentially ignoring copyright.

Their commercial LLMs would not be possible without original creators who are now being ripped off and squeezed out of their jobs; if they don’t keep the tech open it will be very difficult to justify.

[threeseed]

> China is not similarly constrained and so could end up outcompeting the U.S.

With what technology ?

US has long term export controls on China and as they have demonstrated with Russia recently once you have secondary sanctions in place everyone falls into line. So it's pretty likely they will be effective.

[throwaway2990]

The export controls simply don’t work. Those chips still make their way into China. All those export controls do is slow it down a bit.

But China can outfit itself with more hardware even if it’s not as fast as the latest iteration and still speed past the U.S. while the U.S. and the EU argue about AI being racist or not.

[threeseed]

> Those chips still make their way into China

Not at the scale you need to build a world-class AI.

Let me know when Huawei is able to place an order for 300,000 GPUs.

[bugglebeetle]

Okay:

https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Business-Spotlight/How-Chin...

[viksit]

China actually has very advanced technology in literally every area of the sciences now. They just don’t bother talking about it in english

I recommend you follow some of the specialist chinese AI substacks to see what’s happening over there.

Esp around chip building

[sdsd]

>I recommend you follow some of the specialist chinese AI substacks to see what’s happening over there.

Do you recommend any in particular? I'm not familiar enough with the Chinese AI scene to know who to check out

[threeseed]

Not really buying the idea that China secretly has equivalents for Nvidia, ASML, TSMC etc.

SIMC right now relies entirely on existing US/EU hardware for their chip building.

New versions of which are no longer available to them.

[bugglebeetle]

I’m guessing you don’t read many machine learning papers. Chinese research in AI coming out of their top institutions (e.g. Tsinghua University, Shanghai AI Lab), is pretty much on par with state of the art in U.S. labs.

[__loam]

The greatest near term risk to progress here is cost but nobody wants to talk about it.

[bugglebeetle]

Architecture improvements and stuff like the 1-bit networks that have been all over HN recently are going to drastically reduce training costs over time and could easily result in very powerful local models. That’s why there is a rush to regulate and create monopolies. Microsoft and OpenAI know they have no real moat relative to the current pace of R&D.