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I haven't read the comments here yet, but I'm predicting there will be at least a few of the form "why would you bother doing this, you aren't an expert in AI, this is stupid, leave AGI to the experts, why would you think this could possibly work" etc. I hope not, but this being HN, history suggests those people will be out en-force. I hope not. I think this is GREAT work even if the result was ultimately less than what was desired. And I want to encourage the author, and other people who might make similar attempts. I think we need more people "taking a stab" and trying different ideas. You might or might not succeed, but in almost every case the absolute worst scenario is that you learn something that might be useful later. If taking on something like this motivates someone to spend time studying differential equations, then I say "great!" Or if it motivates someone to study neuroscience, or electronics (maybe somebody decides to try realizing a neural network in purpose built hardware, for example) then also "Great!" Do it. About the only serious negative (aside from allusions to opportunity cost) that I can see for making an effort like this, would be if somebody gets really deep in it and winds up blowing a shit-ton of money on the project, whether that be for cloud compute cycles, custom hardware, or whatever. I wouldn't necessarily recommend maxing out your credit cards and draining your retirement account unless you have VERY solid evidence that you're on the right path! You are a worse driver in a worse car. If you follow the same strategy as the cars in front of you, pit at the same time and choose the same tires, you will certainly lose. The only chance you have is to pick a different strategy. Yes, exactly. I adhere to a similar mindset. I do AI research in my spare time. And I cannot possibly afford to spend the kind of money on training ginormous ANN's that OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Twitter, Meta, IBM, etc. can spend. To even try would be completely ludicrous. There is simply no path where an independent solo researcher can beat those guys playing that game. So the only recourse is to change the rules and play a different game. That's no guarantee of success of course, but I'll take a tiny, even minuscule, chance of achieving something over just ramming my head into the wall over and over again in some Sisyphean attempt to compete head to head in a game I know a priori that I simply cannot win. Anyway.. to the OP: great work, and thanks for sharing. And I hope you decide to make other attempts in the future, and share those results as well. Likewise to anybody else who has considered trying something like this. |
To your point, I wasn't pretending that this work is novel or something that the AI community should take seriously. If anything, my point was that you can just do things.
I also feel like in the SWE community folks are generally concerned that LLMs are getting considerably better at doing our jobs. This was a poetic attempt at trying to regain some agency and not just let life happen _to_ you.