I work with people who work in this field. Everyone knows this, but there’s also an increased effort in improvements all across the stack, not just the final LLM. I personally suspect the current generation of LLMs is at its peak, but with each breakthrough the technology will climb again.
Put differently, I still suspect LLMs will be at least twice as good in 10 years.
Welcome to the top of the sigmoid curve.
If you were wondering what 1999 felt like WRT to the internet, well, here we are. The Matrix was still fresh in everyone’s mind and a lot of online tech innovation kinda plateaued, followed by some “market adjustments.”
I think it’s more likely a compound sigmoid (don’t Google that). LLMs are composed of distinct technologies working together. As we’ve reached the inflection point of the scaling for one, we’ve pivoted implementations to get back on track. Notably, context windows are no longer an issue. But the most recent pivot came just this week, allowing for a huge jump in performance. There are more promising stepping stones coming into view. Is the exponential curve just a series of sigmoids stacked too close together? In any case, the article’s correct - just adding more compute to the same exact implementation hasn’t enabled scaling exponentially.
I just want a portable self hosted LLM for specific tasks like programming or language learning.
You can install Ollama in a docker container and use that to install models to run locally. Some are really small and still pretty effective, like Llama 3.2 is only 3B and some are as little as 1B. It can be accessed through the terminal or you can use something like OpenWeb UI to have a more “ChatGPT” like interface.
I have a few LLMs running locally. I don’t have an array of 4090s to spare so I am limited to the smaller models 8B and whatnot.
They definitely aren’t as good as anything you get remotely. It’s more private and controlled but it’s much less useful (I’ve found) than any of the other models.
I hope it all burns.
Oh nice, another Gary Marcus “AI hitting a wall post.”
Like his “Deep Learning Is Hitting a Wall” post on March 10th, 2022.
Indeed, not much has changed in the world of deep learning between spring 2022 and now.
No new model releases.
No leaps beyond what was expected.
\s
Gary Marcus is like a reverse Cassandra.
Consistently wrong, and yet regularly listened to, amplified, and believed.
“LLMs such as they are, will become a commodity; price wars will keep revenue low. Given the cost of chips, profits will be elusive,” Marcus predicts. “When everyone realizes this, the financial bubble may burst quickly.”
Please let this happen
Market crash and third world war. What a time to be alive!
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.
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.
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.
Being convincing and confident without actually knowing is how 9/10s of them make it to the C suite.
That’s probably why they don’t worry about confidently incorrect AI.
Salesmanship is the essence of management at those levels.
Which brings us back around to the original subject of this thread - tech bros - in my own experienced in Tech recently and back in the 90s boom, this generation of founders and “influencers” aren’t techies, they’re people from areas heavy on salesmanship, not actually on creating complex things that objectivelly work.
The complete total dominance of sales types in both domains id why LLMs are being pushed the way they are as if they’re some kind of emerging-AGI and lots of corporates believe it and are trying to hammer those square pegs into round holes even though the most basic of technical analises would tell them that it doesn’t work like that.
Ultimately since the current societal structures we have massively benefit that kind or personality, we’re going to keep on having these kinds of barely-useful-stuff-insanely-hyped-up cycles wasting tons of resources because salesmanship is hardly a synonym for efficiency or wisdom.
Yeah yours is a more thorough and less flippant description of what I meant.
We used to make fun of all the corporate word salad that the Managment would use at my last “real” job. But it really was weird salad all the way down [up].
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.
True, they just sell it to their investors as a panacea
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?
Of course most don’t actually even believe it, that’s just the pitch to get that VC juice. It’s basically fraud all the way down.
Soooo… Without capitalism?
Pretty much.
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.
Then what is this I’m feeling if it’s not AGI? 🤔
Maybe GERD?
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…
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.
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.
Yeah, 20 something years ago when I was trying to learn PHP of all things, I really wanted to make a chat bot that could learn what words are… I barely got anywhere but I was trying to program the understanding of sentence structure and feeding it a dictionary of words… My goal was to have it output something on its own …
I see these things become less resource intensive and hopefully running not on some random server…
I found the files… It was closer to 15 years ago…
Trying to invent artificial intelligence to learn php is quite funny lol
Also a bit sadistic to be honest. Bringing a new form of life into the world only to subject it to PHP.
I’m amazed I still have the files… But yeah this was before all this shit was big… If I had a better drive I would have ended up more evil than zuck … my plan was to collect data on everyone who used the thing and be able to build profiles on everyone based on what information you gave the chat … And that’s all I can really remember… But it’s probably for the best…
Right, so AIs don’t really know what words are. All they see are tokens. The tokens could be words and letters, but they could also be image/video features, audio waveforms, or anything else.
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largely based on the notion that LLMs will, with continued scaling, become artificial general intelligence
Who said that LLMs were going to become AGI? LLMs as part of an AGI system makes sense but not LLMs alone becoming AGI. Only articles and blog posts from people who didn’t understand the technology were making those claims. Which helped feed the hype.
I 100% agree that we’re going to see an AI market correction. It’s going to take a lot of hard human work to achieve the real value of LLMs. The hype is distracting from the real valuable and interesting work.
OpenAI published a paper about GPT titled “Sparks of AGI”.
I don’t think they really believe it but it’s good to bring in VC money
That is a very VC baiting title. But it’s doesn’t appear from the abstract that they’re claiming that LLMs will develop to the complexity of AGI.
You assume most stock investors read beyond the headline, you assume wrong.
Journalists have no clue what AI even is. Nearly every article about AI is written by somebody who couldn’t tell you the difference between an LLM and an AGI, and should be dismissed as spam.
The call is coming from inside. Google CEO claims it will be like alien intelligence so we should just trust it to make political decisions for us bro: https://www.computing.co.uk/news/2024/ai/former-google-ceo-eric-schmidt-urges-ai-acceleration-dismisses-climate
Do you have a non paywalled link? And is that quote in relation to LLMs specifically or AI generally?
I read a lot I guess, and I didn’t understand why they think like this. From what I see, are constant improvements in MANY areas! Language models are getting faster and more efficient. Code is getting better across the board as people use it to improve their own, contributing to the whole of code improvements and project participation and development. I feel like we really are at the beginning of a lot of better things and it’s iterative as it progresses. I feel hopeful
It’s so funny how all this is only a problem within a capitalist frame of reference.
What they call “AI” is only “intelligent” within a capitalist frame of reference, too.
I don’t understand why you’re being downvoted. Current “AI” based on LLM’s have no capacity for understanding of the knowledge they contain (hence all the “hallucinations”), and thus possess no meaningful intelligence. To call it intelligent is purely marketing.
Thank fuck. Can we have cheaper graphics cards again please?
I’m sure a RTX 4090 is very impressive, but it’s not £1800 impressive.
nope, if normal gamers are already willing to pay that price, no reason for nvidia to reduce them.
There’s more 4090 on steam than any AMD dedicated GPU, there’s no competition
AMD will go back to the same strategy they had with the RX 580. They don’t plan to release high end cards next generation. It seems they just want to pump out a higher volume of mid-tier (which is vague and subjective) while fixing hardware bugs plaguing the previous generation.
Hopefully, this means we can game on a budget while AMD is focusing primarily on marketshare.
Just wait for the 5090 prices…
I just don’t get whey they’re so desperate to cripple the low end cards.
Like I’m sure the low RAM and speed is fine at 1080p, but my brother in Christ it is 2024. 4K displays have been standard for a decade. I’m not sure when PC gamers went from “behold thine might from thou potato boxes” to “I guess I’ll play at 1080p with upscaling if I can have a nice reflection”.
4k displays are not at all standard and certainly not for a decade. 1440p is. And it hasn’t been that long since the market share of 1440p overtook that of 1080p according to the Steam Hardware survey IIRC.
Maybe not monitors, but certainly they are standard for TVs (which are now just monitors with Android TV and a tuner built in).
That doesn’t really matter if people on PC don’t game on it, does it?
These are the primary display resolutions from the Steam Hardware Survey.
I do wonder how much higher that would be if GPUs targeting 4K were £299 rather than £999.
Although some of it is down to monitors being on desks right in front of you and 4K not really being needed. It would also be interesting to for Valve to weight the results by hours spent gaming that month (and amount they actually spend on games), rather than just counting hardware numbers.
You’re so close to the answer. Now, why are PC gamers the ones still on 1080 and 1440 when everyone else has moved on?
Have I said anything in favor of crippling lower end cards or that these high prices of the high end cards are good? My only argument was that 4K displays in the PC space being the standard was simply delusional because the stats say something wholly different.
Well, people aren’t sticking 4090s in their Samsung smart TVs, so idk that matters.
Before you claim 4k is the standard, you might wanna take a peak at the Steam hardware survey.
I don’t know anyone I game with that uses a 4k monitor. 1440p at your monitors max refresh rate is the favorite.
I think it’s just an upselling strategy, although I agree I don’t think it makes much sense. Budget gamers really should look to AMD these days, but unfortunately Nvidia’s brand power is ridiculous.
An the issue for PC gamers is that Nvidia has spent the last few years convincing devs to shovel DLSS into everything, rather than a generic upscaling solution that other vendors could just drop their own algorithms into, meaning there’s a ton of games that won’t upscale nicely on anything else.
Sorry, crypto is back in season.
I swapped to AMD this generation and it’s still expensive.
A well researched pre-owned is the way to go. I bought a 6900xt a couple years ago for a deal.
I used to buy broken video cards on ebay for ~$25-50. The ones that run, but shut off have clogged heat sinks. No tools or parts required. Just blow out the dust. Obviously more risky, but sometimes you can hit gold.
If you can buy a ten and one works, you’ve saved money. Two work and you’re making money. The only question is whether the tenth card really will work or not.
And are you really interested in selling the extras?
For the price of the bundle? Sure.
Really? I’m far too lazy to list things like that. If I was, I’d be buying a lot more than 10 and make a little business out of it.
Graphics cards are so bulky nowadays it’s often hard to even fit two on one mobo, as much as I’d love to see 10 GPUs all linked up.
Lol. I guess you’d need to go to a mining crypto den then, I hear they pull that sort of nonsense. ;)
But seriously though, I’m not interested in listing, shipping, and dealing w/ customer feedback just to save a few bucks on a GPU, because that sounds like a job.
I used to get EVGA bstock which was reasonable but they got out of the business 😞
Oh no!
Anyway…
I’ve been hearing about the imminent crash for the last two years. New money keeps getting injected into the system. The bubble can’t deflate while both the public and private sector have an unlimited lung capacity to keep puffing into it. FFS, bitcoin is on a tear right now, just because Trump won the election.
This bullshit isn’t going away. Its only going to get forced down our throats harder and harder, until we swallow or choke on it.
With the right level of Government support, bubbles can seemingly go on for literal decades. Case in point, Australian housing since the late 90s has been on an uninterrupted tear (yes, even in ‘08 and ‘20).
But eventually, bubbles either deflate or pop, because eventually governments and investors will get tired of propping it up. It might take decades, but I think it’s inevitable.
“The economics are likely to be grim,” Marcus wrote on his Substack. “Sky high valuation of companies like OpenAI and Microsoft are largely based on the notion that LLMs will, with continued scaling, become artificial general intelligence.”
“As I have always warned,” he added, “that’s just a fantasy.”
Even Zuckerberg admits that trying to scale LLMs larger doesn’t work because the energy and compute requirements go up exponentially. There must exist a different architecture that is more efficient, since the meat computers in our skulls are hella efficient in comparison.
Once we figure that architecture out though, it’s very likely we will be able to surpass biological efficiency like we have in many industries.
That’s a bad analogy. We weren’t able to surpass biological efficiency in industry sector because we figured out human anatomy and how to improve it. It’s simply alternative ways to produce force like electricity and motors which had absolutely no relation to how muscles works.
I imagine it would be the same for computers, simply another, better method to achieve something but it’s so uncertain that it’s barely worth discussing about.
Of course! It’s not like animals have jet engines!
Human brains are merely the proof that such energy efficiencies are possible for intelligence. It’s likely we can match or go far beyond that, probably not by emulating biology directly. (Though we certainly may use it as inspiration while we figure out the underlying principles.)
With current stat prediction models?
Microsoft shit is a mega corp… AI is based on their revenue lol
Well duhhhh.
Language models are insufficient.
They also need:
Someone in here has once linked me a scientific article about how today’s “AI” are basically one level below what they need to be anything like an AI. A bit like the difference between exponent and Ackermann function, but I really forgot what that was all about.
LLMs are AI. There’s a common misconception about what ‘AI’ actually means. Many people equate AI with the advanced, human-like intelligence depicted in sci-fi - like HAL 9000, JARVIS, Ava, Mother, Samantha, Skynet, and GERTY. These systems represent a type of AI called AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), designed to perform a wide range of tasks and demonstrate a form of general intelligence similar to humans.
However, AI itself doesn’t imply general intelligence. Even something as simple as a chess-playing robot qualifies as AI. Although it’s a narrow AI, excelling in just one task, it still fits within the AI category. So, AI is a very broad term that covers everything from highly specialized systems to the type of advanced, adaptable intelligence that we often imagine. Think of it like the term ‘plants,’ which includes everything from grass to towering redwoods - each different, but all fitting within the same category.
The stuff in computer games that makes NPCs move around the game world from point A to point B has been called AI for ages (and in this case specifically, is generally the A* pathing algorithm which isn’t even all that complex).
It’s only recently that marketing-types, salesmen and journalists with no actual technical expertise have started pushing AI as if the I in the acronym actually meant general intelligence rather than the “intelligence-alike” meaning that it has had for decades.
I know those terms. I wanted to edit it, but was too lazy. You still did understand what I meant, right?
We don’t call a shell script “AI” after all, and we do call those models that, while for your definition there shouldn’t be any difference.
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