No shit, that’s been the point all along.
Might be news to a low-information audience who no basically nothing about AI.
Look, I get that we all are very skeptical and cynical about the usefulness and ethics of AI, but can we stop with the reactive headlines?
Saying we know how AI works because it’s ‘just predicting the next word’ is like saying I know how nuclear energy works because it’s ‘just a hot stick of metal in a boiler’
Researchers who work on transformer models understand how the algorithm works, but they don’t yet know how their simple programs can generalize as much as they do. That’s not marketing hype, that’s just an acknowledgement of how relatively uncomplicated their structure is compared to the complexity of its output.
I hate that we can’t just be mildly curious about ai, rather than either extremely excited or extremely cynical.
Researchers who work on transformer models understand how the algorithm works, but they don’t yet know how their simple programs can generalize as much as they do.
They do!
You can even train small networks by hand with pen and paper. You can also manually design small models without training them at all.
The interesting part is that this dated tech is producing such good results now that we throw our modern hardware at it.
an acknowledgement of how relatively uncomplicated their structure is compared to the complexity of its output.
The interesting part is that this dated tech is producing such good results now that we throw our modern hardware at it.
That’s exactly what I mean.
Ah I see.
Maybe a less challenging way of looking at it would be:
We are surprised at how much of subjective human intuition can be replicated using simple predictive algorithms
instead of
We don’t know how this model learned to code
Either way, the technique is yielding much better results than what could have been reasonably expected at the outset.
This is still part of the hype. If he says they don’t understand it, it sounds sexy and dangerous - lie maybe it could turn into HAL9000 at any moment. If they say it’s just generating the most likely output for the tokens you entered the VCs will get bored and plough money into live human organ trafficking or whatever is cool next year.
It’s pretty easy to understand how it works. It’s a giant “guess which word should come next” machine.
Isn’t that sort of how we work?
I don’t think so? Not a neuroscientist or whatever though.