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Posted by bilsbie 20 hours ago

There are no new ideas in AI only new datasets(blog.jxmo.io)
360 points | 180 commentspage 2
seydor 15 hours ago|
There are new ideas, people are finding new ways to build vision models, which then are applied to language models and vice versa (like diffusion).

The original idea of connectionism is that neural networks can represent any function, which is the fundamental mathematical fact. So we should be optimistic, neural nets will be able to do anything. Which neural nets? So far people have stumbled on a few productive architectures, but it appears to be more alchemy than science. There is no reason why we should think there won't be both new ideas and new data. Biology did it, humans will do it too.

> we’re engaged in a decentralized globalized exercise of Science, where findings are shared openly

Maybe the findings are shared, if they make the Company look good. But the methods are not anymore

piinbinary 16 hours ago||
AI training is currently a process of making the AI remember the dataset. It doesn't involve the AI thinking about the dataset and drawing (and remembering) conclusions.

It can probably remember more facts about a topic than a PhD in that topic, but the PhD will be better at thinking about that topic.

jayd16 16 hours ago||
Its a bit more complex than that. Its more about baking out the dataset into heuristics that a machine can use to match a satisfying result to an input. Sometimes these heuristics are surprising to a human and can solve a problem in a novel way.

"Thinking" is too broad a term to apply usefully but I would say its pretty clear we are not close to AGI.

tantalor 15 hours ago|||
Maybe that's why PhDs keep the textbooks they use at hand, so they don't have to remember everything.

Why should the model need to memorize facts we already have written down somewhere?

nkrisc 16 hours ago||
> It can probably remember more facts about a topic than a PhD in that topic

So can a notebook.

LarsDu88 15 hours ago||
If datasets are what we are talking about, I'd like to bring attention to the biological datasets out there that have yet to be fully harnessed.

The ability to collect gene expression data at a tissue specific level has only been invented and automated in the last 4-5 years (see 10X Genomics Xenium, MERFISH). We've only recently figured out how to collect this data at the scale of millions of cells. A breakthrough on this front may be the next big area of advancement.

somebodythere 12 hours ago||
I don't know if it matters. Even if the best we can do is get really good at interpolating between solutions to cognitive tasks on the data manifold, the only economically useful human labor left asymptotes toward frontier work; work that only a single-digit percentage of people can actually perform.
mikewarot 9 hours ago||
Hardware isn't even close to being out of steam. There are some breathtakingly obvious premature optimizations that we can undo to get at least 99% power reduction for the same amount of compute.

For example, FPGAs use a lot of area and power routing signals across the chip. Those long lines have a large capacitance, and thus cause a large amount of dynamic power loss. So does moving parameters around to/from RAM instead of just loading up a vast array of LUTs with the values once.

tim333 12 hours ago||
An interesting step forward, although an old idea we seem close to is recursive self improvement. Get the AI to make a modified version of itself to try to think better.
mdaniel 8 hours ago|
Inbreeding is illegal for a reason
sakex 11 hours ago||
There are new things being tested and yielding results monthly in modelling. We've deviated quite a bit from the original multi head attention.
Kapura 16 hours ago||
Here's an idea: make the AIs consistent at doing things computers are good at. Here's an anecdote from a friend who's living in Japan:

> i used chatgpt for the first time today and have some lite rage if you wanna hear it. tldr it wasnt correct. i thought of one simple task that it should be good at and it couldnt do that.

> (The kangxi radicals are neatly in order in unicode so you can just ++ thru em. The cjks are not. I couldnt see any clear mapping so i asked gpt to do it. Big mess i had to untangle manually anyway it woulda been faster to look them up by hand (theres 214))

> The big kicker was like, it gave me 213. And i was like, "why is one missing?" Then i put it back in and said count how many numbers are here and it said 214, and there just werent. Like come on you SHOULD be able to count.

If you can make the language models actually interface with what we've been able to do with computers for decades, i imagine many paths open up.

cheevly 15 hours ago|
Many of us have solved this with internal tooling that has not yet been shared or released to the public.
layer8 15 hours ago||
This needs to be generalized however. For example, if you present an AI with a drawing of some directed graph (a state diagram, for example), it should be able to answer questions based on the precise set of all possible paths in that graph, without someone having to write tooling for diagram or graph processing and traversal. Or, given a photo of a dropped box of matches, an AI should be able to precisely count the matches, as far as they are individually visible (which a human could do by keeping a tally while coloring the matches). There are probably better examples, these are off the cuff.

There’s an infinite repertoire of such tasks that combine AI capabilities with traditional computer algorithms, and I don’t think we have a generic way of having AI autonomously outsource whatever parts require precision in a reliable way.

snapcaster 14 hours ago||
What you're describing sounds like agentic tool usage. Have you kept up with the latest developments on that? it's already solved depending on how strict you define your criteria above
layer8 12 hours ago||
My understanding is that you need to provide and configure task-specific tools. You can’t combine the AI with just a general-purpose computer and have the AI figure out on its own how to make use of it to achieve with reliability and precision whatever task it is given. In other words, the current tool usage isn’t general-purpose in the way the LLM itself is, and also the LLM doesn’t reason about its own capabilities in order to decide how to incorporate computer use to compensate for its own weaknesses. Instead you have to tell the LLM what it should apply the tooling for.
tantalor 16 hours ago||
> If data is the only thing that matters, why are 95% of people working on new methods?

Because new methods unlock access to new datasets.

Edit: Oh I see this was a rhetorical question answered in the next paragraph. D'oh

lossolo 15 hours ago|
I wrote about it around a year ago here:

"There weren't really any advancements from around 2018. The majority of the 'advancements' were in the amount of parameters, training data, and its applications. What was the GPT-3 to ChatGPT transition? It involved fine-tuning, using specifically crafted training data. What changed from GPT-3 to GPT-4? It was the increase in the number of parameters, improved training data, and the addition of another modality. From GPT-4 to GPT-40? There was more optimization and the introduction of a new modality. The only thing left that could further improve models is to add one more modality, which could be video or other sensory inputs, along with some optimization and more parameters. We are approaching diminishing returns." [1]

10 months ago around o1 release:

"It's because there is nothing novel here from an architectural point of view. Again, the secret sauce is only in the training data. O1 seems like a variant of RLRF https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.14238

Soon you will see similar models from competitors." [2]

Winter is coming.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40624112

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41526039

tolerance 15 hours ago|
And when winter does arrive, then what? The technology is slowing down while its popularity picks up. Can sparks fly out of snow?
imiric 1 hour ago|||
> And when winter does arrive, then what?

If the technology is useful, the Slope of Enlightenment, followed by the Plateau of Productivity.

blibble 9 hours ago|||
the trillion dollar funding tap is turned off, the prices charged then will have to reflect the costs

shortly thereafter the entire ecosystem will collapse

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