this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2023
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Machine Learning

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With the advent of LLMs, multimodality and “general purpose” AIs which seat on unimaginable amounts money, computing power and data. I’m graduating and want to start a PHD, but feel quite disheartened given the huge results obtained simply by “brute-forcing” and by the ever-growing hype in machine learning that could result in a bubble of data scientists, ML researchers and so on.

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[–] Grouchy-Friend4235@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (5 children)

The bubble is about to burst. Six more months, tops. At that point people will realize that next word prediction while impressive is just not very useful in most business contexts, and that the use cases that might be interesting don't need a universe-sized model. Useful applications of natural language processing are quite limited despite what everyone says right now. The idea to replace workers in large numbers is a pipedream, if the idea has merit at all it will be for those who promote it the most (talking heads).

[–] TenshiS@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

!RemindMe 6 months

[–] covertBehavior@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

Not so sure about this timeline, we kept the social media company delusion going from ~2016-2021

[–] MyPetGoat@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

All technology will have a natural language interface within 10 years. We will have embodied reasoning machines at most a decade later. Your perspective is skewed by your business context perhaps

[–] damhack@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

Divide those timescales by 4 and you are on the mark.

[–] TenshiS@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Interesting take, but 180 degrees from what I believe. Seeing how amazing transformers are and for the first time carving a path to AGI, I think we'll have the ability to replace the average office worker within 5 years. Any excel and PowerPoint task, phone call, contracting and negociation with clients, controlling and finance, coding task and analytic task can be automated. Its easier than you make it out to be. Most people do disappointingly simple stuff on a daily basis and spend most time with politics and dicking around. A migration project where you move data from a legacy system to a new system sometimes takes 20 people half a year. It's like reinventing wheels every single time, simply because the systems are different and unique, not because the work itself is particularly difficult. That's something that could be done in an hour.

I hope you're right, but I'm betting on a different horse. I think many people will be blindsided. And I think politics will have a hard time handling the transition to a UBI or whatever solution they come up with fast enough.

[–] damhack@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

Transformers are not a path to AGI. They’re too dumb and static. Active Inference is where it’s at.

[–] damhack@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

Depends on if the bubble you are referring to is the current crop of Transformers. Which will keep running for a good while. However, the bubble will be made larger once Karl Friston’s group start releasing and low power Transformer-optimised optical chips start production next year. I can’t see an end to it as most current issues are in the process of being solved, including smaller, faster, less hallucinatory low compute models. We’re only just hitting the multimodal on-ramp and that journey has far to go.