Submitted by thecoffeejesus t3_11b5vs6 in singularity
Difficult_Review9741 t1_j9wb1if wrote
Technical progress is a given, but remember that within those N years that saw immense progress, many ideas also seemed imminent and then fizzled out. We don't live in The Jetsons.
Engineering is hard. Many approaches have limits that are undetectable until you hit them.
LLMs are really impressive, but the reality is that they have very few practical use cases at this point. So why expect people to care that much about it? Future progress is not inevitable.
By the way, there are tons of applications of AI/ML that have been immensely more impactful to society than LLMs have been. And yet no one ever seems to talk about those, because they aren't flashy.
Frumpagumpus t1_j9wbqwo wrote
> reality is that they have very few practical use cases at this point
the metric crap tons of vc money pouring into llm based startups would beg to disagree.
it just takes time to build stuff. you'll see what the current api's are capable of within 2 yrs.
Difficult_Review9741 t1_j9wcemh wrote
"VCs think it's a good idea" is often times a signal to look in a different direction. I think there are uses cases by the way. But there will be limits.
Frumpagumpus t1_j9wvpep wrote
signals mean different things in different contexts.
i think you are extremely wrong to say very few practical use cases at this point (almost makes me question if you have used them much?)
even when vc money was "wrong" like in the dot com bubble. it turned out to be right, just early. (lets ignore crypto plz).
If anything maybe vc is late here lol (tho probly not and for the record i personally hold 6 month treasuries at this point just cuz i think market doesn't give a shit about much except for like mortgages and gov spending, ah yea and the whole taiwan thing could nuke appl from orbit and silicon valley bank may be insolvent or something?)
thecoffeejesus OP t1_j9xnfzj wrote
Yo, I agree with some of what you said. I really believe we’ve just scratched the tip of the iceberg.
I’m really interested to see how things evolve over the next four years, and how people adjust.
More tools are going to become publicly available, and people are going to have to use them to do their jobs.
It’ll be just like when your boss get to bee in his bonnet after a trade show, and decides to buy a whole bunch of new equipment. You’re going to be forced to learn how to use it. Because that’s what he wants you to do for your job.
Except it’s gonna be AI. It’s gonna be runway for video generation for social media.
It’s gonna be ChatGPT or Bard or something else for entertainment and gaming generation.
It’s going to be the Adobe sensei AI plus the Nvidia 3-D modeler.
And it’s gonna be some sort of transformer based complex AI with tool building and self learning baked in, with Internet access, and the ability to learn how to use APIs.
I don’t think it will be one AI, I think it will be several different models that all communicate with each other in the sync, like a hive mind, all specializing in one particular thing or another.
Just like your brain, yo 🧠
ChronoPsyche t1_j9x7l3m wrote
Do you know how much money vcs invested in all those web3 start ups in 2021 and 2022? How many of them have gotten anywhere? Web3 is pretty much dead now, and I say that as someone who fell for hype. Vcs can definitely jump onto the hype train prematurely.
That being said, I do think we are at the beginning of an AI revolution, you just shouldn't base your predictions on high-risk/high-reward speculation. That's their job, to take risky bets.
thecoffeejesus OP t1_j9xni2r wrote
Web3 may be dead but just like coral it’s the skeleton on which Web4 will be built
ChronoPsyche t1_j9z2fmn wrote
Sure, I believe it. Web3 will play a role in the future of the metaverse, it was just too early. It put the cart before the horse was even born. There has to be compelling metaverse experiences before there will be a need for a financial infrastructure to support transactions within and between those experiences. Nobody cares about NFTs if there are no good games or experiences to use them in.
theabominablewonder t1_j9y4pme wrote
Saying web3 is dead is the same as the OP complained about, people claiming AI isn’t going anywhere. We’ve only seen the early stages of a lot of disruptive technologies, metaverse/web3 included.
One thing that does happen though is that we get investment bubbles where VCs jump into the latest trend to try and be first, and those first waves of speculation always pop. But that money that VCs have thrown in does contribute to the development of that area as an industry.
A lot of VCs won’t make anything from AI, web3, additive manufacturing, blockchain etc, but their funds would have been used to push those things forwards.
You are right in their behaviour - if VCs are all shouting about something, then it may be better to look the other way, because by that point they are scraping the barrel on good investments trying to get in on the hype. The industry/tech itself can still be a legitimate, disruptive industry as a whole.
ChronoPsyche t1_j9z203t wrote
The web3 hype was a solution in search of a problem. I do think it correctly foresaw the whole metaverse phenomena, but it was too early. It was a supply side approach. It tried to create demand for the metaverse by building the financial infrastructure for it, but that was a mistake. Demand for the metaverse will only come when game changing experiences are built for it.
After that happens and enough compelling experiences are built, eventually there will be a need for the block chain infrastructure to handle transactions within and between those games and experiences. At that point, the technology will be more than ready.
Things just happened out of order, bolstered by the extremely speculative monetary environment we were in at the time. It would be like if PayPal were invented while the early internet was still being researched by ARPANET in the 70s.
theabominablewonder t1_j9zbemc wrote
It was too early yes, but then the VCs and retail pile in, speculate on everything Web3 being massive and then the bubble bursts. Some of the money is taken by scammers or failed businesses, but some money is left in the ecosystem to develop it so in a decade it is much closer to a 'consumer friendly' experience with actual use cases built around it. It's generally a good thing for the industry as a bubble attracts investment. A lot of people will get burnt by jumping on the hype train though.
And yes you are right on the technology. I believe the likes of Tim Sweeney at Epic see it as a 10+ year time horizon because the experience needs to be a LOT better than it is currently. I think that's a reasonable timeline really. One or two more bubbles before it gets there, no doubt.
ChronoPsyche t1_j9zc495 wrote
To be clear, I'm not talking about the Web3 experience. Web3 is not a very technically challenging problem. I'm talking about the experiences that would require Web3 in the first place, VR and AR experiences. Consumer VR is still in its infancy and has no "killer experience" and AR is even further behind. Until we have mass adoption of those technologies, there will be no place for Web3.
And even then, there is no guarantee there will be a demand for Web3 technology right away when VR and AR explodes. It all depends on what type of experiences are popular. There is theoretically no reason the current financial system can't support transactions in those environments. Where Web3 will be desired is if a metaverse-oriented ecosystem of connected social experiences comes into fruition.
I think that is highly likely, but it's still not a guaranteed outcome. For all we know, the killer experiences of VR and AR could be something we aren't even predicting that doesn't have very much to do with transactions at all. For instance, imagine the most popular experiences end up being single player games with intelligent NPCs. If that were the case, there would be no Web3. If people decide they'd much rather just interact with AI than with other people, the metaverse would be dead.
However, personally, I think a combination of the two paradigms is likely; social experiences + enriched single player with intelligent AI characters.
theabominablewonder t1_j9zjd53 wrote
I think people have always moved towards richer experiences that more closely emulate face to face contact. Moving from written word, to phone, to video calling.. an immersive experience that allows full natural gesturing is a step up. All the VR side will take a while to develop.
Web3 (as a general theme, allowing decentralised/personal ownership of data/assets) is easier, but the current platforms are not very user friendly. I think only now there's a few good tech demos on an experience for NFT ownership that would be considered user friendly (ie low fees, easy to use, good security - no high fees, random contract messages no one understands etc).
All the current experiences inform the industry how to make it more user friendly and all the scams, exploits, etc, of NFTs/crypto, essentially feed into further development so it is better the next time around.
I think we will have another bubble where stuff is easier for consumers - owning and operating a wallet without easily being scammed would be a nice start :) - but it will still be a way off what the eventual solution will look like.
visarga t1_ja5450y wrote
No, it's not about flashiness. Those ML apps you are talking about were specialised projects, each one developed independently. LLMs on the other hand are generalist. They can do thousands of known tasks and countless more, including combinations of tasks.
Instead of taking one year or more to provide a proof of concept, you can do that in a week. Instead of painstakingly labelling tens of thousands of examples, you just prompt with 4 examples. The entry barrier is so low now for many applications that anyone with programming experience can do it.
For vision, the CLIP model gives us a way to make classifiers without any samples, and the diffusion models allow us to generate any image. All without retraining, without large scale labelling.
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