I was listening to the New Year’s Day concert by the Vienna philharmonic and wondered who one of the composers was so used a popular song recognition app. (I expected it would make some fuzzy match on the piece and give me the name + composer). To my amazement it did give the name and composer but as played by the Vienna philharmonic in 2005 in the same location. The orchestra does not have the same members as 19 years ago, nor was it the same conductor, so it seemed the piece was matched on the acoustics of the Musikverein where they were playing, which I found astonishing.

  • @[email protected]English
    14•5 days ago

    Large Language Models.

    While it’s trendy to hate on them and nitpick every single flaw, I still have a vivid memory of how terrible chatbots were just a few years ago. The fact that I can now have an actual, insightful discussion with a computer still amazes me. I hope they continue to improve to the point where it’s impossible to tell them apart from a real person.

    • Snot FlickermanEnglish
      12•5 days ago

      It’s funny, because what makes them more like a real person is their inability to be consistent.

      Like genuinely, LLMs are indeed cool, but in many ways all we’ve done is create a computer that is as bad at computer tasks as a human.

      It lies with the same confidence that it uses to tell the truth, mostly because it can’t actually make distinctions between the two.

      • @[email protected]English
        2•2 days ago

        in many ways all we’ve done is create a computer that is as bad at computer tasks as a human.

        What we have done is even worse because by and large the marketing around AI has worked and people categorically trust what a single AI will tell them after asking the question only once and if that doesn’t terrify you, you aren’t paying attention.

        If there is a future for ai it is in “ensembles” where you ask several independently trained and developed LLMs the same question, preferably at least checking some of the LLMs for consistency/indepth correct knowledge by asking them the same question twice in two different sessions. Then you evaluate from the ensemble of answers what you think the real answer is.

        Sound tedius compared to just using a search engine that works?

        …and to that question I respond emphatically - Yes, very much so!

    • DankOfAmericaEnglish
      2•3 days ago

      I see a lot of hate for them on Lemmy, but I find hem quite helpful with earning how to work with computers and also summarizing general info I search for on the internet. Rather than spend 20 minutes reading thru various websites on a topic know nothing about, I can simply ask an LLM. Eve if they are known to make mistakes, I can accommodate that possibility if the stakes are high enough by looking into it further.

      • @LovableSidekickEnglish
        2•3 days ago

        A programmer friend of mine uses AI constantly now in his work. Once during a D&D game he had ChatGPT write database code for a character generator or something, I forget the actual goal, just while sitting there between turns. It churned out the tedious routine crap you always have to write for tasks like that. He said he’s had it refactor his own code, and it has come up with interesting approaches he wouldn’t have thought of. Pretty amazing for software that essentially just reshuffles material it’s already seen to create something that looks like what a human would produce, without actually understanding what it’s doing.

    • ShadowEnglish
      3•4 days ago

      I’ve been working with cursor.ai lately and it’s pretty mind blowing in composer mode. I understand the hate and how the tech is limited, but it’s still pretty amazing at what it can do.