Predictions about the potential impacts of generative AI may be hugely overblown because of "many serious, unsolved problems" with the technology according to Gary Marcus, one of the field's leading voices.
We don’t even know how they arrive at the output they arrive at, and it takes lengthy research just to find out how, say, an LLM picks the next word in an arbitrarily chosen sentence fragment. And that’s for the simpler models! (Like GPT-2)
That’s pretty crazy when you think about it.
So, I don’t think it’s fair to suggest they’re just “a new type of app”. I’m not sure what “revolutionary” really means but the technology behind the generative AI is certainly going to be applied elsewhere.
There was this point where VR gaming seemed like an inevitable successor to traditional gaming. It was everywhere and improving rapidly. There were core concerns, but most felt that those could be solved with time. The technology had so much potential.
This is how the current AI solutions feel to me right now. There are a small-ish group of people who find them very useful and use them often. There are a large group of people who are currently on the hype bandwagon, talking about all the potential they hold. But currently they have yet to truly hit mainstream use.
With VR, all that hype and potential seems largely dead. The promised advancements haven’t seemed like enough to take over from traditional games, the fundamental issues haven’t been fixed because they’re too hard or too costly to fix.
I’m still unsure if AI will go this same route, or if it will eventually break into more mainstream. I think probably the most likely route is something like how Siri/Alexa worked out. Some people use voice assistants all the time, others basically never do. They never quite fully delivered on the revolution they promised, but they were useful enough to stick around. That’s how I feel about the current AI approach.
I think long term we’ll get some other approach that will once again kick off the AI hype machine, but the current AI approach is only going to find limited success because it’s going to be really, really hard to get it to a place where you can reasonably trust the output.
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We don’t even know how they arrive at the output they arrive at, and it takes lengthy research just to find out how, say, an LLM picks the next word in an arbitrarily chosen sentence fragment. And that’s for the simpler models! (Like GPT-2)
That’s pretty crazy when you think about it.
So, I don’t think it’s fair to suggest they’re just “a new type of app”. I’m not sure what “revolutionary” really means but the technology behind the generative AI is certainly going to be applied elsewhere.
There was this point where VR gaming seemed like an inevitable successor to traditional gaming. It was everywhere and improving rapidly. There were core concerns, but most felt that those could be solved with time. The technology had so much potential.
This is how the current AI solutions feel to me right now. There are a small-ish group of people who find them very useful and use them often. There are a large group of people who are currently on the hype bandwagon, talking about all the potential they hold. But currently they have yet to truly hit mainstream use.
With VR, all that hype and potential seems largely dead. The promised advancements haven’t seemed like enough to take over from traditional games, the fundamental issues haven’t been fixed because they’re too hard or too costly to fix.
I’m still unsure if AI will go this same route, or if it will eventually break into more mainstream. I think probably the most likely route is something like how Siri/Alexa worked out. Some people use voice assistants all the time, others basically never do. They never quite fully delivered on the revolution they promised, but they were useful enough to stick around. That’s how I feel about the current AI approach.
I think long term we’ll get some other approach that will once again kick off the AI hype machine, but the current AI approach is only going to find limited success because it’s going to be really, really hard to get it to a place where you can reasonably trust the output.
The paper that invented http had a not “interesting idea” from the researcher who reviewed it.
These AI are a revolution. But like all revolution it will take some time for the society to absorb it.