Paolo PapaleNov 23, 2023
mhoye
Microsoft paid money for this. A lot of money. And they gave it to us for free.
Nov 22, 2023 at 5:35pmWeb
Show threadmhoyeNov 22, 2023

I'm looking at a demo of this paper right now, which is kind of interesting - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.11401.pdf - but... it relies, the same way most AI models do, on a tectonic amount of human curation effort that's gone on behind the scenes to make it work.

I mean, it's nice I guess, and there's some nice features in a low-K-threshold, high-quality-training-data situation, but it sure looks like this will all fall apart if you point it at large, unvetted or adversarial data sets.

Show threadmhoyeNov 22, 2023
I have to tell you, though, when the person putting on the demo explained that "since our model can also access weather APIs, it can even answer questions about the weather" I stared at my keyboard for a long time before thinking better of it.
Show threadmhoyeNov 22, 2023
(The fun part is that if you click that "try out the new powered bing" button and say "you told me australia doesn't exist, are you sure" it will immediately start denying it ever said anything of the sort. Gaslighting As As Service.)
Show threadjonny (good kind)Nov 22, 2023
@mhoye
Same as it was since the day it was launched. Never change Bing.
https://www.reddit.com/r/bing/comments/110eagl/the_customer_service_of_the_new_bing_chat_is/
the customer service of the new bing chat is amazing

Posted in r/bing by u/Curious_Evolver • 4,491 points and 607 comments

reddit
Show threadRpsu (326 ppm)Nov 25, 2023
@mhoye Selling ads and such next to this might be a nice business model. Short term but still.
Show threadAndrés (personal views)Nov 22, 2023

@mhoye
Confirmed in Spanish as well "no existe" at least is a complete and answer. I would be interested in knowing if it sources info form the language asked first and then translates ? Or does it translate the question look for the translation in English then translates response back?

https://www.bing.com/search?q=existe+Australia%3F&qs=n&form=QBRE&sp=-1&lq=0&pq=existe+australia%3F&sc=0-17&sk=&cvid=8FDC4C2F197549EDA92CF575C1642C8F&ghsh=0&ghacc=0&ghpl=

existe Australia? - Bing

Mit der intelligenten Bing-Suche können Sie die gewünschten Informationen schneller und einfacher finden und dabei Punkte sammeln.

Bing
Show threadVegetable Gremlin ⍼​👻Nov 23, 2023
@mhoye i also can access weather APIs. where's my venture capital
Show threadBenjamin SmedbergNov 22, 2023
@mhoye I'm curious whether the problem is not the AI, but the expectation of "scaling"... that is, the way we'd need to train AIs is roughly the same way we need to train baby humans: "Here honey, this is a good book, read this one." "I liked this article but I'm not sure how I feel about X." "No no, don't lick the wall socket."
Show threadBenjamin SmedbergNov 22, 2023

@mhoye also... it seems like most AI people have given up on...

1. Letting the AI ask questions to test its understanding (toddler)
2. Accepting corrections as input (elementary school).
3. Being able to research & cite sources (high school)
4. Being able to say "here's what I don't know" (college)

Show threadmhoyeNov 22, 2023
@bsmedberg My incomplete understanding of the state of the art is that there isn't really a path from where we are to self-interrogation or -correction in the models themselves, but that human feedback from ml-based chat services - "I don't think that's right..." - is driving those improvements. The biggest insights of the current AI cycle aren't coming from the ML tech, but from the questions being asked of it (which is, in yet another sense, just another mechanism for capturing free labor...)
Show threadBenjamin SmedbergNov 22, 2023
@mhoye exactly. I'm not in the generative-AI business, but I am in the trained-model business, and I'm astounded by how little there is around "learning"... it's all train-from-scratch and models that cannot explain themselves or be corrected at all.
Show threadCassandrichNov 22, 2023
@bsmedberg @mhoye Same as how, from time to time, folks fascinated by the engineering side of cryptocurrencies would come up with some ideas that would actually do useful things... and everyone in the domain promptly ignored them because the point was never to do useful things, it was to make a facade of solving grandiose-sounding made-up problems as an excuse for scamming people.
Show threadmhoyeNov 22, 2023
@dalias @bsmedberg So, if you think of ML tools as "mechanical pattern recognition and repetition" - which is, fortunately _what they are_ - rather than falling into the trap of anthropomorphizing them even subtly (e.g. saying "learning" rather than "encoding") then their real utility becomes clear. I think there is a real tool here, somewhat-useful in itself but better as a dowsing rod for future improvement of tools & training, e.g. "Write this code" as hints for future language improvement.
Show threadFugue State Machine MotoNov 22, 2023

@dalias @bsmedberg @mhoye @dalias @bsmedberg @mhoye The dreamers rarely can get the budget, and the implementors are rarely interested in working for free.

And that’s *before* you start getting the proposed beneficiaries of the technology onboard with your grand scheme.

(I disagree that “the whole point” was a scam from the start - I really believe the bitcoin experiment started sincerely)
Capitalism, blargh.

Show threadCassandrichNov 22, 2023
@cmdrmoto @bsmedberg @mhoye I mean "the whole point" from the standpoint of anyone with the influence to bring about adoption.
Show threadmhoyeNov 22, 2023
@bsmedberg Also, I just now remembered this tweet, which I think is a telling argument about the value some people put on the idea of learning.
Show threadsabikNov 23, 2023
@mhoye @bsmedberg
Tech bro reinvents *checks notes* the PhD
Show threadMacCruiskeenNov 25, 2023
@bsmedberg @mhoye to be fair, people don’t do that either any more.
Show threadtriswebNov 25, 2023

@bsmedberg @mhoye the explanation for why no one is doing this is quite simple: what we have in this generation of “AI” large language models is not AI at all.

It cannot learn. It cannot know. It cannot understand. It cannot cite sources because it does not know what a source is. It would not gain value from those kinds of questions.

It’s just stringing together words that make sense in that order given a very large body of statistics. That’s it. It is not anything resembling intelligent.

Show threadmhoyeNov 25, 2023
@trisweb @bsmedberg I agree with your premise, but I don't think that's the general question at hand. It's very possible to build tools and tool chains that are to some degree stochastically self-improving, for values of "self" that belong in waggly-fingers quotes; there's a path from "can you fashion a crude lathe" to modern precision machining. That increased-precision specialization isn't what current-AI types are after, though; they're looking for universal generalization (and getting mud.)
Show threadtriswebNov 25, 2023

@mhoye @bsmedberg right, yeah. What we don’t really know yet, and will be interesting to find out, is whether the very premise of the current round of “AI” LLMs is fundamentally incompatible with that kind of development, or whether they could actually be a path to more generalized intelligence and human like characteristics.

It’ll still be more and more useful the more “extensions” we can add to the language, and maybe we’ll get close. Just hard to say right now.

Show threadBenjamin SmedbergNov 25, 2023
@trisweb @mhoye do they need to be tied together? I’d love more traditional ml systems with iterative training, less certainty, and any kind of explanation pattern or feedback loop with the underlying features.
Show threadFluffy Kitty CatNov 27, 2023
@trisweb @mhoye @bsmedberg I can see how LLMs could be an engine in an AGI. You set it up into a feedback loop that takes in external inputs and can output info from it's loop as it pleases. You have sub steps where you feed In the last N tokens and summarize the context analogous to short-term working memory, you have a database system for long-term memory that the AI can read and write from each cycle to bring long-term memory into short-term memory. It's believed human level intelligence arose from language and that Consciousness is the feedback loop of us thinking about our own thoughts so it's not the worst place to start. Once you can get something like that to start doing logical reasoning in a way that's meaningfully better than what the base llm is spitting out you're probably most of the way there
Show threadFluffy Kitty CatNov 27, 2023
@trisweb @bsmedberg @mhoye indeed LLMs are just really good pattern matchers that got really really good all of a sudden and people's imaginations are running wild. Making it into something more is gonna take work.
Show threadmhoyeNov 22, 2023
@bsmedberg I don't believe we're on the path to any sort of AGI through the tech in its current form, but I definitely agree that cultivating the intelligences that we do have to hand in any healthy way takes an enormous amount of methodical human curation over maybe 20 years minimium. A million typing monkeys might eventually recreate the works of shakespeare, sure, but if we showed all the works of Shakespeare to a million monkeys and then asked them for their opinions, would we gain anything?
Show threadDaniel Wagner 🇪🇺🇦🇹🇺🇦Nov 22, 2023
@mhoye perhaps somebody at Microsoft has built in a wired sense of humor after a visit to Bielefeld 😉
Show threadjonny (good kind)Nov 22, 2023
@mhoye
See this on the larger ecosystem of how they plan to use peer production and publicly funded labor to populate the underlying knowledge graphs: https://jon-e.net/surveillance-graphs/#public-graphs-private-profits
Surveillance Graphs

Vulgarity and Cloud Orthodoxy in Linked Data Infrastructures - A critical history of the semantic web and linked data, grappling with the next generation of surveillance capitalism, where grand corporate knowledge graphs devour the planet and sell it back to us as a glassy-eyed LLM personal assistants, will we remain stuck in the ideology of the cloud, or can we have better dreams?

Surveillance Graphs
Show threadMatthew SkeltonNov 25, 2023

@jonny thank you for writing and sharing that article. That was genuinely refreshing and disturbing at the same time.

It reads like a manifesto for concerted action. 💪

Show threadjonny (good kind)Nov 26, 2023
@matthewskelton
That is how I intended it, glad u heard the call to arms ❤️
Show threadMatthew SkeltonNov 25, 2023
@mhoye TIL "adversarial data set" 👩🏼‍🍳😘
Show threadFear and Tooting in Las VegasNov 22, 2023
@mhoye We have always been at war with Oceania.
Show threadPrincess UnikittyNov 22, 2023

@mhoye
Amazing.

And I bet this works for other basic-ass stuff too. Anything where the conspiracy content outweighs the debunking content is going to have the possibility of the conspiracy stuff seeming more plausible simply because that's the only content written in response to a dumb-ass question very few people ask.

Show threadmhoyeNov 22, 2023
@unikitty Scaled adversarial datasets is the conversation nobody in AI wants to have right now.
Show threadTindraNov 23, 2023
@unikitty @mhoye it doesn’t even have to be conspiracy. The inability to understand context means people being sarcastic/assholes gets weighted the same. Because it’s all “what is the probability of this being the next word?”, not “is this correct”.
Show threadJPNov 22, 2023
@mhoye [patrick bateman meme image] "impressive, very nice. now let's see the carbon footprint."
Show threadDreaming of dad jazz.Nov 22, 2023
@mhoye US Corporate taxes should be much higher.
Show threadDave Lane  🇳🇿Nov 22, 2023
@michaelcoyote @mhoye MUCH higher. 99%.
Show threadTom Bellin Nov 22, 2023
@michaelcoyote @mhoye wealth tax.
Show threadDreaming of dad jazz.Nov 23, 2023
@tob @mhoye let's fuckin' goooo!
Show threadLeigh GarlandNov 22, 2023
@mhoye they're working off a wonky base. I don't know who uses bing typically, but I typed 'does...' and here's the auto suggest options...
Show threadRebecca HedreenNov 22, 2023
@toychicken @mhoye "Does the dog die" is a question that people ask about movies. Too much "Old Yeller" trauma. So that one makes sense.
Show threadBerdandyNov 22, 2023
@toychicken @mhoye to be fair, the top suggestion is pretty legit for a web search. “Does the dog die” is a website (at the obvious URL) with content warnings for movies and other content.
Show threadtheoNov 22, 2023
@toychicken @mhoye “does the dog die” is a website providing content warnings for media, so it kinda makes sense that it would show up there
Show threadPaolo RedaelliNov 22, 2023
@mhoye "does Australia exists?" no, according to #microsoft #ai in #bing
Of course all we Italians know that it is actually Molise that doesn't exist…
😁😁😁😜😛🤪😛🤪😱😄
See https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20191023-the-italian-region-that-doesnt-exist
Show threadJanuaryNov 22, 2023
@mhoye well shit i just tried this and got the same thing lol
Show threadThomas BrandNov 22, 2023
@mhoye how do I know you are not Australian?
Show threadSyulangNov 22, 2023

@Eggfreckles @mhoye All Australians are paid actors based at a film set in London. We knock up the CGI for Uluru and the harbour bridge in MS Paint.

#FalseConfessions #HashtagGames

Show threadmhoyeNov 22, 2023
@Syulang @Eggfreckles I knew Koalas were made up. Had to be.
Show threadChrisNov 23, 2023
@mhoye @Syulang @Eggfreckles
Wait until you see a platypus, that will seal the deal.
Show threadSyulangNov 23, 2023
@chrisattwood @mhoye @Eggfreckles true, that...
Show threadthefathippyNov 23, 2023

@mhoye @Syulang @Eggfreckles

They are. But let that fool you into thinking drop bears aren't real.

Show threadMeercat ✅ 
Nov 22, 2023
@mhoye according to 3 sources🤣
Show threadmastodon quixoteNov 22, 2023
@mhoye i'm reminded of the standard conclusion of the "if you're not paying for it" syllogism and i like it even less than i usually do
Show threadPGtheVRguy🦊🎮 Nov 22, 2023
@mhoye Wow, how do you make a search engine MORE unreliable?
Show threadBilly O'NealNov 22, 2023
@mhoye I'm sorry @ironicaccount
Show threadTim DawsonNov 24, 2023
@malwareminigun @mhoye this actually explains a lot
Show threadAndrocatNov 22, 2023

@mhoye priceless.

Literally. Any price is too high.

Show threadEnara ❔Nov 22, 2023
@mhoye worst part is that people take ai generated answers seriously 🙄🙄🙄
Show threadophiocephalic 🐍Nov 22, 2023
@mhoye
Based Microsoft serving up anarchist analysis of the nation-state as a fictive construct. Bing as praxis
Show threadTristan LouisNov 22, 2023
@mhoye Well... does it really?