this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2024
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[–] [email protected] 117 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

Investment giant Goldman Sachs published a research paper

Goldman Sachs researchers also say that

It's not a research paper; it's a report. They're not researchers; they're analysts at a bank. This may seem like a nit-pick, but journalists need to (re-)learn to carefully distinguish between the thing that scientists do and corporate R&D, even though we sometimes use the word "research" for both. The AI hype in particular has been absolutely terrible for this. Companies have learned that putting out AI "research" that's just them poking at their own product but dressed up in a science-lookin' paper leads to an avalanche of free press from lazy credulous morons gorging themselves on the hype. I've written about this problem a lot. For example, in this post, which is about how Google wrote a so-called paper about how their LLM does compared to doctors, only for the press to uncritically repeat (and embellish on) the results all over the internet. Had anyone in the press actually fucking bothered to read the paper critically, they would've noticed that it's actually junk science.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Same with all cryptocurrencies having a "white paper", as if it was anything other than marketing crap formatted like a scientific paper.

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[–] [email protected] 72 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Go-dAmn Sachs is wrong often, but in this I think they're on point. Learned from the Crypto insanity.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 9 months ago (2 children)

It's costing them money, and they're not sure they're going to get it back.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago

They're not

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago

Naw if they're publicly bashing it they've already dumped on all the downside risk onto their customers and now they're net short.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 9 months ago (4 children)

In other news: water is wet and bears shit in the woods

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Man I love it when billionaire assholes finally figure out what the rest of the world has been saying since the beginning.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 9 months ago (1 children)

AI has been overhyped since it first played tic-tac-toe in the 1950s. One definition of "AI" is: "an algorithm that people don't understand... yet" 🤷

[–] [email protected] 17 points 9 months ago (3 children)

The stuff they're calling ai now is just predictive text algorithms. I really can't wait to stop hearing about this because it is all artificial with no intelligence.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago (1 children)

LLMs have been shown to have emergent math capabilities (that are the opposite of what is trained) so you’re simplifying way too much. Yes a lot is just “predictive text” but there’s a ton of “this was not the training and we don’t know how it knows this” as well.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago

Game of Life has cool emergent properties that are a lot more interesting and fun to play with than LLMs. LLMs also have emergent properties like, for instance, failing classification due to the manipulation of individual image pixels.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago (5 children)

You know it's funny how many times I've heard that "it's just predictive text algorithms!" As a dismissal that I'm beginning to think we're just predictive text algorithms.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Not exactly.

LLMs are predictive-associative token algorithms with a degree of randomness and some self-reflection. A key aspect is that anything can be a token, they can self-feed their own output, creating the basis for a thought cycle, as well as output control input for other algorithms. It remains to be seen whether the core of "(human) intelligence" is much more than that, and by how much.

Stable Diffusion is a random image generator that refines its output based on perceptual traits associated with a prompt. It's like a "lite" version of human dreaming, only with a super-human training set. Kind of an "uncanny valley" version of dreaming.

It just so happens that both algorithms have been showcased at about the same time, and it's the first time we can build a "set and forget" AI system that can both make decisions about its own next steps, and emulate human creativity... which has driven the hype into overdrive.

I don't think we'll stop hearing about it, but I do think there is much more to be done, and it's pretty much impossible to feed any of the algorithms with human experience data, without registering at least one human learning cycle, as in over many years from inside a humanoid robot.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago (2 children)

If there’s one job I think AI could definitely replace, it’s crafting reports by investment bankers.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

Funny you should mention that McKinsey published a paper a few months back concluding that GenAI will take over most of the jobs in America because it was good at doing what McKinsey Associates do. Missed by the authors is that the job of a McKinsey associate is to confidently spout nonsense all day long and that's actually exactly what chatgpt is programmed to do.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (5 children)

If Goldman Sachs said that, then most likely the opposite is true.

I'm surprised how everyone here believes what that capitalist company is saying, just because it fits their own narrative of AI being useless.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I mean, ask pretty much anyone familiar with the workings of AI who doesn't have a vested interest, and they'll say the same thing. Goldman is right.

I'd also say that it does have applications, but it's going to take a moment for all the bullshit artists to move on to the next thing so the grown-ups can work. It's a bit like graphene research circa-2011, although it's way more proven than graphene ever was.

They might also say that the moment it does work reliably we should be scared, although it's fair to say there's many experts who take the obvious stance.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago
[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago

Hopefully this will have an impact

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago

Oh no, you mean the big "smart" money investors that manage to crash the economy every decade or so and ruin every business they touch are gonna leave generative AI alone? Oh nooo. How will the science progress without Goldman Sachs's guiding hand?

Good riddance.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago

"will this large spend ever pay off?"

That's the neat part: it won't!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

They’re just not invested in it yet. Once their money is in it, they’ll suddenly say it’s the best thing in the world.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago
[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago
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