Alex Gude

Maria Antoniak @mariaa.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 30, 2024 at 16:39 UTC

"LLMs are just next-word predictors." What are the current best references to respond to this, either supporting or critiquing?

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Alex Gude @alexgude.com [ View ] Jun 29, 2024 at 15:52 UTC

At the time I thought it was weird trying to form hierarchies from incredibly independent professors. Now that I work in tech it's pretty similar: both professors and SWEs have a lot of job freedom and can say "Nah this sucks I'm out" if they don't like it. Need lots of "soft power" management.

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Alex Gude @alexgude.com [ View ] Jun 29, 2024 at 15:46 UTC

In high energy patticle physics, you delegate to post docs and students. And you form a management hierarchy above the professors as well consisting of committees, etc. No other way to build a billion dollar detector with 3,000 people.

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Alex Gude @alexgude.com [ View ] Jun 28, 2024 at 19:00 UTC

Did you hit it?

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Alex Gude @alexgude.com [ View ] Jun 27, 2024 at 22:15 UTC

_ Marionette turns off the TV_ "It launched 3 days ago; it's been flying in circles upside down since." "But with its nuclear motor it should stay up forever, right? We've got plenty of time to fix it." "But the coolant pumps weren't designed to run upside down..." Thunderbirds are go! 🚀

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Alex Gude @alexgude.com [ View ] Jun 27, 2024 at 20:31 UTC

Of course you could probably just like look up cars in a database. Our actual use case is more complicated in that there is no database, and you also have to do some work (well the LLM is) so you know it's the same thing you saw previously...

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Alex Gude @alexgude.com [ View ] Jun 27, 2024 at 20:29 UTC

It turns out people write a lot about cars, so LLMs have a lot of context based just on the naming. ChatGPT knows that a 2016 Honda Odyssey is a van. And we know that once you've categorized as a van, all others have the same type are also Vans. That's what we're doing at a very high level.

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Alex Gude @alexgude.com [ View ] Jun 27, 2024 at 20:27 UTC

I can't share tons of details but I can give you a toy example. This is of course greatly simplified but gets the point mostly right. Imagine you have a bunch of makes and models of cars. Did you want to categorize them into: Truck Van SUV Sedan And you've got several million of these.

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Alex Gude @alexgude.com [ View ] Jun 27, 2024 at 20:20 UTC

It's in production. Results are pre-computed and cached.

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Alex Gude @alexgude.com [ View ] Jun 27, 2024 at 16:36 UTC

Yes yes! All the "neural networks mean you don't have to do feature engineering" is actually *true* for these models. I just ask "What is this?" and give it an item and it works really well.

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Alex Gude @alexgude.com [ View ] Jun 26, 2024 at 22:56 UTC

On the subject of LLMs and their usefulness or lack there of: I just got one to solve a zero-shot, 4-way classification problem with a precision of 98%. Work involved: about 30 minutes of tweaking a prompt explain what belonged in each class.

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Alex Gude @alexgude.com [ View ] Jun 26, 2024 at 22:51 UTC

@burke.bsky.social

GPT wins again.

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Alex Gude @alexgude.com [ View ] Jun 26, 2024 at 17:29 UTC

But are you sure we shouldn't have a committee that decides who can live in the Bay Area? Maybe we can issue little internal passports saying you're allowed here... (Who am I kidding, local zoning boards already kinda do this...)

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Alex Gude @alexgude.com [ View ] Jun 26, 2024 at 17:17 UTC

Yeah an interesting question, but I don't think who owns the copyright matters in this case. Specifically no one owns the copyright for AI works, and I'm certain that doesn't absolve anyone of liability.

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Alex Gude @alexgude.com [ View ] Jun 26, 2024 at 17:15 UTC

Yeah compared to Photoshop (at least classic, pre-2020 Photoshop) doesn't have a memorization problem, so it is different in that respect.

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Alex Gude @alexgude.com [ View ] Jun 26, 2024 at 16:46 UTC

I agree that we already have all the legal tools in place! And we should use them! But why would that be the responsibility of the companies and not the end user? Adobe doesn't currently have to make sure you're not drawing Mickey mouse with Photoshop. That's my responsibility as the end user.

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