this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2024
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See now, I would prefer AI in my toaster. It should be able to learn to adjust the cook time to what I want no matter what type of bread I put in it. Though is that realky AI? It could be. Same with my fridge. Learn what gets used and what doesn't. Then give my wife the numbers on that damn clear box of salad she buys at costco everytime, which take up a ton of space and always goes bad before she eats even 5% of it. These would be practical benefits to the crap that is day to day life. And far more impactful then search results I can't trust.
There's a good point here that like about 80% of what we're calling AI right now... isn't even AI or even LLM. It's just.... algorithm, code, plain old math. I'm pretty sure someone is going to refer to a calculator as AI soon. "Wow, it knows math! Just like a person! Amazing technology!"
(That's putting aside the very question of whether LLMs should even qualify as AIs at all.)
In my professional experience, AI seems to be just a faster way to generate an algorithm that is really hard to debug. Though I am dev-ops/sre so I am not as deep in it as the devs.
I remined of the time researchers used an evolutionary algorithm to devise a circuit that would emit a tone on certain audio inputs and not on others. They examined the resulting circuit and found an extra vestigial bit, but when they cut it off, the chip stopped working. So they re-enabled it. Then they wanted to show off their research at a panel, and at the panel it completely failed. Dismayed they brought it back to their lab to figure out why it stopped working, and it suddenly started working fine.
After a LOT of troubleshooting they eventually discovered that the circuit was generating the tone by using the extra vestigial bit as an antenna that picked up emissions from a CRT in the lab and downconverted it to the desired tone frequency. Turn of the antenna, no signal. Take the chip away from that CRT, no signal.
That's what I expect LLMs will make. Complex, arcane spaghetti stuff that works but if you look at it funny it won't work anymore, and nobody knows how it works at all.