Comment on Why AI is going to be a shitshow.
GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org 5 months ago
I’d reframe this as: “Why AI is currently a shitshow”. I am optimistic about the future though. Open models you can run locally are getting better and better. Hardware is getting better and better. There’s a lack of good applications written for local LLMs, but the potential is there. They’re coming. You don’t have to eat whatever Microsoft puts in front of you. The future does not belong to Microsoft, OpenAI, etc.
cynar@lemmy.world 5 months ago
One of the key thing that LLMs lack is a knowledge layer. In many ways, modern LLMs are hyper advanced predictive text. Don’t get me wrong, what they produce is awesome and can be extremely useful, but it’s still fundamentally limited.
Ultimately, a useful AI will need some level of understanding. It will need to be able to switch between casual chatter, and information delivery. It will need to be able to crosscheck its own conclusions before delivering them. There are groups working on this, but they are quite a bit behind LLMs. When they catch up, and the 2 can be linked/combined then things will get VERY interesting!
GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org 5 months ago
Totally agree, there’s a big hole in the current crop of applications. I think there’s not enough focus on the application side; they want to do everything within the model itself, but LLMs are not the most efficient way to store and retrieve large amounts of information.
They’re great at taking a small to medium amount of information and formatting it in sensible ways. But that information should ideally come from an external, reliable source.
kromem@lemmy.world 5 months ago
RAG serves as a knowledge layer.
What they really lack right now is effective introspection and executive function.
Too many people are trying to build a single model to do things correctly rather than layering models to do things correctly, which more closely approximates how the brain works.
We are shocked when AI chooses to nuke people in a wargame, but conveniently gloss over the fact that nearly every human put in front of a giant red button saying “Launch nukes” is going to have an intrusive thought to push the button. This is part of how we have an exploratory search around choices and consequences and rely on a functioning prefrontal cortex to inhibit those thoughts after working through the consequences. We need to be layering generative models behind additional post-processing layers that take similar approaches of reflection and refinement. It’s just more expensive to do things that way, so cheap low effort things like chatbots still suck.