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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • It’s not just skills not being passed down, but also that as technology has moved on, things have got more complicated, and then the skills needed to figure out why something isn’t working, and what needs doing to fix it plus actually carry out the fix, have got more and more technical, to the point that anyone who could do a repair could also probably get a much better-paying career than repairing things.

    That’s not an inherent problem, as a good service manual from the manufacturer could bypass the need to understand all the details of how a device works to identify a root cause, but it’s not in most companies’ interests to provide one that good when regulation doesn’t force them to, so for the most part, things need repairing without help from the manufacturer.







  • If we’re going to pull up other people’s pithy phrases that aren’t intended to be taken entirely literally, then the relevant one here is machine learning is the second best solution to any problem. In the (approximately, depending on how you define it) century people have been thinking about computers, we’ve already found better solutions to lots of problems. If a transformer-based neural network can get 99% accuracy in sixty seconds on 92 billion transistors of GPU and billions more for its VRAM, that’s pretty useless if we can also do it with 100% accuracy in sixty microseconds on a $1 microcontroller, or even faster on a less constrained device.

    The attention is all you need phrase is specifically in the context of sequence transduction models, and specifically referring to the discovery that they don’t need a combination of attention, recurrence and convolution, but actually only need attention if it’s used in the novel way introduced by the paper. If you don’t need to transduce any sequences, then this isn’t necessarily relevant, and it’s critically not a claim that you can do everything by transducing sequences. It was a surprise that applying it to generating new text instead of just converting it worked as well as it did, and a surprise that it kept getting better with larger models instead of plateauing around the GPT-1 and GPT-2 era, and a surprise that the text generation could be used to do other things, even ones as basic as addition. These things weren’t predicted by the Attention Is All You Need paper.


  • It’s not damn near anything. There’s loads of stuff that computers can do much more quickly and more accurately without it just by virtue of computers already being fast and effective at maths and obeying logic. With or without the transformer architecture, a neural network is never going to be as fast or reliable at, for example, summing a collection of numbers as just adding them would be, and loads of real-world tasks are like this, hence why we’ve built billions of computers even before the transformer architecture was invented.

    Also, in particular, I didn’t say that the transformer architecture wasn’t useful for things that aren’t LLMs, I said that most of the work done specifically to improve LLMs has no applications outside LLMs, so the next big leap towards making computers intelligent isn’t helped more by working on LLMs than it would be by working on any other kind of AI.


  • It’s actually just a lot of pretty simple maths from decades ago, but it’s a lot of it. The big changes in those decades have been the feasibility of doing enough of that simple maths to achieve anything useful, and domain-specific network architecture stuff that’s rarely transferable, e.g. LLMs are possible because of the invention of the transformer architecture in 2017, and that’s also turned out to be useful for a few things like image generation and protein folding simulation, but not for all neural network based techniques, and then most of the things that have made successive LLMs better haven’t also been useful for the few other transformer-architecture-based neural networks. Most not-LLM AI isn’t going to be meaningfully easier to create than it would have been had the world got bored after GPT-2 and we’d only focussed on doing image and video generation.


  • Fun fact: if you’re self employed in the UK, you’ve been able to do your taxes online via a simple (ish) form on the HMRC website, but they’re in the process of phasing it out in favour of third-party proprietary software, so some people aren’t allowed to use the free web form anymore, and within two or three years, it’ll become totally unavailable. Everyone always loves it when the government finds things that Americans complain about and copies it here so we get to complain about it, too.


  • Lots of shops have gone out of business because, by having a premises, their operating expenses were more than an online retailer, so places like Amazon could undercut them, and their customers were willing to wait for delivery to save some money. It doesn’t take that many customers leaving before you’ve got to put up prices to cover your overheads, and that just makes more customers leave, and after a couple of decades of online retail being common, you’re left with far fewer physical shops.