this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2025
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image description (contains clarifications on background elements)Lots of different seemingly random images in the background, including some fries, mr. crabs, a girl in overalls hugging a stuffed tiger, a mark zuckerberg "big brother is watching" poser, two images of fluttershy (a pony from my little pony) one of them reading "u only kno my swag, not my lore", a picture of parkzer parkzer from the streamer "dougdoug" and a slider gameplay element from the rhythm game "osu". The background is made light so that the text can be easily read. The text reads:

i wanna know if we are on the same page about ai.
if u diagree with any of this or want to add something,
please leave a comment!
smol info:
- LM = Language Model (ChatGPT, Llama, Gemini, Mistral, ...)
- VLM = Vision Language Model (Qwen VL, GPT4o mini, Claude 3.5, ...)
- larger model = more expensivev to train and run
smol info end
- training processes on current AI systems is often
clearly unethical and very bad for the environment :(
- companies are really bad at selling AI to us and
giving them a good purpose for average-joe-usage
- medical ai (e.g. protein folding) is almost only positive
- ai for disabled people is also almost only postive
- the idea of some AI machine taking our jobs is scary
- "AI agents" are scary. large companies are training
them specifically to replace human workers
- LMs > image generation and music generation
- using small LMs for repetitive, boring tasks like
classification feels okay
- using the largest, most environmentally taxing models
for everything is bad. Using a mixture of smaller models
can often be enough
- people with bad intentions using AI systems results
in bad outcome
- ai companies train their models however they see fit.
if an LM "disagrees" with you, that's the trainings fault
- running LMs locally feels more okay, since they need
less energy and you can control their behaviour
I personally think more positively about LMs, but almost
only negatively about image and audio models.
Are we on the same page? Or am I an evil AI tech sis?

IMAGE DESCRIPTION END


i hope this doesn't cause too much hate. i just wanna know what u people and creatures think <3

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (2 children)

What I think is missing from your viewpoint (and from most people's, this is [IMO] a problem at scale) is the distinction between "simple" and broad machine learning, and the very specific things that are Large Language Models.

For example, there are no small Large Language Models, and I think that the oxymoron speaks for itself. Machine learning is a very good thing, and automated classification is definitely its best use case, but they are not a small version of ChatGPT, the same way that the average Joe is not a smaller version of a billionaire.

For more details, these small models are trained on a small set of data, how small depending on how specific the task is; as an example, I worked with models that detect manufacturing defects on production lines, and theses need a few hundreds images in order to produce good results, this make it very easy to produce the data ourselves, and it is relatively cheap to train energy-wise.

Compared to that, Large Language Models, and their audiovisual counterparts, operate on billions of data, and work on a task so general that they provide incredibly bad results. As a little statistical reminder, anything below 95% confidence is a bust, LLMs are way below that.

It's very important to distinguish the two, because all of the positives you list for AI are not about LLMs, but about simple machine learning. And this confusion is by design, techbros are trying to profit of the successes of other form of artificial intelligence by pretending that AI is this one single thing, instead of an entire class of things.

Otherwise, I generally agree with the rest of your points.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

i completely agree. training an actually small model on your specific task almost always results in WAY better output.

current LLMs might be great at PhD questions, but are still bad at way simpler things, which shows that they have been trained on these questions, rather than generalizing to that level.

training a "cancer recognizer" will be way more efficient and accurate than a general, much larger VLM trying to do the same thing.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

wait no, there are small language models! like the one in the phone keyboard, suggesting the next word. sometimes there are rule-based but in many cases, they are real neuronal networks, predicting what you will type. in my case it even trains on what i type (an open source keyboard i got, running locally obv)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

I'm pretty sure that phone keyboard use heuristics and not Machine Learning. Basically, it does not create a neural network through trial and error, but whenever you type, it saves the context of each word, and when it sees the same context again, it "knows" what the next word is.

For example, if you type this big brown fox, it might saves something like "{ fox", ["big", "brown"], 1 } (assuming two words of context, and the 1 being the number of times it was encountered). Then when you type my big brown, fox will be suggested.

Using the technology of LLMs for keyboard suggestions is impractical, as your typing habits would be drowned in the initial training data, and would yield worse performance as well as results compared to the simpler approach.