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this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023
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Technology
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I guess the important thing to understand about spurious output (what gets called "hallucinations") is that it's neither a bug nor a feature, it's just the nature of the program. Deep learning language models are just probabilities of co-occurrence of words; there's no meaning in that. Deep learning can't be said to generate "true" or "false" information, or rather, it can't be meaningfully said to generate information at all.
So then people say that deep learning is helping out in this or that industry. I can tell you that it's pretty useless in my industry, though people are trying. Knowing a lot about the algorithms behind deep learning, and also knowing how fucking gullible people are, I assume that—if someone tells me deep learning has ended up being useful in some field, they're either buying the hype or witnessing an odd series of coincidences.
Deep learning can be and is useful today, it's just that the useful applications are things like classifiers and computer vision models. Lots of commercial products are already using those kinds of models to great effect, some for years already.
What do you think of the AI firms who are saying it could help with making policy decisions, climate change, and lead people to easier lives?
Absolutely. Computers are great at picking out patterns across enormous troves of data. Those trends and patterns can absolutely help guide policymaking decisions the same way it can help guide medical diagnostic decisions.
The article was skeptical about this. It said that the problem with expecting it to revolutionize policy decisions isn’t that we don’t know what to do, it’s that we don’t want to do it. For example, we already know how to solve climate change and the smartest people on the planet in those fields have already told us what needed to be done. We just don’t want to make the changes necessary.
Thats been the case time and again, how many disruptions from the tech bros came to industries that had been stagnant or moving at a snails pace when it came to adopting new technology (esp to lock into more expensive legacy systems).
Most of those industries disrupted could have been secured by the players in those markets instead the allowed a disruptor to appear unchallenged.
Remember the market is not as rational as some might think, you start filling gaps and people often won't ask about the fallout and many of these services did have people warning against these things.
We are for the most part, in a nation that lets you do whatever you want until the effects have hit people, this is even more a thing if you are a business. I don't know an easy answer, in some of these cases, old gaurd needed a smack, in others a more controlled entry may have been better. As of now "controlled" is jut about the size of ones cash pile.
Cue the ethical corporations discussion....