Comment by ajross
7 months ago
So... obviously SOAP was dumb[1], and lots of people saw that at the time. But SOAP was dumb in obvious ways, and it failed for obvious reasons, and really no one was surprised at all.
ML isn't like that. It's new. It's different. It may not succeed in the ways we expect; it may even look dumb in hindsight. But it absolutely represents a genuinely new paradigm for computing and is worth studying and understanding on that basis. We look back to SOAP and see something that might as well be forgotten. We'll never look back to the dawn of AI and forget what it was about.
[1] For anyone who missed that particular long-sunken boat, SOAP was a RPC protocol like any other. Yes, that's really all it was. It did nothing special, or well, or that you couldn't do via trivially accessible alternative means. All it had was the right adjective ("XML" in this case) for the moment. It's otherwise forgettable, and forgotten.
ML has already succeeded to the point that it is ubiquitous and taken for granted. OCR, voice recognition, spam filters, and many other now boring technologies are all based on ML.
Anyone claiming it’s some sort of snake oil shouldn’t be taken seriously. Certainly the current hype around it has given rise to many inappropriate applications, but it’s a wildly successful and ubiquitous technology class that has no replacement.
That ML I have no problem with.
This new ML that's supposed to be the basis for an entire new economic wave, that I mostly dislike.
But I guess that's how we build new things... We explore and throw away 80% of what we've built.
Call me back when you have voice recognition that doesn't constantly fail spectacularly.
Voice recognition will never be rule based.
Thank you for this.
Reading these comments I thought I stepped into some alternate timeline when we don't already have widespread ML all over the place.
Like, nobody does rules-based image recognition for a decade now already!
Yeah, I'm staring at my use of chatgpt to write a 50 line python program that connected to a local sqlite db and ran a query; for each element returned, made an api call or ran a query against a remote postgres db; depending on the results of that api call, made another api call; saved the results to a file; and presented results in a table.
Chatgpt generated the entirety of the above w/ me tweaking one line of code and putting creds in. I could have written all of the above, but it probably would have taken 20-30 minutes. With chatgpt I banged it out in under a minute, helped a colleague out, and went on my way.
Chatgpt absolutely is a real advancement. Before they released gpt4, there was no tech in the world that could do what it did.