Comment by hansmayer
2 months ago
Right, but on the other hand... how is it even useful? Let's say it can beat the game, so what? So it can (kind of) summarise or write my emails - which is something I neither want nor need, they produce mountains of sloppy code, which I would have to end up fixing, and finally they can play a game? Where is the killer app? The gaming approach was exactly the premise of the original AI efforts in the 1960s, that teaching computers to play chess and other 'brainy' games will somehow lead to development of real AI. It ended as we know in the AI nuclear winter.
from a foundational research perspective, the pokemon benchmark is one of the most important ones.
these models are trained on a static task, text generation, which is to say the state they are operating in does not change as they operate. but now that they are out we are implicitly demanding they do dynamic tasks like coding, navigation, operating in a market, or playing games. this are tasks where your state changes as you operate
an example would be that as these models predict the next word, the ground truth of any further words doesnt change. if it misinterprets the word bank in the sentence "i went to the bank" as a river bank rather than a financial bank, the later ground truth wont change, if it was talking about the visit to the financial bank before, it will still be talking about that regardless of the model's misinterpretation. But if a model takes a wrong turn on the road, or makes a weird buy in the stock market, the environment will react and change and suddenly, what it should have done as the n+1th move before isnt the right move anymore, it needs to figure out a route of the freeway first, or deal with the FOMO bullrush it caused by mistakenly buying alot of stock
we need to push against these limits to set the stage for the next evolution of AI, RL based models that are trained in dynamic reactive environments in the first place
Honestly I have no idea what is this supposed to mean, and the high verbosity of whatever it is trying to prove is not helping it. To repeat: We already tried making computers play games. Ever heard of Deep Blue, and ever heard of it again since the early 2000s?
Here's a summary for you:
llm trained to do few step thing. pokemon test whether llm can do many step thing. many step thing very important.
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The state space for actions in Pokemon is hilariously, unbelievably larger than the state space for chess. Older chess algorithms mostly used Brute Force (things like minimax) and the number of actions needed to determine a reward (winning or losing) was way lower (chess ends in many, many, many fewer moves than Pokemon).
Successfully navigating through Pokemon to accomplish a goal (beating the game) requires a completely different approach, one that much more accurately mirrors the way you navigate and goal set in real world environments. That's why it's an important and interesting test of AI performance.
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> Where is the killer app?
My man, ChatGPT is the sixth most visited website in the world right now.
But I did not ask "what was the sixth most visited website in the world right now?", did I? I asked what was the killer app here. I am afraid vague and un-related KPIs will not help here, otherwise we may as well compare ChatGPT and PornHub based on the number of visits, as you seem to suggest.
Are you saying PornHub isn’t a killer app?
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If the now default go-to source for quick questions and formulating text isn't a killer app in your eyes, I don't know what is.
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It's a fun benchmark, like simonw's pelican riding a bike. Sometimes fun is the best metric.
This is a weirdly cherry-picked example. The gaming approach was also the premise of DeepMind's AI efforts in 2016, which was nine years ago. Regardless of what you think about the utility of text (code), video, audio, and image generation, surely you think that their progress on the protein-folding problem and weather prediction have been useful to society?
What counts as a killer app to you? Can you name one?
Well the example came from their own press-release, so who cherry-picked it? Why should I name the next killer app ? Isnt that something that we just recognise the moment it shows up, like we did with www and e-commerce? Its not something a comittee staffed by a bunch of MBAs defines ahead of the time, as is currently the case with the use-cases that are being pushed into our faces every day. I would applaud and cheer if their efforts were focused on scientific problems that you mentioned. Unfortunately for us, this is not what the bean-counters heading all major tech corps see as useful. Do you honestly think any one of them has the benefit of society at heart? No, they want to make money by selling you bullshit products like e-mail summarising and such. Perhaps in the process also to get rid of software developers altogether as well. Then once we as the society lose the ability to do anything on our own, relying on these bullshit machines they gain not only in terms of being able to entshittify their products and squeeze that extra buck, but also opens a "world of possibilities" (for the rich) in terms of societal control. But sure, at least you will still have your, what is it now, two-day delivery from Amazon and a handholding tool to help you speak, write and do anything meaningful as a human being.
you assert that people know a killer app when they see one
a bunch of people think that something like chatgpt is a killer app, and they know it when they see it. you assert that it obviously is not, so clearly the above intuition isn't working for the purposes of discussion.
instead, someone should define the term so that we know what we're talking about, and i offer you the ability to do it so that the frame of the discussion can be favorable to your point of view. but you are also not willing to do that, so how do you expect to convince anyone of your viewpoint?
The whole idea of a "killer app" is stupid.
It is a dismissive rhetorical device to prove a wrong point on an internet forum such as this that has nothing to do with reality.
Are you sure you are not describing your own argument here?