Microblog Memes

And even then I don’t think many of them truly understand what’s going on in there.

That's just the thing about neural networks: Nobody actually understands what's going on there. We've put an abstraction layer over how we do things that we know we will never be able to pierce.

Yeah, I've trained a number of models (as part of actual CS research, before all of this LLM bullshit), and while I certainly understand the concepts behind training neural networks, I couldn't tell you the first thing about what a model I trained is doing. That's the whole thing about the black box approach.

Also why it's so absurd when "AI" gurus claim they "fixed" an issue in their model that resulted in output they didn't want.

No, no you didn't.

business majors are the worst i swear to god

I have personally told coworkers that if they train a custom GPT, they should put "AI expert" on their resume as it's more than 99% of people have done - and 99% of those people didn't do anything more than tricked ChatGPT into doing something naughty once a year ago and now consider themselves "prompt engineers."

I’ve given up attending AI conferences, events and meetups in my city for this exact reason. Show up for a talk called something like “Advances in AI” or “Inside AI” by a supposed guru from an AI company, get a 3 hour PowerPoint telling you to stop making PowerPoints by hand and start using ChatGPT to do it, concluding with a sales pitch for their 2-day course on how to get rich creating Kindle ebooks en masse

Hell, I’ve been training models and using ML directly for a decade and I barely know what’s going on in there.

Outside of low dimensional toy models, I don’t think we’re capable of understanding what’s happening. Even in academia, work on the ability to reliably understand trained networks is still in its infancy.

NONE of them knows what's going on inside.

We are right back in the age of alchemy, where people talking latin and greek threw more or less things together to see what happens, all the while claiming to trying to make gold to keep the cash flowing.

With crypto, it was largely MLM scammers who started pumping it (futily, for the most part) until Ross Ulrich and the Silk Road leveraged it for black market sales.

Then Bitcoin, specifically, took off as a means of subverting bank regulations on financial transactions. This encouraged more big-ticket speculators to enter the market, leading to the JP Morgan sponsorship of Etherium (NFTs were a big part of this scam).

There's a whole historical pedigree to each major crypto offering. Solana, for instance, is tied up in Howard Lutnick's play at crypto through Cantor Fitzgerald.

Yeah but why am I arguing with them?

Basic model of a neural net. The post is implying that you're arguing with bots.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_network_(machine_learning)

Illustration of a neural network.

The simplest neural network (simplified). You input a set of properties(first column). Then you weightedly add all of them a number of times(with DIFFERENT weights)(first set of lines). Then you apply a non-linearity to it, e.g. 0 if negative, keep the same otherwise(not shown).

You repeat this with potentially different numbers of outputs any number of times.

Then do this again, but so that your number of outputs is the dimension of your desired output. E.g. 2 if you want the sum of the inputs and their product computed(which is a fun exercise!). You may want to skip the non-linearity here or do something special™

There used to be some skill involved in getting search engines to give you the right results, these days not so much but originally you did have to inject the right kind of search terms and a lot of people couldn't work that out.

Many years ago back before Google became so dominant I had a co-worker who could not get her head around the idea that you didn't in fact have to ask a search engine in the form of a question with a question mark on the end. It used to be somewhat of a skill.