| ▲ | bbor 4 hours ago |
| To keep my usual rant short: I think you’re assuming a categorical distinction between those two types of innovations that just doesn’t exist. Calculus certainly required some fundamental paradigm shifts, but there’s a reason that they didn’t have to make up many words wholesale to explain it! Also we shouldn’t be thinking about what LLMs are good at, but rather what any computer ever might be good at. LLMs are already only one (essential!) part of the system that produced this result, and we’ve only had them for 3 years. Also also this is a tiny nitpick but: the fields medal is every 4 years, AFAIR. For that exact reason, probably! |
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| ▲ | symfrog 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| We have had LLMs for much longer than 3 years. |
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| ▲ | Nevermark 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I took humans thousands of years, then hundreds of years, to come to terms with very basic concepts about numbers. Its amazing to me when people talk about recombining things, or following up on things as somehow lesser work. People can't separate the perspective they were given when they learned the concepts, that those who developed the concepts didn't have because they didn't exist. Simple things are hard, or everything simple would have been done hundreds of years ago, and that is certainly not the case. Seeing something others have not noticed is very hard, when we don't have the concepts that the "invisible" things right in front of us will teach us. | | |
| ▲ | adi_kurian 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Anyone in the arts is aware that creativity is not the new, it is the repackaging of what already exists into something that is itself new. | | |
| ▲ | RajT88 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Except for "Being John Malkovich". That movie was way out there on its own. | | |
| ▲ | fragmede an hour ago | parent [-] | | It's "just" a Man-vs-Self story, of the ~7 story archetypes out there. |
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| ▲ | godelski an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's why the invention of teaching has been so important. Took a long time for humans to develop calculus. A long time to then refine it and make it much more useful. But then in a year or two an average person can learn what took hundreds of years to invent. It's crazy to equate these tasks as being the same. Even incremental innovation is difficult. You have to see something billions of people haven't. But there's also paradigm shifts and well... if you're not considered crazy at first then did you really shift a paradigm? |
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| ▲ | asdfasgasdgasdg an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | When people say this what they mean is that we've had plausibly useful LLMs for around three years, and I would say that is basically true. The stuff before 2023 could barely be classified above the level of an interesting toy. | |
| ▲ | asdfasgasdgasdg an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | When people say this what they mean is that we've had plausibly useful LLMs for around three years, and I would say that is basically true. | |
| ▲ | nextaccountic 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Fine, 8 years? That's not a long time | |
| ▲ | danielmarkbruce 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | No, we haven't, for any reasonable definition of L. | | |
| ▲ | wavemode 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | OpenAI themselves must not have a "reasonable definition of L", then. Their own papers and press releases refer to GPT-2 (from 2019) as a "large language model". https://openai.com/index/better-language-models/ | | |
| ▲ | danielmarkbruce 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yes, and 1.5 billion parameters meets no reasonable current definition of large. It would be considered a tiny language model. OpenAI themselves refer to their small/fast models as small models all over their documentation. |
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| ▲ | Yizahi 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Sure we do, since Fei-Fei Li and team created that annotated dataset, which allowed to train first LLMs. So LLMs are here for more than a decade already. | | |
| ▲ | danielmarkbruce 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | You are confused by what the L and L mean in LLM, or which data set she created, or both, or in general. |
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| ▲ | pegasus 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| The fundamental paradigm shift is the categorical distinction. And what would constitute many new words for you? It introduced a bunch of concepts and terms which we take for granted today, including "derivative", "integral", "infinitesimal", "limit" and even "function", the latter two not a new words, but what does it matter? – the associated meanings were new. |
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