[HN Gopher] Stanford just released a 386-page report on the stat...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Stanford just released a 386-page report on the state of AI
        
       Author : doener
       Score  : 212 points
       Date   : 2023-04-04 11:02 UTC (11 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (twitter.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
        
       | Kalanos wrote:
       | it's probably already obsolete
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | mickael-kerjean wrote:
         | Yep, I randomly picked a bit from the "technical performance"
         | titled "capable language models still struggle with reasoning"
         | and it doesn't mention GPT4
        
           | ModernMech wrote:
           | GPT4 also struggles with reasoning.
        
         | rbanffy wrote:
         | Indeed. Should be at least 486 pages.
        
       | camillomiller wrote:
       | Who is this absolutely hapless person and why is this linked? He
       | most probably parsed the research with chatGPT or so I hope. He
       | managed to write a concoction of useless datapoints and ended up
       | piling up mistake and bias in most.
        
         | rchaud wrote:
         | Author seems to be an AI-fluencer/hustlebro.
        
           | geodel wrote:
           | So Gartner/McKinsey style crapola it is. Perhaps useful for
           | AI Buzzword bingo.
        
         | MisterPea wrote:
         | Jeez thank you, one of my least favorite things on the internet
         | is long and unnecessary twitter threads - just post the damn
         | link!
        
       | abeppu wrote:
       | The report isn't interested in this question but I am: If we had
       | spent the last decade throwing this amount of resources at some
       | other family of ML techniques, would they have shown the same
       | improvement? Or is there some parallel universe where if we had
       | made 500B parameter non-parametric bayesian models or something
       | we would have gotten to a similar place?
        
         | jimmySixDOF wrote:
         | Another counterfactual branch could be considered where GPU
         | innovation and market pushes from Gaming and Crypto did not
         | happen to make transformer parallelization such a great value
         | proposition and what alternative paths have not been explored
         | thoroughly as a result.
        
         | MichaelRazum wrote:
         | Not an expert but intuitively, let's say in classical stat's.
         | If you add parameters the danger of overfit increases. So it is
         | far from obvious (at least to me) why it works at all and why
         | bigger is obviously better.
        
         | riotnrrd wrote:
         | I'm a deep learning researcher so I can speak to this a little.
         | Until roughly 2010 neural networks were barely used and broadly
         | considered to be less efficient and less accurate than rival
         | techniques (decision trees, support vector machines, etc.). For
         | decades, far more work was put into these other approaches but
         | the amazing thing about neural networks is that, even in a
         | relatively primitive and neglected state, they outperformed
         | traditional techniques. AlexNet is the poster-child of this
         | phenomenon, but look at facial recognition, speech recognition,
         | etc. These are all fields where older approaches are just dead.
         | Nobody is working on SVMs for facial identification or object
         | pose estimation anymore.
         | 
         | It's more accurate to say that neural networks succeeded
         | against the research darlings of the time despite being
         | relatively ignored for decades.
        
       | MattyMc wrote:
       | Did they happen to release an LLM to summarize it for us?
        
       | GaggiX wrote:
       | Interestingly, Saudi Arabia seems to believe so much in the
       | future of AI according to the report, I would have imagined that
       | such a religious country would not believe in it much, artificial
       | intelligence kinda feels like an affront to God (I am not
       | religious but that is what I would imagine).
        
         | kmeisthax wrote:
         | The core figures involved with AI all seem to be worried that
         | they're actually building Physical Gods[0], so perhaps Saudi
         | Arabia is in the race to make sure our manmade gods are
         | suitably Quranic[1].
         | 
         | More likely they are just throwing money around in an attempt
         | to make the physical embodiment of the Middle East's oil-
         | fueled, centuries-long democratic backslide look modern and
         | progressive. MBS loves to chuck money at flashy tech (and also
         | Fox News).
         | 
         | [0] Roco's Basilisk is just Pascal's Wager with a computer
         | program that doesn't exist yet.
         | 
         | [1] As interpreted by the most intolerant Wahhabist
        
         | nickpeterson wrote:
         | They're big fans until you ask it to criticize a holy book.
        
         | strikelaserclaw wrote:
         | how else will you run a country where the majority are slave
         | labor ruled by a very, very rich minority.
        
           | imiric wrote:
           | Exactly as it's been run until now? Having access to cheap
           | human labor negates the urgency to adopt AI into the
           | workforce.
        
             | strikelaserclaw wrote:
             | i was implying ai will be used as a mechanism for control.
        
         | stephenhuey wrote:
         | First of all, even with all the recent hoopla, "AI" is nothing
         | like what I'd consider intelligent despite the name. Machines
         | have been able to out-compute humans for a long time, but when
         | I interpret Genesis's verse about mankind being made in God's
         | image, I think part of it is reasoning abilities that other
         | creatures lack (and that AI may never be able to fully
         | replicate/comprehend in the way we understand the world), as
         | well as concepts like emotion/empathy and the ability to enjoy
         | people/things/experiences. Islam accepts the same verse in
         | Genesis that Judaism & Christianity do. As someone who has been
         | reading Asimov from an early age and who keeps an eye out for
         | Skynet, I'm not too concerned about them taking over anytime
         | soon, although as a software developer, I certainly believe in
         | the possibility that a complex buggy super-calculator may
         | wrongfully decide to launch nuclear missiles. :)
        
         | londons_explore wrote:
         | Saudi Arabia believes in anything that looks like a great
         | investment when you consider only as much as you can fit on 10
         | presentation slides...
        
           | luqtas wrote:
           | did you come up with this comment out of your GPTbrain?
        
         | abudabi123 wrote:
         | Arabian cultures have a deep sense of geometry, math. That
         | could be the key to human level A.I. observing the patterns in
         | bigdata and biohacking models of the brain and the social
         | information sphere.
        
           | fakedang wrote:
           | Well most of the Islamic age progress was mostly done by
           | Persians and Turkic folks rather than Arabs, out of which
           | none of the scholars were based in Saudi Arabia of all
           | places.
           | 
           | On the other hand, Arabs were extremely good at racial name
           | calling (calling Persians Ajami, and calling chess evil and
           | shit).
        
         | muzani wrote:
         | If you're interested in some theological debate, I actually
         | asked a question on Islam SE on this 11 years ago:
         | https://islam.stackexchange.com/questions/2320/is-it-haram-t...
         | 
         | Take note the Islam SE community mostly comes from Stack
         | Overflow and is somewhat biased towards tech. But it was a
         | decent discussion with some solid citations.
         | 
         | tldr: Imitation of humans and other living creatures is not
         | okay, but nothing wrong with imitation of intelligence.
        
           | GaggiX wrote:
           | Very interesting, thank you
        
       | detrites wrote:
       | The size and speed graphs from 1950 to 2022 essentially shape an
       | exponential but are already shown at log scale.
       | 
       | There must be a word for that?
        
         | wcoenen wrote:
         | That would be a "double exponential function".
         | 
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_exponential_function
        
         | nmca wrote:
         | super-exponential?
        
         | amphitoky wrote:
         | log log linear? :D
        
         | gattilorenz wrote:
         | Unrelated to your question, but the tweet "AI research has been
         | heating up for years, with no signs of slowing down" is a bit
         | disingenuous by showing stuff happening only after 2010 (while
         | "parameters for machine learning models" are shown from 1950
         | onwards).
         | 
         | There's been multiple AI winters, and it would be wise not to
         | sweep them under the rug.
        
       | 1MachineElf wrote:
       | It would be nice if it were available in ePub format. PDFs don't
       | render so well on sub-$400 e-readers lacking large screens.
        
       | _joel wrote:
       | Does it come with a math co-professor?
        
         | Narishma wrote:
         | There's a separate 387-page report for that.
        
       | nico wrote:
       | Where's the chat interface for this?
       | 
       | No one wants to read a 386 page report.
       | 
       | Any links for a version we could ask questions to?
        
         | KineticLensman wrote:
         | > No one wants to read a 386 page report.
         | 
         | You don't have to. The bulk of the report homepage is the top
         | ten takeaways of the work in bite-size format. The body of the
         | report is (or at least should be) the evidence that supports
         | these statements. A good conclusion should always be supported
         | by evidence.
        
           | nico wrote:
           | Thank you. In fact the Twitter thread was very good.
        
       | rswerve wrote:
       | The Kagi Universal Summarizer (which is generally pretty great)
       | gave me this as a summary:
       | 
       | The Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2023 provides insights
       | into the current state of AI research, development, and adoption.
       | Key findings and implications from the report include:
       | 
       | 1. Research and Development: The United States and China lead in
       | cross-country collaborations in AI publications, with the number
       | of collaborations increasing four times since 2010. China has
       | also overtaken the European Union and the United Kingdom in AI
       | conference publications, producing 26.2% of the world's share in
       | 2021.
       | 
       | 2. Technical Performance: AI models have become more advanced,
       | with the release of text-to-image models like DALL-E 2 and Stable
       | Diffusion, text-to-video systems like Make-A-Video, and chatbots
       | like ChatGPT. AI systems are increasing in complexity due to
       | advancements in hardware, data availability, and the performance
       | of larger models.
       | 
       | 3. Technical AI Ethics: In 2022, new ethics benchmarks and
       | diagnostic metrics were introduced to address concerns about AI
       | fairness, bias, and transparency. However, challenges remain in
       | steering AI models to avoid harmful outcomes, such as toxicity,
       | bias, and privacy violations.
       | 
       | 4. Economy: AI hiring has grown in various countries, with Hong
       | Kong experiencing the highest growth in 2022. Private investment
       | in AI decreased for the first time in a decade, but AI remains a
       | topic of interest for policymakers and industry leaders.
       | 
       | 5. Education: The United States leads in AI-related postsecondary
       | education, with a significant number of AI courses and programs
       | offered at universities.
       | 
       | 6. Policy and Governance: AI-related policymaking has increased,
       | with the United States, Spain, and the Philippines passing the
       | most AI-related laws in 2022. Legal cases involving AI highlight
       | the challenges and complexities of AI in the courts.
       | 
       | 7. Public Perception: Men are more likely than women to report
       | that AI products and services make their lives easier and trust
       | companies that use AI. Surveyed Americans are most excited about
       | AI's potential to make life and society better (31%) and save
       | time and increase efficiency (13%).
       | 
       | 8. AI Talent: The top skills in the AI skill grouping include
       | machine learning, natural language processing, data structures,
       | computer vision, and deep learning, among others.
        
         | oh_sigh wrote:
         | Can we really trust an AI summarizer to summarize a report on
         | AI which may reflect poorly on AI?
        
           | firatsarlar wrote:
           | We need them. How do we trust a car at 200km/h , or a plane ?
           | We'll test, standardize, improve and trust them.
        
           | beepbooptheory wrote:
           | As much as we can trust it to summarize anything! It doesn't,
           | like, know that it is the subject of the paper. And either
           | way, it doesn't care if it lives or dies!
        
           | barrysteve wrote:
           | Trust? It's worse than that.
           | 
           | I don't believe AI output. My eyes glaze over and I scroll
           | past it. Anything that looks AI formatted is branded with
           | disbelief and a cognizant awareness that it produces
           | unverifiable shades-of-grey.
           | 
           | Are we really going to live in a world where a blackbox
           | program that does not produce meaningfully deterministic
           | results and cannot be examined, is regarded as a source of
           | truth?
           | 
           | If AI takes in a poisoned database and spreads it, who would
           | know? The AI leaving out vital information is just as
           | dangerous, though we are used-to that problem.
           | 
           | And that's before we even hit the accuracy of it's word
           | predictions..
           | 
           | I don't understand why people are keen on 'being friends'
           | with the grim reaper parrot.
        
         | MisterPea wrote:
         | I wonder when South Asia will leapfrog the EU. It is insane to
         | me still how orthogonal innovation is to European leaders.
        
       | simontheowl wrote:
       | What's interesting is that the trend in "Average Weighted
       | Accuracy" seems to increase linearly in the past three years
       | whereas the number of model parameters and required compute is
       | growing exponentially. So accuracy is pretty expensive.
        
         | pixl97 wrote:
         | I mean, yes, you have around 100 trillion interconnections in
         | your brain, likely the most complicated biological device on
         | this planet, to create the accuracy you perform. We're just
         | very power efficient when doing that computation.
        
       | Upvoter33 wrote:
       | What's weird is that many of the big names in AI (in CS) are not
       | associated with this thing in any way. Maybe just Shoham?
        
       | mellosouls wrote:
       | The report homepage:
       | 
       | https://aiindex.stanford.edu/report/
       | 
       | Honestly though a quick skim of those bullet points in the
       | Twitter thread and looking at the length of it (nearly 400 pages)
       | I am sceptical it's not a lot of corporatese for execs.
       | 
       | Ps. already submitted here:
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35431057
        
         | belter wrote:
         | We need a plugin to have ChatGPT read it and resume it on a 5
         | line post....
        
           | d3vmax wrote:
           | You can upload a pdf of the report to www.chatpdf.com and
           | query it.
        
             | yannis wrote:
             | Thanks for chatpdf.com I found it very useful
        
           | iruoy wrote:
           | This is what Kagi's Universal Summarizer[0] generates[1]:
           | 
           | The Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2023 provides
           | insights into the current state of AI research, development,
           | and adoption. Key findings and implications from the report
           | include:
           | 
           | 1. Research and Development: The United States and China lead
           | in cross-country collaborations in AI publications, with the
           | number of collaborations increasing four times since 2010.
           | China has also overtaken the European Union and the United
           | Kingdom in AI conference publications, producing 26.2% of the
           | world's share in 2021.
           | 
           | 2. Technical Performance: AI models have become more
           | advanced, with the release of text-to-image models like
           | DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion, text-to-video systems like
           | Make-A-Video, and chatbots like ChatGPT. AI systems are
           | increasing in complexity due to advancements in hardware,
           | data availability, and larger model sizes.
           | 
           | 3. Technical AI Ethics: In 2022, new ethics benchmarks and
           | diagnostic metrics were introduced to address concerns about
           | AI fairness, bias, and transparency. However, challenges
           | remain in steering AI models to avoid harmful outcomes.
           | 
           | 4. The Economy: AI hiring has grown in various countries,
           | with Hong Kong experiencing the highest growth in 2022.
           | Private investment in AI decreased for the first time in a
           | decade, but AI remains a topic of interest for policymakers
           | and industry leaders.
           | 
           | 5. Education: The United States leads in AI-related
           | postsecondary education, with a significant number of AI
           | courses and programs offered at universities.
           | 
           | 6. Policy and Governance: AI-related policymaking has
           | increased, with the United States, Spain, and the Philippines
           | leading in AI-related laws. Legal cases involving AI
           | highlight the challenges and complexities of AI in the
           | courts.
           | 
           | 7. Public Perception: Men are more likely than women to
           | report that AI products and services make their lives easier
           | and trust companies that use AI. Surveyed Americans are most
           | excited about AI's potential to make life and society better
           | (31%) and save time and increase efficiency (13%).
           | 
           | 8. AI Skills: The top AI skills include machine learning,
           | natural language processing, data structures, computer
           | vision, image processing, deep learning, TensorFlow, Pandas
           | (software), and OpenCV.
           | 
           | [0]: https://kagi.com/summarizer/index.html [1]: https://kagi
           | .com/summarizer/index.html?url=https%3A%2F%2Faii...
        
         | yamtaddle wrote:
         | Execs won't read it until someone turns it into a 100-slide
         | powerpoint and emails it to them.
        
           | hammyhavoc wrote:
           | I hate how correct this is. LOL
        
             | yamtaddle wrote:
             | I've been told by multiple McKinsey people that execs won't
             | read a god-damn thing unless it's, specifically, in a
             | powerpoint deck. Typically never intended to be presented,
             | even, often just these hideous walls of text copy-pasted
             | into the deck then emailed around, often with tons and tons
             | of slides.
             | 
             | They made it clear they weren't joking, nor exaggerating. I
             | have no idea how things got this way, nor why. Must be some
             | kind of filter?
        
         | wallfacer wrote:
         | If the top ten takeaways are ok using incredibly vaporous, non-
         | sensical phrasing why would I dig any deeper?
         | 
         | "the number of AI incidents and controversies has increased 26
         | times since 2012"
         | 
         | Ok but how many "incidents," also detectably fake deepfakes and
         | call-monitoring inmates are top examples of misuse? Naive.
         | 
         | "BLOOM's training run emitted 25 times more carbon than a
         | single air traveler on a one-way trip from New York to San
         | Francisco"
         | 
         | What does this mean? That sounds like a very small amount to me
         | but the conclusion is that's a huge environmental impact. No, I
         | read, for the carbon cost of decommissioning one old jet, we
         | can have a new LLM.
        
           | hyperhopper wrote:
           | Not decommissioning one jet: just one fraction of a percent
           | of one jet ride.
           | 
           | Honestly seems like a good tradeoff.
        
             | steve_adams_86 wrote:
             | The utility of effective models (which can be used many
             | times over) likely exceeds the utility of virtually any
             | person travelling anywhere one time. That seems like a
             | poorly thought statistic to mention. It makes me wonder if
             | it's misunderstood or misinterpreted.
        
               | bombcar wrote:
               | Total passengers' CO2/journey (KG) 292.50 according to
               | https://applications.icao.int/icec/Home/Index
               | 
               | This is roughly a 400 mile car trip, or about a year of
               | breathing.
        
               | tomp wrote:
               | Those are 100% not comparable metrics.
               | 
               | What you breathe out is mostly what you eat, and most of
               | the carbon there is part of a continuous carbon cycle. A
               | part of it comes from fossil fuels, mainly transport and
               | energy to power the Haber Bosch (the source of most of
               | (organic) hydrogen in your body).
               | 
               | LLM training process consumes practically _only_ energy.
               | As such, it could very easily be replaced by carbon-
               | neutral sources (nuclear, solar).
               | 
               | All of the CO2 of a airplane flight comes from fossil
               | fuels, and there is not viable technology to replace that
               | yet.
        
               | justsocrateasin wrote:
               | not comparable from a climate change perspective, but
               | helps put perspective into just how much CO2 that is. I
               | disagree with you that it's unhelpful, context is always
               | helpful.
        
           | zitterbewegung wrote:
           | They are using it as an example but, if you take all of the
           | training across all organizations it represents a huge carbon
           | footprint due to training. Also, inference isn't exactly free
           | either . Open sourcing your weights and putting them
           | downloadable would get rid of that but on the other hand you
           | have trade secrets that would make you not want to release
           | your weights so inevitable another group will reproduce your
           | weights and use more electricity.
        
             | simonw wrote:
             | I wonder how the carbon footprint of training every single
             | large language model that exists today compares to the
             | carbon footprint of a single day of global air traffic.
        
               | zitterbewegung wrote:
               | That question is unanswerable so its weird to wonder
               | about it...
        
               | simonw wrote:
               | Is it? I wonder about unanswerable questions all the
               | time.
        
               | pxc wrote:
               | What's answerable isn't even clear in advance most of the
               | time, for many scientific, philosophical, and
               | mathematical questions! Questions that are not obviously
               | answerable often turn out to be really productive,
               | important, or interesting, too.
        
           | UncleEntity wrote:
           | > BLOOM's training run emitted 25 times more carbon than a
           | single air traveler on a one-way trip from New York to San
           | Francisco
           | 
           | Less than the cost to send the SF Giants to play the NY
           | Yankees then?
           | 
           | I wonder how many SF to NY carbon units Stanford expends each
           | year to send their various sports teams out to do important
           | work?
           | 
           | This game is fun!
        
             | malwrar wrote:
             | I agree! So many more possibilities too, like for example
             | rather than simply downloading and locally storing the
             | movie Predator once I am forced to hunt down a provider who
             | currently has it and stream it directly each time I want to
             | watch it. Between google, the streaming provider, the cost
             | of all the extra networking equipment required to support
             | this data, and the extra cost on end-user devices
             | themselves I wonder what the carbon cost of copyright is?
        
       | dpflan wrote:
       | Seems like a great opportunity to put a LLM interface in front of
       | this report so readers and query it...
        
       | fedeb95 wrote:
       | the twitter summary is a bit garbage. Makes a lot of assumptions
       | about the future, when all we really know is that recent
       | developments take a huge leap. But that the trend will continue,
       | or that it is even a trend, whatever that means in this context,
       | is uncertain as every prediction. Is this a plateau? Will an even
       | bigger development come, changing the game? Will AI close
       | business forever after some unpredictable event? Nobody knows.
        
       | animitronix wrote:
       | Instantly becomes out of date
        
       | b1c1jones wrote:
       | How much was written by AI?
        
       | alex_suzuki wrote:
       | Unrelated to TFA: everytime I see numbers like 386, 486, etc. I'm
       | instantly triggered. Even more than for powers of two. Growing up
       | with computers really ,,does a number" on you.
        
         | piinbinary wrote:
         | Also numbers for display resolutions (640 and 480, 800 and 600,
         | 1024 and 768, etc)
        
         | hyperhopper wrote:
         | What is significant about those numbers?
        
           | etrautmann wrote:
           | These were the designations for intel processors in the 90s.
        
             | Robotbeat wrote:
             | 1985 is when the 386 came out (286 in 1982, 8086/8088 was
             | in the 70s)! 486 was 1989.
             | 
             | Pentium (technically 586), released in 1993, is what I
             | think of when I think of CPUs in the 90s. "n"86 has the
             | 1980s association.
             | 
             | Generational divide, here.
        
               | etrautmann wrote:
               | ah my apologies, as a child of the 90s, the 486 was just
               | what I had in my house then.
        
           | organsnyder wrote:
           | 386 is an especially important milestone CPU, since it was
           | the first CPU to offer a 32-bit mode in the Wintel space.
        
             | elromulous wrote:
             | Found the OG Mac user :)
        
               | organsnyder wrote:
               | Ha! I was actually a DOS user at the time, but I know it
               | wasn't the only platform in existence.
        
           | bena wrote:
           | The original Intel processors that kicked off the personal
           | computing revolution was the 8086. It itself was a variation
           | on earlier chips, the 8008 and 8080.
           | 
           | It took off and spawned its own line, the 80168, 80286, etc.
           | Eventually, the 80 was dropped and they became known as the
           | 286, 386, 486. Even the Pentium processor was really a brand
           | name for the 586.
           | 
           | Every Core i7 is an x86.
        
           | dave78 wrote:
           | Wow, I assumed those numbers were still universally
           | recognized in tech, but I guess it makes sense that they're
           | not anymore.
           | 
           | Your question makes me feel old :)
        
         | drooopy wrote:
         | Same thing for me. For the past 30 years it feels like I'm
         | seeing those numbers everywhere haha
        
         | drybjed wrote:
         | I have 386 as last digits of my phone number. Hardly anyone
         | notices though.
        
         | WorldPeas wrote:
         | glad I wasn't the only one
        
         | mysterydip wrote:
         | My first thought was "was the page count intentional?"
        
         | nsenifty wrote:
         | My middle school enrollment number was 286. The number was
         | significant because it was etched/embroidered/painted all over
         | my belongings. A few years later they renumbered us all. I was
         | a bit disappointed losing this number until I saw my new number
         | - 640!
        
       | YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
       | >> You should be in the US if you're starting an AI company
       | 
       | This is the Tweet author's comment on a graph that shows the
       | number of AI companies in different countries, rendered as a bar
       | chart. The comment is a little cryptic -why would the number of
       | AI companies in a country advise where you should start an AI
       | company?
       | 
       | So I figured I'd try to understand the comment by engaging in a
       | bit of arbitrary, ad-hoc math.                 US: 542
       | Everyone else: 160 + 99 + 73 + 57 + 47 + 44 + 41 + 36 + 32 + 26 +
       | 23 + 22 + 12 + 12 = 684
       | 
       | It turns out the US has fewer AI companies than the rest of the
       | world put together!
       | 
       | So I guess the logic was that, "you should be in the US if you're
       | starting an AI company" because that's where you can expect the
       | least competition.
       | 
       | That sounds like solid advice!
        
         | steve_adams_86 wrote:
         | If you look at it like working on AI in the USA will provide
         | you the best density of AI workers, researchers, and resources,
         | it makes a lot of sense.
         | 
         | In terms of competition, evidently it's working out relatively
         | well in the USA as there are enough people there to support
         | nearly half the AI companies on earth. It appears to be a very
         | fertile bed for growth in this sector.
         | 
         | Further, most products will likely wind up online; there will
         | not be much need for localized competition advantage outside of
         | securing a team. The competition stage is largely a global
         | market, online. You're best forming your company where you can
         | hire people and collaborate with other people in your sector.
         | That's ideally in the USA, so far.
        
         | EntrePrescott wrote:
         | I'm all with you about the principle i.e. that having the
         | biggest number in a set (whether or not that number is even
         | still minoritary by itself, though that does make the claim
         | even more ridiculous) doesn't imply being the best let alone a
         | necessity. Otherwise it would boil down to the classic "eat
         | shit, billions of flies can't be wrong".
         | 
         | That being said, there are actual factors for which the US
         | might indeed plausibly be the best location choice specifically
         | for most AI companies in the current hype context. For example
         | funding:
         | 
         | * while there is also some proportion of actually promising
         | sustainable business models based on AI, the fact is that a
         | very large proportion of AI companies are surfing on a
         | hype/bubble and have somewhat of an exit strategy (e.g. being
         | bought by some bigger player) but not a business model that
         | would otherwise sustainably stand on its own feet.
         | 
         | * the US is arguably indeed the best location for most high-
         | risk ventures in need of big funding... including and
         | especially so for hype/bubble surfers. Nowhere else can you
         | find that much early investment money with such a willingness
         | to take risks and to ride a hype/bubble. For most AI companies,
         | the US as a location means they are able to raise more at a
         | better (for the founders) valuation.
        
           | YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
           | As you say, there are advantages and disadvantages. What I
           | don't see is how the bar chart in the tweet justifies the
           | comment above it that "You should be in the US if you're
           | starting an AI company". To be perfectly clear: it doesn't,
           | and if one _should_ move to the US to start an AI company,
           | then the numbers of AI companies already there wouldn 't
           | really tell us why.
           | 
           | The error is of the same kind as counting the number of
           | papers published by a researcher, or an institution, or an
           | entire country, as some kind of indication for the _quality_
           | of the research in those papers.
           | 
           | After all, if we just counted publications in AI journals,
           | China, which is far ahead of all the rest of the world (with
           | 39.87%, vs 10.03% of the US) would appear to be the leader in
           | AI research. And that's according to Figure 1.1.11 in the
           | report
           | 
           | Here's a link to the report btw:
           | 
           | https://aiindex.stanford.edu/wp-
           | content/uploads/2023/04/HAI_...
        
         | MisterPea wrote:
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_agglomeration
         | 
         | I bet most of the startups in the US are concentrated in the
         | SF/Bay Area. Would be stupid to go build something anywhere
         | else in the US unless you already have a strong team/defined
         | product.
        
       | Aachen wrote:
       | Is the page count really the most interesting thing to say about
       | it?
        
         | frozencell wrote:
         | What else can you expect from a McKinsey alumni
        
           | eastbayjake wrote:
           | * alumnus
        
         | AnimalMuppet wrote:
         | Probably not. It's just that nobody can find the interesting
         | bits, because they're buried in all those pages.
         | 
         | Experiment: What does ChatGPT produce when you ask it for a
         | 300-plus-page report? Is it better or worse than the average
         | human-written report of similar size?
        
           | jerf wrote:
           | The GPT architecture can't really produce a 300+ page report
           | right now, because that doesn't even come close to fitting
           | within its window. Of course you can just keep running it and
           | concatenating, but I wouldn't really call that a 300+ page
           | report. It'll either wander off topic completely once it
           | loses the prompt, or be very repetitive because it'll have no
           | idea whatsoever what it said before its window.
           | 
           | I gather that with the current architecture it becomes
           | exponentially more difficult to grow the window, but I'm not
           | sure if that's what a computer scientist would call
           | "exponential" or if it was the common colloquial usage that
           | calls x^2 "exponential growth"; would actually be interested
           | if anyone could clarify that. With the current expense
           | though, any of the common complexity classes beyond O(n log
           | n) isn't very feasible at the moment though.
        
             | og_kalu wrote:
             | Attention used to be quadratic. But there have been linear
             | attention advances. In fact, gpt-4 is almost certainly
             | using some linear attention variant, maybe flash attention.
             | 
             | Then there's this
             | https://hazyresearch.stanford.edu/blog/2023-03-27-long-
             | learn...
             | 
             | I don't think a 300 page context window is too far away
        
             | firatsarlar wrote:
             | I believe LLMs could generate limitless page reports. Not a
             | single prompt of course. Pick a topic, outline it, grow the
             | outline with subsections. Use a generic summary and LLM
             | indexing to feed context every time you want a subsection,
             | if you want do not stop there use text to image to add
             | drawings, you have 1000 pages thing. Yes, currently it is a
             | thing not an article or research paper. Simple tool and
             | intention relation.
        
             | ModernMech wrote:
             | You can prompt it for an outline, and then prompt it to go
             | section by section. It's a lot more work than "write 300
             | pages!"
             | 
             | It's actually more like working with a junior copy editor
             | that you have to constantly correct, so you keep wondering
             | what you're even paying them for. But at $20 a month it's
             | worth it for that.
        
           | Aachen wrote:
           | I don't get this sentiment. Check the summary if you don't
           | want to read everything before submitting? Has OP even opened
           | the thing to check the first page of contents? If it's good
           | stuff, one would keep reading and be sad for it to end, no
           | matter if it's 5 or 5000 pages (I was sad for book series to
           | end that were longer than that).
           | 
           | OP shouldn't have changed the report's title, or if this is
           | the original title by some miracle, they should have changed
           | it or posted a comment about why it's interesting. Presumably
           | they did read at least part of it and have a reason for
           | submitting it. As it is, the submission is entirely useless
           | beyond pointing out that a certain URL exists.
        
       | muzani wrote:
       | The interesting one is East vs West. As a child, I remember some
       | documentary saying that robotics development was ahead in
       | China/Japan, because the East grew up on stories like Doraemon
       | and Akira, while the West was resistant to it because of
       | Terminator, The Matrix, Neuromancer, etc. The idea in the West is
       | that AI is dangerous, while the East grew up with the idea of
       | them as friends and leaders.
       | 
       | This probably wasn't that true because obviously AI & robotics
       | research is booming in the US.
       | 
       | But I think the data hints that _consumer_ demand for AI and AGI
       | might be significantly higher in China, etc. There was also the
       | recent controversy around Midjourney banning Xi Jinping images
       | lately, which suggests that they 're eyeing the Chinese consumer
       | market.
        
         | dehrmann wrote:
         | > I remember some documentary saying that robotics development
         | was ahead in China/Japan
         | 
         | I also had this impression, especially after seeing demos of
         | ASIMO. Looking back, ASIMO was always just a demo, Germany is a
         | strong player in industrial robots, and Boston Dynamics is
         | doing some very impressive demos. I have no idea who is/was
         | actually ahead.
        
       | evo_9 wrote:
       | Summarization by ChatGPT: The AI Index Report 2023 provides
       | insights into the latest developments and trends in artificial
       | intelligence. Key takeaways include:
       | 
       | 01 Industry now leads academia in releasing significant machine
       | learning models. 02 Traditional benchmarks are showing
       | performance saturation, but new benchmarks are emerging. 03 AI
       | has both positive and negative environmental impacts. 04 AI is
       | accelerating scientific progress in various fields. 05 Incidents
       | concerning AI misuse are rapidly rising. 06 Demand for AI-related
       | skills is increasing across most American industrial sectors. 07
       | For the first time in a decade, year-over-year private investment
       | in AI decreased in 2022. 08 While AI adoption by companies has
       | plateaued, those that have adopted AI are experiencing cost and
       | revenue benefits. 09 Policymaker interest in AI is growing, with
       | more AI-related bills being passed into law. 10 Chinese citizens
       | have the most positive view of AI products and services, while
       | Americans are more skeptical.
        
         | 7ero wrote:
         | > Chinese citizens have the most positive view of AI products
         | and services, while Americans are more skeptical.
         | 
         | Is there a cultural reason for this?
        
         | mistrial9 wrote:
         | readers - you are invited to join me in downvoting each and
         | every "ChaptGPT summary" of technical content, in any comments
         | section, for the next .. 30 months..
        
         | firatsarlar wrote:
         | First of all, since I'm not a native speaker and my solid
         | intention is communicate - not to be formal -, I've used
         | chatGPT to fix my grammar errors. I even tried to mimic my
         | voice - it started to use ya, ugh, ... - The paragraph you read
         | is my instant English - may be enough, but I like clear
         | communication, message should be understandable - So before
         | downvote, keep these in mind.
         | 
         | Two different summaries -I can't point them currently but one
         | of them chatGPT, one of them a credible software- created by
         | two distinct models. While it's not scientifically accurate to
         | claim they are significantly different, there are noticeable
         | differences between them. I'd like to use ChatGPT to compare
         | these summaries, as I believe its contextualization
         | capabilities could help clarify the situation. However, there
         | are people who have strong opinions against using ChatGPT, and
         | they criticize each other for doing so. This resistance is
         | causing me frustration and holding me back from pursuing the
         | comparison, which is a pain point for me.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2023-04-04 23:02 UTC)