[HN Gopher] 2023: The Year of AI
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       2023: The Year of AI
        
       Author : talboren
       Score  : 87 points
       Date   : 2023-12-25 18:52 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (journal.everypixel.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (journal.everypixel.com)
        
       | Flux159 wrote:
       | I think that it would also make sense to have a diagram that has
       | open source achievements in Ai for 2023 (at least open weight &
       | inference code). A lot of the announcements in the chart are
       | behind an api so can't be run locally.
       | 
       | Just thinking off the top of my head, Segment Anything, Llama 1
       | and 2, Mistral, Stable diffusion XL, ControlNet, Whisper are all
       | open source AI releases this year.
        
       | rightbyte wrote:
       | This article seems very corporate centric. Like, I am able to run
       | a ChatGPT3-ish code LLM locally on a 2015 midrange laptop. Just
       | like this:                   wget
       | https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/deepseek-coder-6.7B-instruct-
       | GGUF/resolve/main/deepseek-coder-6.7b-instruct.Q5_K_M.gguf
       | git clone https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp              cd
       | llama.cpp         make              ./main -ngl 32 -m
       | ../deepseek-coder-6.7b-instruct.Q5_K_M.gguf --color -c 2048
       | --temp 0.7 --repeat_penalty 1.1 -n -1 -i -ins
       | 
       | Haven't people realized what they can run themself?
        
         | swsieber wrote:
         | I appreciate the sentiment. It definitely seems possible, but
         | it doesn't ever seem as easy as copy + paste if you ever want
         | performance or to go outside the same generic tutorial.
         | 
         | > Just like this:
         | 
         | Just is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
         | 
         | Is this the first model you came across?
         | 
         | We're there any dependencies you had to install?
         | 
         | Did you have to check video card compatibility?
         | 
         | Where did you get the command arguments. It looks awfully
         | complicated for a "just", as if there's a lot of options that
         | aren't straightforward to use.
         | 
         | Etc
        
           | rightbyte wrote:
           | Ye ... with "just like this" I actually mean "proficient with
           | compiling C projects on an Unixy system" which is like years
           | of dev, "power user" or admin experience (not being sarcastic
           | here). For the audience here I would say that "just" is about
           | right though.
           | 
           | I have no clue about anything LLM related. I just made it run
           | after reading some comment on HN pointing in its direction.
           | 
           | My point is that these locally run LLMs seems way
           | "underreported". I even tried to make a "Show HN" post about
           | it but it got zero interest.
           | 
           | But maybe I am missing something?
        
             | ilaksh wrote:
             | The Makefile for llama.cpp is really good and doesn't
             | require hacking to make it work.
        
               | mitthrowaway2 wrote:
               | Even on Windows?
        
               | marcosdumay wrote:
               | It's probably a hell to run it on Windows. But again, for
               | the audience here, that's not expected to be a large
               | roadblock.
        
             | ruune wrote:
             | With almost every AI story I read on here (granted, I don't
             | read that many, I find them quite boring), the top comment
             | seems to be something like "you can do the same on your
             | machine, see ollama". Case in point, your comment was the
             | first one listed for me. So the interest for running LLMs
             | on here seems quite high. Don't know why your post didn't
             | catch anyone.
        
           | ilaksh wrote:
           | The Makefile for llama.cpp is really good, it will work the
           | way he said.
           | 
           | You can also use ollama which makes it into a one line
           | install and then a simple command to run any popular model.
        
           | yieldcrv wrote:
           | check out LM Studio
           | 
           | no command line involved, has a huggingface browser built in
           | to load in the model of the day, has a chat-like interface
           | for chatGPT like use, and can create a local server to run
           | your local model for your programs to interact with it using
           | an API that is identical to OpenAI's
        
         | 23B1 wrote:
         | No they haven't. It's actually quite weird how the whole hype-
         | cycle is working this time; I think tech journalists are so
         | caught up in the drameh of OAI and whatever they haven't a clue
         | that most people can run most of these novelty UCs on their
         | own. You don't even need a speedy rig!
        
           | rightbyte wrote:
           | Ye it is strange. And in the tail around Sam Altman there
           | seems to be these semi-religious lunatics believing that only
           | some government mandated big tech monopoly can save mankind
           | from the LLMs.
           | 
           | Meanwhile amateurs and uni researchers post really
           | interesting work on a site named after a hugging emoji ...
        
         | thefz wrote:
         | > Haven't people realized what they can run themself?
         | 
         | Lots, lots of people do not care.
        
         | Kiro wrote:
         | Why would I run it myself when I can run GPT-4 for less than
         | the electricity cost? Running these yourself is not free.
         | OpenAI is heavily subsidized.
        
           | rightbyte wrote:
           | Ye well at some point getting a sausage from Deliveroo or
           | Uber Eats was a no-brainer since it was cheaper than in the
           | actual fast food joint, due to some VC selling a dollar for
           | pennies.
           | 
           | Should limit the stock price prospects though.
        
         | tempodox wrote:
         | I followed your instructions, and it works without a hitch.
         | macOS-13.6 on an Intel iMac with a Radeon Pro 5700 GPU. My
         | first direct contact with an LLM, and I don't understand most
         | of the command line options yet, but it's certainly
         | interesting.
        
         | phillipcarter wrote:
         | A key difference is that for basic use cases, yes, this is a
         | comparable experience.
         | 
         | Where it stops being comparable is general application across
         | literally millions of use cases. The ChatGPT system has proven
         | itself a valuable utility across industries, people, and use
         | cases. No open model I know of can match it yet.
        
           | simbolit wrote:
           | They don't have to match the market leader, they just have to
           | be "good enough".
           | 
           | There are oodles of use-cases where sending your data to an
           | outside provider is a complete no-go. In these cases
           | OpenAI/Google/whoever-products aren't relevant competition.
        
         | guitarlimeo wrote:
         | This is generating answers a lot slower on my machine (X1
         | carbon) than GPT-3.5. :(
        
         | forevernoob wrote:
         | Would you say that this could run (smoothly) on my X220 with
         | i7-2640M?
        
           | rightbyte wrote:
           | Imagine some old sci-fi movie where the computer write out
           | the answer to a query, as if it actually was some scene
           | worker typing it to some terminal. On this:
           | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti         Intel(r) Core(tm) i5-8300H
           | x 8         32,0 GiB ram
           | 
           | So I guess your computer would be a faster typist?
        
         | vasco wrote:
         | A few years ago peak HN comment was complaining about wget |
         | sh.
         | 
         | Nowadays we just run full on opaque models directly from
         | huggingface without thinking twice about reading anything.
         | Interesting how times change. I wonder what supply chain
         | attacks will come from huggingface, must not be long now.
        
           | fragmede wrote:
           | That is, by the by, why models are no longer distributed as
           | Python Pickle files, which _can_ root your box if the model
           | being loaded is malicious.
        
       | andy99 wrote:
       | Something I find interesting is that in the last year or so, the
       | talk around AI shifted from the model architecture to the trained
       | model. People talk about Mistral 7B e.g., not transformer with
       | rotary position embedding and gelu feed forward network (I don't
       | know Mistral's architecture).
       | 
       | Contrast this to a few years ago we'd talk about Resnet or
       | Retina-net or whatever, not so much about the facebook pertain on
       | Image-net when describing the model.
       | 
       | In 2018 I remember hearing "architecture is the new feature
       | engineering" (mostly meaning over-fitting I undetstood). Now it's
       | all (mostly) about the dataset and training, the architecture, in
       | 2023, was a minor detail. I personally think architecture will
       | make a comeback soon.
        
         | dartos wrote:
         | It's because weights are where the magic lies, for the most
         | part.
         | 
         | Annnd nowadays tools like transformers can automatically select
         | the architecture based on the name of the weights, so when
         | interacting with LLMs, you generally just name the weights.
         | 
         | Also MANY models are just using the llama or llama2
         | architecture.
        
           | kleiba wrote:
           | _> It's because weights are where the magic lies, for the
           | most part._
           | 
           | What's that supposed to mean? Weights are not independent of
           | the underlying architecture.
        
         | bugglebeetle wrote:
         | IIRC Mistral's architecture is llama-2. They just trained it
         | from scratch with undisclosed data and techniques.
        
         | ilaksh wrote:
         | I think it did with Mixtral and MoE.
         | 
         | I think people talk about the models because the architectural
         | details are generally inaccessible for us since we don't have
         | sufficient training (which it requires quite a lot to have an
         | intuitive understanding I believe). Whereas the models are
         | easily downloaded and tested.
        
         | xiphias2 wrote:
         | It probably means that AI is getting more use outside technical
         | circles.
         | 
         | I would definitely include Mamba state space models and of
         | course would prefer a technical review over a corporate review
         | of the year.
        
       | greatpostman wrote:
       | TLDR: openai still crushing the competition. Competing models
       | beat benchmarks, but are borderline worthless on real tasks.
        
         | dmezzetti wrote:
         | Going to call BS on this. I've delivered multiple projects this
         | year using open models.
        
           | apwell23 wrote:
           | > delivered multiple projects
           | 
           | Very curious about the type of projects you've delivered.
        
             | dmezzetti wrote:
             | You can look at https://github.com/neuml/txtai. Biggest
             | thing of 2023 was RAG with models like Mistral.
        
             | benrow wrote:
             | Also curious.
             | 
             | I'm a sample of 1 and also relatively inexperienced. But I
             | felt I quickly reached the limits of what was possible when
             | I tried doing sentence classification with OSS sentence
             | embedding models. The issue was with negation. I'd
             | attributed too much magic to embedding models - they don't
             | really understand language.
             | 
             | Not to say there isn't very capable tech out there. Just to
             | add a datapoint that "sentiment analysis"-like approaches
             | in blogs don't always scale to your particular use-case.
             | 
             | Edit: conscious I've drifted from the topic of chatbot type
             | models, but felt relevant somehow.
        
         | ewweezdsd wrote:
         | How do you define "real tasks"? Even small models that can be
         | run on consumer CPU can produce a coherent summary of an email,
         | as an example. Isn't that a real task?
        
         | ilaksh wrote:
         | I think that might have been more true several 8-12 months ago.
         | But now it feels like the momentum has swung towards open
         | source. Multiple models are close to or exceeding GPT 3.5 now.
         | They can do a lot of useful things.
         | 
         | I have come to the conclusion that as much as possible I should
         | try to wean myself off of OpenAI immediately. Because it's just
         | not necessary or desirable to be tied to a single vendor
         | anymore for many tasks. And in 2024 the open source
         | capabilities will continue to increase. Soon everyone with a
         | relatively new computer will be running things like LLMs
         | locally. Within a couple of years it will be integrated into
         | every OS or browser.
        
           | Kiro wrote:
           | Why are people benchmarking against 3.5? To me, the real race
           | started with GPT-4. 3.5 and 4 are completely different beasts
           | and that open models are catching up to 3.5 doesn't mean
           | much. I've yet to see anything come close to 4.
        
             | JanSt wrote:
             | Because 3.5 is a very useful model. Getting there with an
             | open model already is pretty cool.
        
       | api wrote:
       | AI has been gradually improving for decades, but this is the year
       | we finally noticed.
       | 
       | The big thing was huge progress in natural language
       | understanding. 2023 was the year the Turing test was smashed.
       | 
       | Seeing computers win games, drive cars, optimize systems, even
       | design things wasn't as _subjectively_ impressive to most of us
       | as being able to talk to them. This was the year we first saw AI
       | that could sort of communicate with us the way we can with each
       | other.
        
         | UrineSqueegee wrote:
         | not only talk to them, but ask them to perform tasks, sometimes
         | obscure and they do it.
        
         | Nullabillity wrote:
         | People were amazed by ELIZA back in '67. That doesn't mean that
         | it did anything useful...
        
           | steveoscaro wrote:
           | What's your point? Because I can't imagine it's to suggest
           | that GPT4 doesn't do anything useful.
        
             | bamboozled wrote:
             | Their point is, we've been here before.
        
       | hiddencost wrote:
       | I dunno. The year of AI hype? LLMs are gonna change the world but
       | the real incredible stuff is gonna take a few years before it
       | really hits.
        
         | chime wrote:
         | Things are already changing for early adopters. Yesterday, I
         | used a PDF GPT to review an 80+ page contract and GPT4 to
         | explain specific parts of it in depth using layman's terms. I
         | could have hired a lawyer like I have done in the past but that
         | itself is a slow, laborious process and I often feel like my
         | questions don't get thoroughly answered. I feel very confident
         | of my understanding of the contract now.
         | 
         | I also used StableDiffusion to mock-up landscaping designs for
         | our back patio and make ceramic art ideas for my wife last
         | month.
         | 
         | I was finally able to use super resolution to improve the
         | quality of an old video CD of a VHS tape of a theater play my
         | dad starred in with his friends in the 80s. I tried without
         | super resolution many times in the past but it was never good
         | enough.
         | 
         | You are right that it will take a few years before it hits but
         | AI in 2023 is not hype if you know which tool to use when.
        
           | bamboozled wrote:
           | When we use it to solve real problems, make some real
           | progress on climate change, then it will be something else
           | from hype and it will be the year of AI.
           | 
           | When you as an individual use it to sort PDFs or something
           | it's really hype.
        
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       (page generated 2023-12-25 23:00 UTC)