The deep learning boom caught almost everyone by surprise

I wonder what would have happened if we poured the same amount of money, talent and hardware into SVMs, random forests, KNN, etc.

I don't say that transformers, LLMs, deep learning and other great things that happened in the neural network space aren't very valuable, because they are.

But I think in the future we should also study other options which might be better suited than neural networks for some classes of problems.

Can a very large and expensive LLM do sentiment analysis or classification? Yes, it can. But so can simple SVMs and KNN and sometimes even better.

I saw some YouTube coders doing calls to OpenAI's o1 model for some very simple classification tasks. That isn't the best tool for the job.

I think neural networks are fundamental and we will focus/experiment a lot more with architecture, layers and other parts involved but emerging features arise through size

people did that to horses. No car resulted from it, just slightly better horses.

>I saw some YouTube coders doing calls to OpenAI's o1 model for some very simple classification tasks. That isn't the best tool for the job.

This "not best tool" is just there for the coders to call while the "simple SVMs and KNN" would require coding and training by those coders for the specific task they have at hand.

As a simple example, if you ask a question and part of the answer is directly quoted from a book from memory, that text is not computed/reasoned by the AI and so doesn't have an "explanation".

But I also suspect that any AGI would necessarily produce answers it can't explain. That's called intuition.

But that's backwards from how new techniques and progress is made. What actually happens is somebody (maybe a student at a university) has an insight or new idea for an algorithm that's near $0 cost to implement a proof-of concept. Then everybody else notices the improvement and then extra millions/billions get directed toward it.

New ideas -- that didn't cost much at the start -- ATTRACT the follow on billions in investments.

This timeline of tech progress in computer science is the opposite from other disciplines such as materials science or bio-medical fields. Trying to discover the next super-alloy or cancer drug all requires expensive experiments. Manipulating atoms & molecules requires very expensive specialized equipment. In contrast, computer science experiments can be cheap. You just need a clever insight.

An example of that was the 2012 AlexNet image recognition algorithm that blew all the other approaches out of the water. Alex Krizhevsky had an new insight on a convolutional neural network to run on CUDA. He bought 2 NVIDIA cards (GTX580 3GB GPU) from Amazon. It didn't require NASA levels of investment at the start to implement his idea. Once everybody else noticed his superior results, the billions began pouring in to iterate/refine on CNNs.

Both the "attention mechanism" and the refinement of "transformer architecture" were also cheap to prove out at a very small scale. In 2014, Jakob Uszkoreit thought about an "attention mechanism" instead of RNN and LSTM for machine translation. It didn't cost billions to come up with that idea. Yes, ChatGPT-the-product cost billions but the "attention mechanism algorithm" did not.

>into SVMs, random forests, KNN, etc.

If anyone has found an unknown insight into SVM, KNN, etc that everybody else in the industry has overlooked, they can do cheap experiments to prove it. E.g. The entire Wikipedia text download is currently only ~25GB. Run the new SVM classification idea on that corpus. Very low cost experiments in computer science algorithms can still be done in the proverbial "home garage".

Fact by definition

What you'd get is an explanation saying "it quoted this verbatim", or possibly "the top neuron is used to output the word 'State' after the word 'Empire'".

You can try out a system here: https://monitor.transluce.org/dashboard/chat

Of course the AI could incorporate web search, but then what if the explanation is just "it did a web search and that was the first result"? It seems pretty difficult to recursively make every external tool also explainable…

The search is for something that can write an essay, drive a car, and cook lunch so we need something new.

This falls apart for breakthroughs that are not zero cost to do a proof-of concept.

Think that is what the parent is rereferring . That other technologies might have more potential, but would take money to build out.

Simplest example: OCR. A network identifying digits can often be explained as recognizing lines, curves, numbers of segments etc.. That is an explanation, not "computer says it looks like an 8"

From my perspective, that is actually what happened between the mid-90s to 2015. Neural netowrks were dead in that period, but any other ML method was very, very hot.

I though the main insights were embeddings, positional encoding and shortcuts through layers to improve back propagation.

A Prolog query is explainable precisely because, by construction, it itself is the explanation. And you can go step by step and understand how you got a particular result, inspecting each variable binding and predicate call site in the process.

Despite all the billions being thrown at modern ML, no one has managed to create a model that does something like what Prolog does with its simple recursive backtracking.

So the moral of the story is that you can 100% trust the result of a Prolog query, but you can't ever trust the output of an LLM. Given that, which technology would you rather use to build software on which lives depend on?

And which of the two methods is more "artificially intelligent"?

And is that explanation the way how they obtained the "cat-nes" of the picture, or do they just see that it is a cat immediately and obviously and when you ask them for an explanation they come up with some explaining noises until you are satisfied?

People don't even think of doing anything else and those that might do, are paid to pursue research on LLMs.

For cat vs pumpkin they will think you are making fun of them, but it very much is explainable. Though now I am picturing a puzzle about finding orange cats in a picture of a pumpkin field.

https://transluce.org/observability-interface

LLMs don't have enough self-awareness to produce really satisfying explanations though, no.