Meta’s storied AI research lab faces existential questions amid leadership changes and internal reshuffling—while its founder insists it’s just entering a new chapter.
That’s true but at least one of these things needs to happen:
the forklift costs billions and consumes tons of energy, but it can lift a whole mountain, which no group of humans can do
the forklift helps a team of 10 do the work of 50 and, while still relatively expensive, it costs less than the 40 people it’s replacing
the forklift becomes an inexpensive commodity and it augments human capabilities and creates new possibilities for society as a whole
This is roughly what happened with mainframes to personal computers to mobile devices. LLMs are stuck between 1 and 2, they are not good enough forklifts to lift a mountain and not cheap enough to replace 40 people and save money. There are some hints that they could at one point move to 3 but the large players that could make it happen are starting to be scared by the amount of investment to get there.
On a related note, lot of people are being fooled by this hype machine mixing GenAI with good “old” machine learning and you now read about all these “AI wins” like “student discovers new galaxies with AI” or “scientist discover new medicines with AI” that make it sound like these people just asked ChatGPT “how would you go about discovering a new galaxy?” or “could you make up a new drug for me pretty please?”.
That’s true but at least one of these things needs to happen:
the forklift costs billions and consumes tons of energy, but it can lift a whole mountain, which no group of humans can do
the forklift helps a team of 10 do the work of 50 and, while still relatively expensive, it costs less than the 40 people it’s replacing
the forklift becomes an inexpensive commodity and it augments human capabilities and creates new possibilities for society as a whole
This is roughly what happened with mainframes to personal computers to mobile devices. LLMs are stuck between 1 and 2, they are not good enough forklifts to lift a mountain and not cheap enough to replace 40 people and save money. There are some hints that they could at one point move to 3 but the large players that could make it happen are starting to be scared by the amount of investment to get there.
On a related note, lot of people are being fooled by this hype machine mixing GenAI with good “old” machine learning and you now read about all these “AI wins” like “student discovers new galaxies with AI” or “scientist discover new medicines with AI” that make it sound like these people just asked ChatGPT “how would you go about discovering a new galaxy?” or “could you make up a new drug for me pretty please?”.