For OpenAI, o1 represents a step toward its broader goal of human-like artificial intelligence. More practically, it does a better job at writing code and solving multistep problems than previous models. But it’s also more expensive and slower to use than GPT-4o. OpenAI is calling this release of o1 a “preview” to emphasize how nascent it is.

The training behind o1 is fundamentally different from its predecessors, OpenAI’s research lead, Jerry Tworek, tells me, though the company is being vague about the exact details. He says o1 “has been trained using a completely new optimization algorithm and a new training dataset specifically tailored for it.”

OpenAI taught previous GPT models to mimic patterns from its training data. With o1, it trained the model to solve problems on its own using a technique known as reinforcement learning, which teaches the system through rewards and penalties. It then uses a “chain of thought” to process queries, similarly to how humans process problems by going through them step-by-step.

At the same time, o1 is not as capable as GPT-4o in a lot of areas. It doesn’t do as well on factual knowledge about the world. It also doesn’t have the ability to browse the web or process files and images. Still, the company believes it represents a brand-new class of capabilities. It was named o1 to indicate “resetting the counter back to 1.”

I think this is the most important part (emphasis mine):

As a result of this new training methodology, OpenAI says the model should be more accurate. “We have noticed that this model hallucinates less,” Tworek says. But the problem still persists. “We can’t say we solved hallucinations.”

7 points

Technophobes are trying to downplay this because “AI bad”, but this is actually a pretty significant leap from GPT and we should all be keeping an eye on this, especially those who are acting like this is just more auto-predict. This is a completely different generation process than GPT which is just glorified auto-predict. It’s the difference between learning a language by just reading a lot of books in that language, and learning a language by speaking with people in that language and adjusting based on their feedback until you are fluent.

If you thought AI comments flooding social media was already bad, it’s soon going to get a lot harder to discern who is real, especially once people get access to a web-connected version of this model.

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9 points

It’s weird how so many of these “technophobes” are IT professionals. Crazy that people would line up to go into a profession they so obviously hate and fear.

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5 points

I’ve worked in tech for 20 years. Luddites are quite common in this field.

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4 points

Read some history mate. The luddites weren’t technophobes either. They hated the way that capitalism was reaping all the rewards of industrializion. They were all for technological advancement, they just wanted it to benefit everyone.

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26 points
*

All signs point to this being a finetune of gpt4o with additional chain of thought steps before the final answer. It has exactly the same pitfalls as the existing model (9.11>9.8 tokenization error, failing simple riddles, being unable to assert that the user is wrong, etc.). It’s still a transformer and it’s still next token prediction. They hide the thought steps to mask this fact and to prevent others from benefiting from all of the finetuning data they paid for.

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0 points

They hide the thought steps to mask this fact and to prevent others from benefiting from all of the finetuning data they paid for.

Well possibly but they also hide the chain of thought steps because as they point out in their article it needs to be able to think about things outside of what it’s normally allowed allowed to say which obviously means you can’t show the content. If you’re trying to come up with worst case scenarios for a situation you actually have to be able to think about those worst case scenarios

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2 points

It does not fail the 9.11 > 9.8 thing.

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2 points
*

Big leap for OpenAI, as in a kind of ML model they haven’t explored yet. Not that big for AI in general as others have done the same with similar result. Until they can make graphs where they look exceptionally better compared to other models than their own, it’s not that much of a breakthrough.

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-5 points

I’m getting so tired of the pessimists who are against AI. Granted, I can reflect and see my own similar attitude towards Trump: no matter what, I would never vote for him considering his history and who he is as a person. But treating the next generation of technology feels different than that to me; AI is the future, it’s the next revolution. Sure, there are several real issues to criticize and question (copyright, compensation, hallucination come to mind) but instead shit here on Lemmy just gets downvoted to hell with no explanation. I know this comment will get downvoted, but I just wish we could have a discussion about the future without shutting down every practical comment wanting to talk about it.

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1 point

More and more advanced tools for automation are an important part of creating a post-scarcity future. If we can combine that with tearing down our current economic system - which inherently requires and thus has to manufacture scarcity - we can uplift our species in ways we can currently only imagine.

But this ain’t it bud. If I ask you for water and you hand me a glass of warm piss, I’m not “against drinking water” for refusing to gulp it down.

This isn’t AI. It isn’t - meaningfully and usefully - any form of automation at all. A bunch of conmen slapped the letters “AI” on the side of their bottle of piss and you’re drinking it down like it’s grandma’s peach tea.

The people calling out the fundamental flaws with these products aren’t doing so because we hate the entire concept of automation, any more than someone exposing a snake-oil salesman hates medicine. What we hate is being lied to. The current state of this technology is bullshit and hype. It is not fit for human consumption (other than recreationally) and the money being pumped into it could be put to far better uses. OpenAI may have lofty goals, but they have utterly failed at achieving them, and right now any true desire to create AGI has been totally subsumed by the need to keep pumping out slightly better looking versions of the same polished turd in order to convince investors to keep paying for their staggeringly high hosting costs.

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7 points
*

I’m kinda in the same boat but on the other side. I always try to argue with people about this. It gets me a lot of flak on pro AI posts but that won’t stop me. I usually get very aggressive replies and sometimes some fucked up dm’s too.

I’m against it because we are already seeing the consequences of this technology and it’s only getting worse. By the time laws catch up it’s gonna be too late and the damage will be done. For some technologies that’s not always the worst. But we already saw how long it took for anyone to do anything about the Internet when it came out, and we are still trying to this day. This shit is growing so fast we will all feel the whiplash. Sites like Facebook are getting absolutely flooded with so much AI that they are becoming almost unusable. And that’s before we even get into the shady shit people use AI for like making porn of people they know with the click of a button. I recently read an article about how bad deepfake porn is in South Korea (found the article. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/12/world/asia/south-korea-deepfake-videos.html). And in places like the US, where a lot of these companies are based, they are so slow to do anything about a problem it’s going to be too late by the time they get to it.

But besides all the awful things happening because of AI, I do have one personal gripe with the whole ordeal. Why are we so quick to replace the things we enjoy with AI? When I get home from work I like to make music and practice pixel art (I’m not very good at either yet). I’d much rather have AI replace my job than my hobbies. I’m down for things that are useful, but too much of this just gives me a bad gut feeling. Like their trying to replace people and not their jobs.

This may be the future. But it sounds like a pretty dystopian future to me. You already can’t believe everything you see on the Internet and this will only make it worse.

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1 point

Being against LLMs being sold as AI (or as useful for anything practical) is not being against AI.

LLMs have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with AI, other than being sold as if they did.

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7 points

Lol Lemmy has the funniest ai haters they drown out any real criticism with stupid strawman nonsense

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4 points
  • it’s not actually AI
  • it’s just fancy auto complete/ glorified Markov chains
  • it can’t reason it’s just a pLagIaRisM MaChiNe

Now if I want to win the annoying Lemmy bingo I just need to shill extra hard for more restrictive copyright law!

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1 point
*

Remember the people that cry that copyright is an invention of the devil and how it should be more open*

*Doesn’t apply to AI of course.

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1 point

Must admit, that’s me

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121 points

It’s a better prediction model. There’s no reasoning because it’s not understanding anything you’re typing. We’re not closer to general ai.

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9 points

I wish more people would realize this! We’re years away from a truly reasoning computer.

Right now it’s all mimicry. Mimicry that hallucinates no less…

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12 points
*

I don’t think anyone is actually claiming this is AGI though. Basically people are going around going “it’s not AGI you idiot”, when no one’s actually saying it is.

You’re arguing against a point no one’s making.

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-9 points

Except that we had to come up with the term “AGI” because idiots kept running around screaming “intelligence” stole the term “AI”.

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17 points

I think most people do understand this and the naysayers get too caught up on the words being used, like how you still get people frothing over the mouth over the use of the word “intelligence” years after this has entered mainstream conversation. Most people using that word don’t literally think ChatGPT is a new form of intelligent life.

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17 points

It may not be capable of truly understanding anything, but it sure seems to do a better job of it than the vast majority of people I talk to online. I might spend 45 minutes carefully typing out a message explaining my view, only for the other person to completely miss every point I made. With ChatGPT, though, I can speak in broken English, and it’ll repeat back the point I was trying to make much more clearly than I could ever have done myself.

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5 points

I hate to say it bud, but the fact that you feel like you have more productive conversations with highly advanced autocomplete than you do with actual humans probably says more about you than it does about the current state of generative AI.

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-1 points

You should have asked chatgpt to explain the comment to you cause that’s not what they say

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4 points

LoL. You’re proving his point for him. He did not say that at all. Or maybe that’s the joke… I dunno.

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8 points

That’s not what I said, though.

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2 points

It’s a (large) language model. It’s good at language tasks. Helps to have hundreds of Gigs of written “knowledge” in ram. Differing success rates on how that knowledge is connected.

It’s autocorrect so turbocharged, it can write math, and a full essay without constantly clicking the buttons on top of the iphone keyboard.

You want to keep a pizza together? Ah yes my amazing concepts of sticking stuff together tells me you should add 1/2 spoons of glue (preferably something strong like gorilla glue).

How to find enjoyment with rock? Ah, you can try making it as a pet, and having a pet rock. Having a pet brings many enjoyments such as walking it.

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5 points

You want to keep a pizza together? Ah yes my amazing concepts of sticking stuff together tells me you should add 1/2 spoons of glue

That would be a good test to ask it that question and see if it comes up with a more coherent answer.

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6 points

Thanks for illustrating my point.

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16 points

I heard parrots are the pinnacle of conversation

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-1 points

Skill issue. Read more books.

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22 points

OpenAI doesn’t want you to know that though, they want their work to show progress so they get more investor money. It’s pretty fucking disgusting and dangerous to call this tech any form of artificial intelligence. The homogeneous naming conventions to make this tech sound human is also dangerous and irresponsible.

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4 points

Their work is making progress. What is irresponsible or dangerous? Im not understanding what you mean.

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5 points
*

It’s irresponsible because making it sound like it’s true AI when it’s not is going to make it difficult to pull the plug when things go wrong and you’ll have the debate of whether it’s sentient or not and if it’s humane to kill it like a pet or a criminal. It’s more akin to using rainbow tables to help crack passwords and claiming your software is super powerful when in reality it’s nothing without the tables. (Very very rudimentary example that’s not supposed to be taken at face value).

It’s dangerous because talking about AI like it’s a reasoning/thinking thing is just not true, and we’re already seeing the big AI overlords try to justify how they created it with copyrighted material, which means the arguments over copyrighted material are being made and we’ll soon see those companies claim that it’s no different than a child looking up something on Google. It’s irresponsible because it screws over creative people and copyright holders that genuinely made a product or piece of art or book or something in their own free time and now it’s been ripped away to be used to create something else that will eventually push those copyright holders out.

The AI market is moving faster than the world is capable of keeping up with it, and that is a dangerous precedent to set for the future of this market. And for the record I don’t think we’re dealing with early generations of skynet or anything like that, we’re dealing with tools that have the capability to create economical collapse on a scale we’ve never seen, and if we don’t lay the ground rules now, then we will be in trouble.

Edit: A great example of this is https://v0.dev/chat it has the potential to put front end developers out of work and jobless. It’s simple now but give it time and it has the potential to create a frontend that rivals the best UX designs if the prompt is right.

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11 points

It is literally artificial intelligence though. Just because chatGPT doesn’t perform as a layperson imagined it would, it doesn’t mean it’s not AI. They just have an unrealistic expectation of what counts as AI along with the common misconception of AI and AGI being the same thing.

A chess playing robot uses artificial intelligence as well. It’s a narrow AI, meaning it can do one thing really well but that doesn’t translate to other things. AGI on the other hand stands for Artificial General Intelligence. Humans are an example of general intelligence meaning that we have the cognitive ability to perform well on several unrelated tasks.

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-6 points
Removed by mod
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-5 points

Being better at prediction requires reasoning

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46 points

This article from last year compares LLMs to techniques used by “psychics” (cold reading, etc).

https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llmentalist/

I think it’s a great analogy (and an interesting article).

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-3 points
*

I’d recommend everyone saying “it can’t understand anything and can’t think” to look at this example:

https://x.com/flowersslop/status/1834349905692824017

Try to solve it after seeing only the first image before you open the second and see o1’s response.

Let me know if you got it before seeing the actual answer.

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15 points

This example doesn’t prove what you think it does. It shows pattern detection - something computers are inherently very well suited for - but it doesn’t demonstrate “reasoning” in any meaningful way.

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5 points

You should really look at the full CoT traces on the demos.

I think you think you know more than you actually know.

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1 point

I think if you can actually define reasoning, your comments (and those like yours) would be much more convincing. I’m just calling yours out because I’ve seen you up and down in this thread repeating it, but it’s a general observed of the vocal critics of the technology overall. Neither intelligence nor reasons (likewise understanding and knowing, for that matter) are easily defined in a way that is more useful than invoking spirits and ghosts. In this case, detecting patterns certainly seems a critical component of what we would consider to be reasoning. I don’t think it’s sufficient, buy it is absolutely necessary.

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1 point

While truly defining pretty much any aspect of human intelligence is functionally impossible with our current understanding of the mind, we can create some very usable “good enough” working definitions for these purposes.

At a basic level, “reasoning” would be the act of drawing logical conclusions from available data. And that’s not what these models do. They mimic reasoning, by mimicking human communication. Humans communicate (and developed a lot of specialized language with which to communicate) the process by which we reason, and so LLMs can basically replicate the appearance of reasoning by replicating the language around it.

The way you can tell that they’re not actually reasoning is simple; their conclusions often bear no actual connection to the facts. There’s an example I linked elsewhere where the new model is asked to list states with W in their name. It does a bunch of preamble where it spells out very clearly what the requirements and process are; assemble a list of all states, then check each name for the presence of the letter W.

And then it includes North Dakota, South Dakota, North Carolina and South Carolina in the list.

Any human being capable of reasoning would absolutely understand that that was wrong, if they were taking the time to carefully and systematically work through the problem in that way. The AI does not, because all this apparent “thinking” is a smoke show. They’re machines built to give the appearance of intelligence, nothing more.

When real AGI, or even something approaching it, actually becomes a thing, I will be extremely excited. But this is just snake oil being sold as medicine. You’re not required to buy into their bullshit just to prove you’re not a technophobe.

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