News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:GPT-4o by modeless on Monday May 13, 2024 @01:40PM (#40345955)
"not that much better" is extremely impressive, because it's a much smaller and much faster model. Don't worry, GPT-5 is coming and it will be better.
Re:GPT-4o by talldayo on Monday May 13, 2024 @01:46PM (#40346032)
Chalmers: "GPT-5? A vastly-improved model that somehow reduces the compute overhead while providing better answers with the same hardware architecture? At this time of year? In this kind of market?"

Skinner: "Yes."

Chalmers: "May I see it?"

Skinner: "No."

Re:GPT-4o by AaronFriel on Monday May 13, 2024 @01:53PM (#40346141)
It has only been a little over one year since GPT-4 was announced, and it was at the time the largest and most expensive model ever trained. It might still be.

Perhaps it's worth taking a beat and looking at the incredible progress in that year, and acknowledge that whatever's next is probably "still cooking".

Even Meta is still baking their 400B parameter model.

Re:GPT-4o by 1024core on Monday May 13, 2024 @02:30PM (#40346609)
As Altman said (paraphrasing): GPT-4 is the _worst_ model you will ever have to deal with in your life (or something to that effect).
Re:GPT-4o by tiptup300 on Monday May 13, 2024 @03:32PM (#40347341)
and boy did the stockholders like that one.
Re:GPT-4o by dyauspitr on Monday May 13, 2024 @04:31PM (#40348051)
What stockholders. They’re investors at this point. I wish I could get in on it.
Re:GPT-4o by talldayo on Monday May 13, 2024 @06:18PM (#40349195)
They're rollercoaster riders, being told lusterous stories by gold-panners while the shovel salesman counts his money and leaves.
Re:GPT-4o by dyauspitr on Monday May 13, 2024 @07:02PM (#40349588)
There are no shovels or shovel sellers. It’s heavily accredited investors with millions of dollars buying in. It’s way above our pay grade, our pleb sayings don’t apply.
Re:GPT-4o by edaemon on Monday May 13, 2024 @09:43PM (#40350773)
I think you could pretty easily call Nvidia a shovel-seller in this context.
Re:GPT-4o by dyauspitr on Monday May 13, 2024 @10:25PM (#40351031)
You’re right.
Re:GPT-4o by dvfjsdhgfv on Monday May 13, 2024 @04:04PM (#40347721)
Why should I believe anything he says?
Re:GPT-4o by andrepd on Monday May 13, 2024 @02:46PM (#40346784)
I will believe it when I see it. People like to point at the first part of a logistic curve and go "behold! an exponential".
Re:GPT-4o by nwienert on Monday May 13, 2024 @05:16PM (#40348548)
Ah yes my favorite was the early covid numbers, some of the "smartest" people in the SF techie scene were daily on Facebook thought-leadering about how 40% of people were about to die in the likely case.
Re:GPT-4o by noSyncCloud on Tuesday May 14, 2024 @12:37PM (#40357076)
Let's be honest, everyone was speculating. Nobody knew what the future would bring, not even you.
Re:GPT-4o by nwienert on Tuesday May 14, 2024 @09:33PM (#40362145)
The difference is some people were talking a whole lot confidently, and some weren’t.
Re:GPT-4o by markk on Monday May 13, 2024 @06:01PM (#40349022)
I found this statement by Sam quite amusing. It transmits exactly zero information (it's a given that models will improve over time), yet it sounds profound and ambitious.
Re:GPT-4o by ripper1138 on Monday May 13, 2024 @07:25PM (#40349772)
I got the same vibe from him on the All In podcast. For every question, he would answer with a vaguely profound statement, talking in circles without really saying anything. On multiple occasions he would answer like 'In some ways yes, in some ways no...' and then just change the subject.
Re:GPT-4o by markk on Tuesday May 14, 2024 @10:02AM (#40355341)
Yep. I'm not quite sure what he's up to. He takes all these interviews and basically says nothing. What's his objective?

My guess is he wants OpenAI to become a household name, and so he optimizes for exposure.

Re:GPT-4o by bamboozled on Monday May 13, 2024 @02:04PM (#40346298)
Legit love progress
Re:GPT-4o by og_kalu on Monday May 13, 2024 @01:58PM (#40346223)
GPT-3 was released in 2020 and GPT-4 in 2023. Now we all expect 5 sooner than that but you're acting like we've been waiting years lol.
Re:GPT-4o by skepticATX on Monday May 13, 2024 @02:04PM (#40346300)
The increased expectations are a direct result of LLM proponents continually hyping exponential capabilities increase.
Re:GPT-4o by dwaltrip on Monday May 13, 2024 @04:27PM (#40348017)
Pay attention to the signal, ignore the noise.
Re:GPT-4o by og_kalu on Monday May 13, 2024 @02:14PM (#40346420)
The time for the research, training, testing and deploying of a new model at frontier scales doesn't change depending on how hyped the technology is. I just think the comment i was replying to lacks perspective.
Re:GPT-4o by throwthrowuknow on Monday May 13, 2024 @03:54PM (#40347577)
So if not exponential, what would you call adding voice and image recognition, function calling, greatly increased token generation speed, reduced cost, massive context window increases and then shortly after combining all of that in a truly multi modal model that is even faster and cheaper while adding emotional range and singing in… checks notes …14 months?! Not to mention creating and improving an API, mobile apps, a marketplace and now a desktop app. OpenAI ships and they are doing so in a way that makes a lot of business sense (continue to deliver while reducing cost). Even if they didn’t have another flagship model in their back pocket I’d be happy with this rate of improvement but they are obviously about to launch another one given the teasers Mira keeps dropping.
Re:GPT-4o by skepticATX on Monday May 13, 2024 @04:26PM (#40348004)
All of that is awesome, and makes for a better product. But it’s also primarily an engineering effort. What matters here is an increase in intelligence. And we’re not seeing that aside from very minor capability increases.

We’ll see if they have another flagship model ready to launch. I seriously doubt it. I suspect that this was supposed to be called GPT-5, or at the very least GPT-4.5, but they can’t meet expectations so they can’t use those names.

Re:GPT-4o by coffeebeqn on Monday May 13, 2024 @08:04PM (#40350061)
Isn’t one of the reasons for the Omni model that text based learning has a limit of source material. If it’s just as good at audio that opens a whole another set of data - and a interesting UX for users
Re:GPT-4o by throwthrowuknow on Monday May 13, 2024 @08:41PM (#40350327)
I believe you’re right. You can easily transcribe audio but the quality of the text data is subpar to say the least. People are very messy when they speak and rely on the interlocutor to fill in the gaps. Training a model to understand all of the nuances of spoken dialogue opens that source of data up. What they demoed today is a model that to some degree understands tone, emotion and surprisingly a bit of humour. It’s hard to get much of that in text so it makes sense that audio is the key to it. Visual understanding of video is also promising especially for cause and effect and subsequently reasoning.
Re:GPT-4o by Sharlin on Monday May 13, 2024 @02:31PM (#40346623)
People who buy into hype deserve to be disappointed. Or burned, as the case may be.
Re:GPT-4o by pwdisswordfishc on Monday May 13, 2024 @01:53PM (#40346140)
Incidentally, this dialogue works equally well, if not better, with David Chalmers versus B.F. Skinner, as with the Simpsons characters.
Re:GPT-4o by dialup_sounds on Monday May 13, 2024 @02:41PM (#40346731)
Agnes (voice): "SEYMOUR, THE HOUSE IS ON FIRE!"

Skinner (looking up): No, mother, it's just the Nvidia GPUs.

Re:GPT-4o by dialup_sounds on Monday May 13, 2024 @02:41PM (#40346735)
Agnes (voice): "SEYMOUR, THE HOUSE IS ON FIRE!"

Skinner (looking up): "No, mother, it's just the Nvidia GPUs."

Re:GPT-4o by dlivingston on Monday May 13, 2024 @02:11PM (#40346391)
"Seymour, the house is on fire!"

"No, mother, that's just the H100s."

Re:GPT-4o by TIPSIO on Monday May 13, 2024 @01:43PM (#40345990)
Obviously given enough time there will always be better models coming.

But I am not convinced it will be another GPT-4 moment. Seems like big focus on tacking together multi-modal clever tricks vs straight better intelligence AI.

Hope they prove me wrong!

Re:GPT-4o by kmeisthax on Monday May 13, 2024 @02:20PM (#40346489)
The problem with "better intelligence" is that OpenAI is running out of human training data to pillage. Training AI on the output of AI smooths over the data distribution, so all the AIs wind up producing same-y output. So OpenAI stopped scraping text back in 2021 or so - because that's when the open web turned into an ocean of AI piss. I've heard rumors that they've started harvesting closed captions out of YouTube videos to try and make up the shortfall of data, but that seems like a way to stave off the inevitable[0].

Multimodal is another way to stave off the inevitable, because these AI companies already are training multiple models on different piles of information. If you have to train a text model and an image model, why split your training data in half when you could train a combined model on a combined dataset?

[0] For starters, most YouTube videos aren't manually captioned, so you're feeding GPT the output of Google's autocaptioning model, so it's going to start learning artifacts of what that model can't process.

Re:GPT-4o by pbhjpbhj on Monday May 13, 2024 @02:34PM (#40346653)
>harvesting closed captions out of YouTube videos

I'd bet a lot of YouTubers are using LLMs to write and/or edit content. So we pass that through a human presentation. Then introduce some errors in the form of transcription. Turn feed the output in as part of a training corpus ... we plateaued real quick.

It seems like it's hard to get past a level of human intelligence at which there's a large enough corpus of training data or trainers?

Anyone know of any papers on breaking this limit to push machine learning models to super-human intelligence levels?

Re:GPT-4o by pixl97 on Monday May 13, 2024 @03:01PM (#40346952)
If a model is average human intelligence in pretty much everything, is that super-human or not? Simply put, we as individuals aren't average at everything, we have what we're good at and a great many things we're not. We average out by looking at broad population trends. That's why most of us in the modern age spend a lot of time on specialization for whatever we work in. Which brings the likely next place for data. A Manna (the story) like data collection program where companies hoover up everything they can on their above average employees till we're to the point most models are well above the human average in most categories.
Re:GPT-4o by llm_trw on Monday May 13, 2024 @03:23PM (#40347231)
>[0] For starters, most YouTube videos aren't manually captioned, so you're feeding GPT the output of Google's autocaptioning model, so it's going to start learning artifacts of what that model can't process.

Whisper models are better than anything google has. In fact the higher quality whisper models are better than humans when it comes to transcribing text with punctuation.

Re:GPT-4o by WhitneyLand on Monday May 13, 2024 @03:03PM (#40346984)
Why do you think they’re using Google auto-captioning?

I would expect they’re using their own t2s which is still a model but way better quality and potentially customizable to better suit their needs

Re:GPT-4o by marvin on Monday May 13, 2024 @06:45PM (#40349451)
At some point, algorithms for reasoning and long-term planning will be figured out. Data won’t be the holy grail forever, and neither will asymptotically approaching human performance in all domains.
Re:GPT-4o by mupuff1234 on Monday May 13, 2024 @01:44PM (#40346000)
And how can one be so sure of that?

Seems to me that performance is converging and we might not see a significant jump until we have another breakthrough.

Re:GPT-4o by diego_sandoval on Monday May 13, 2024 @01:54PM (#40346156)
> Seems to me that performance is converging

It doesn't seem that way to me. But even if it did, video generation also seemed kind of stagnant before Sora.

In general, I think The Bitter Lesson is the biggest factor at play here, and compute power is not stagnating.

Re:GPT-4o by drawnwren on Monday May 13, 2024 @02:00PM (#40346254)
Computer power is not stagnating, but the availability of training data is. It's not like there's a second stackoverflow or reddit to scrape.
Re:GPT-4o by robwwilliams on Monday May 13, 2024 @02:27PM (#40346578)
No: soon the wide wild world itself becomes training data. And for much more than just an LLM. LLM plus reinforcement learning—this is were the capacity of our in silico children will engender much parental anxiety.
Re:GPT-4o by Animats on Monday May 13, 2024 @03:20PM (#40347199)
This may create a market for surveillance camera data and phone calls.

"This conversation may be recorded and used for training purposes" now takes on a new meaning.

Can car makers sell info from everything that happens in their cars?

Re:GPT-4o by abenga on Monday May 13, 2024 @03:40PM (#40347437)
Well, this is a massively horrifying possibility.
Re:GPT-4o by diego_sandoval on Monday May 13, 2024 @02:49PM (#40346806)
Agree.

However, I think the most cost-effective way to train for real world is to train in a simulated physical world first. I would assume that Boston Dynamics does exactly that, and I would expect integrated vision-action-language models to first be trained that way too.

Re:GPT-4o by pixl97 on Monday May 13, 2024 @03:04PM (#40346998)
That's how everyone in robotics is doing these days.

You take a bunch of mo-cap data and simulate it with your robot body. Then as much testing as you can with the robot and feed the behavior back in to the model for fine tuning.

Unitree gives an example of the simulation versus what the robot can do in their latest video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzX1qOIO1bE

Re:GPT-4o by MVissers on Monday May 13, 2024 @02:42PM (#40346741)
Soon these models are cheap enough to learn in the real world. Reduced costs allows for usage at massive scale.

Releasing models to users that where users can record video is more data. Users conversing with AI is also additional data.

Another example is models that code– And then debug the code and learn from that.

This will be anywhere, and these models will learn from anything we do/publish online/discuss. Scary.

Pretty soon– OpenAI will have access to

Re:GPT-4o by diego_sandoval on Monday May 13, 2024 @02:38PM (#40346702)
I don't think training data is the limiting factor for current models.
Re:GPT-4o by emporas on Monday May 13, 2024 @03:25PM (#40347249)
It is a limiting factor, due to diminishing returns. A model trained on double the data, will be 10% better, if that!

When it comes to multi-modality, then training data is not limited, because of many different combinations of language, images, video, sound etc. Microsoft did some research on that, teaching spacial recognition to an LLM using synthetic images, with good results. [1]

When someone states that there are not enough training data, they usually mean code, mathematics, physics, logical reasoning etc. In the open internet right now, there are is not enough code to make a model 10x better, 100x better and so on.

Synthetic data will be produced of course, scarcity of data is the least worrying scarcity of all.

Edit: citation added,

[1] VoT by MS https://medium.com/@multiplatform.ai/microsoft-researchers-p...

Re:GPT-4o by diego_sandoval on Tuesday May 14, 2024 @04:01AM (#40352707)
> A model trained on double the data, will be 10% better, if that!

If the other attributes of the model do not improve, sure.

Re:GPT-4o by bigyikes on Monday May 13, 2024 @02:28PM (#40346589)
It isn’t clear that we are running out of training data, and it is becoming increasingly clear that AI-generated training data actually works.

For the skeptical, consider that humans can be trained on material created by less intelligent humans.

Re:GPT-4o by rglullis on Monday May 13, 2024 @02:59PM (#40346937)
> humans can be trained on material created by less intelligent humans.

For the skeptics, "AI models" are not intelligent at all so this analogy makes no sense.

You can teach lots of impressive tricks to dogs, but there is no amount of training that will teach them basic algebra.

Re:GPT-4o by wavemode on Monday May 13, 2024 @02:33PM (#40346637)
> video generation also seemed kind of stagnant before Sora

I take the opposite view. I don't think video generation was stagnating at all, and was in fact probably the area of generative AI that was seeing the biggest active strides. I'm highly optimistic about the future trajectory of image and video models.

By contrast, text generation has not improved significantly, in my opinion, for more than a year now, and even the improvement we saw back then was relatively marginal compared to GPT-3.5 (that is, for most day-to-day use cases we didn't really go from "this model can't do this task" to "this model can now do this task". It was more just "this model does these pre-existing tasks, in somewhat more detail".)

If OpenAI really is secretly cooking up some huge reasoning improvements for their text models, I'll eat my hat. But for now I'm skeptical.

Re:GPT-4o by Eisenstein on Monday May 13, 2024 @05:27PM (#40348696)
> By contrast, text generation has not improved significantly, in my opinion, for more than a year now

With less than $800 worth of hardware including everything but the monitor, you can run an open weight model more powerful than GPT 3.5 locally, at around 6 - 7T/s[0]. I would say that is a huge improvement.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1cmmob0/p40_bui...

Re:GPT-4o by aantix on Monday May 13, 2024 @01:59PM (#40346241)
The use of AI in the research of AI accelerates everything.
Re:GPT-4o by thefaux on Monday May 13, 2024 @02:06PM (#40346328)
I'm not sure of this. The jury is still out on most ai tools. Even if it is true, it may be in a kind of strange reverse way: people innovating by asking what ai can't do and directing their attention there.
Re:GPT-4o by bigyikes on Monday May 13, 2024 @02:27PM (#40346568)
There is an increasing amount of evidence that using AI to train other AI is a viable path forward. E.g. using LLMs to generate training data or tune RL policies
Re:GPT-4o by jcd000 on Monday May 13, 2024 @02:11PM (#40346382)
I bet this will also cause model regressions.
Re:GPT-4o by scarmig on Monday May 13, 2024 @01:49PM (#40346079)
Yeah. There are lots of things we can do with existing capabilities, but in terms of progressing beyond them all of the frontier models seem like they're a hair's breadth from each other. That is not what one would predict if LLMs had a much higher ceiling than we are currently at.

I'll reserve judgment until we see GPT5, but if it becomes just a matter of who best can monetize existing capabilities, OAI isn't the best positioned.

Re:GPT-4o by andrepd on Wednesday May 15, 2024 @02:46AM (#40363825)
Exactly. People like to point at the start of a logistic curve and go "behold! an exponential"
Re:GPT-4o by littlestymaar on Monday May 13, 2024 @02:38PM (#40346697)
I don't think a bigger model would make sense for OpenAI: it's much more important for them that they keep driving inference coat down, because there's no viable business model if they don't.

Improving the instruction tuning, the RLHF step, increase the training size, work on multilingual capabilities, etc. make sense as a way to improve quality, but I think increasing model size doesn't. Being able to advertize a big breakthrough may make sense in terms of marketing, but I don't believe it's going to happen for two reasons:

- you don't release intermediate steps when you want to be able to advertise big gains, because it raises the baseline and reduce the effectiveness of your ”big gains” in terms of marketing.

- I don't think they would benefit in an arm race with Meta, trying to keeping a significant edge. Meta is likely to be able to catch-up eventually on performance, but they are not so much of a threat in terms of business. Focusing on keeping a performance edge instead of making their business viable would be a strategic blunder.

Re:GPT-4o by jononor on Monday May 13, 2024 @03:44PM (#40347491)
What is OpenAI business model if their models are second-best? Why would people pay them and not Meta/Google/Microsoft - who can afford to sell at very low margins, since they have existing very profitable businesses that keeps them afloat.
Re:GPT-4o by littlestymaar on Monday May 13, 2024 @03:56PM (#40347606)
That's the question OpenAI needs to find an answer to if they want to end up viable.

They have the brand recognition (for ChatGPT) and that's a good start, but that's not enough. Providing a best in class user experience, a way to lock down their customers in some kind of walled garden, building some kind of network effect (what they tried with their marketplace for community-built “GPTs” last fall but I'm not sure it's working), something else?

At the end of the day they have no technological moat, so they'll need to build a business one, or perish.

For most tasks, pretty much every models from their competitors is more than good enough already, and it's only going to get worse as everyone improves. Being marginally better on 2% of tasks isn't going to be enough.

Re:GPT-4o by Eisenstein on Monday May 13, 2024 @05:22PM (#40348632)
I know it is super crazy, but maybe they could become a non-profit and dedicate themselves to producing open source AI in an effort to democratize it and make it safe (as in, not walled behind a giant for-profit corp that will inevitably enshittify it).

I don't know why they didn't think about doing that earlier, could have been a game changer, but there is still an opportunity to pivot.

Re:GPT-4o by moomoo11 on Monday May 13, 2024 @01:57PM (#40346204)
I really hope GPT5 is good. GPT4 sucks at programming.
Re:GPT-4o by twsted on Monday May 13, 2024 @03:21PM (#40347212)
It's better than at least 50% of the developers I know.
Re:GPT-4o by Jensson on Monday May 13, 2024 @04:05PM (#40347739)
A developer that just pastes in code from gpt-4 without checking what it wrote is a horror scenario, I don't think half of the developers you know are really that bad.
Re:GPT-4o by viking123 on Tuesday May 14, 2024 @04:52AM (#40352995)
What kind of people are you working with?
Re:GPT-4o by verdverm on Monday May 13, 2024 @02:00PM (#40346249)
Look to a specialized model instead of a general purpose one
Re:GPT-4o by moomoo11 on Monday May 13, 2024 @02:06PM (#40346337)
Any suggestions? Thanks

I have tried Phind and anything beyond mega junior tier questions it suffers as well and gives bad answers.

Re:GPT-4o by verdverm on Monday May 13, 2024 @02:12PM (#40346397)
It will be a system, not a single model, and will depend on what programming task you want to perform

probably need routers, RAG, and reranking

I think there is a role for LLM + deterministic code gen as well (https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof/blob/_dev/flow/chat/pro...)

Re:GPT-4o by moomoo11 on Monday May 13, 2024 @02:26PM (#40346562)
Interesting. I was hoping for something with a UI like chat gpt or phind.

Something that I can just use as easily as copilot. Unfortunately every single one sucks.

Or maybe that's just how programming is - its easy at the surface/ice berg level and below is just massive amounts of complexity. Then again, I'm not doing menial stuff so maybe I'm just expecting too much.

Re:GPT-4o by verdverm on Monday May 13, 2024 @06:56PM (#40349534)
I think a more IDE native experience is better than a chat UI

I don't want to have to copy & paste between applications, just let me highlight some sections and then run some LLM operation on it

i.e. a VS Code extension with keyboard shortcuts

Re:GPT-4o by unshavedyak on Monday May 13, 2024 @02:38PM (#40346699)
Yea, I use them daily and that’s my issue as well. You have to learn what to ask or you spend more time debugging their junk than being productive, at least for me. Devv.ai is my recent try, and so far it’s been good but library changes quickly cause it to lose accuracy. It is not able to understand what library version you’re on and what it is referencing, which wastes a lot of time.

I like LLMs for general design work, but I’ve found accuracy to be atrocious in this area.

Re:GPT-4o by verdverm on Monday May 13, 2024 @03:37PM (#40347408)
> library changes quickly cause it to lose accuracy

yup, this is why an LLM only solution will not work. You need to provide extra context crafted from the language or library resources (docs, code, help, chat)

This is the same thing humans do. We go to the project resources to help know what code to write

Re:GPT-4o by unshavedyak on Monday May 13, 2024 @06:56PM (#40349540)
Fwiw that's what Devv.ai claims to do (in my summation from the Devv.ai announcement, at least). Regardless of how true the claims of Devv.ai are, their library versioning support seems very poor. At least for the one library i tested it on (Rust's Bevy).
Re:GPT-4o by verdverm on Monday May 13, 2024 @08:16PM (#40350160)
kapa.ai is another SaaS focused on per-project LLMs

As a developer, you would want something like this, which has access to all the languages / libraries you actually use

Re:GPT-4o by wing-_-nuts on Tuesday May 14, 2024 @11:51AM (#40356527)
You have to think of the LLMs as more of a better search engine than something that can actually write code for you. I use phind for writing obscure regexes, or shell syntax, but I always verify the answer. I've been very pleased with the results. I think anyone disappointed with it is setting the bar too high and won't be fully satisfied until LLMs can effectively replace a Sr dev (which, let's be real, is only going to happen once we reach AGI)
Re:GPT-4o by cududa on Monday May 13, 2024 @05:22PM (#40348625)
It's excellent at programming if you actually know the problem you're trying to solve and the technology. You need to guide it with actual knowledge you have. Also, you have to adapt your communication style to get good results. Once you 'crack the pattern' you'll have a massive productivity boost
Re:GPT-4o by partiallypro on Monday May 13, 2024 @05:46PM (#40348886)
In my experience 3.5 was better at programming than 4, and I don't know why.