this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2023
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Barack Obama: “For elevator music, AI is going to work fine. Music like Bob Dylan or Stevie Wonder, that's different”::Barack Obama has weighed in on AI’s impact on music creation in a new interview, saying, “For elevator music, AI is going to work fine”.

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Why would people think he knows anything about AI?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Because he's a world leader and AI programs are answering search engine queries with what you want to hear now, not actual answers. Ain;t no way hes unaware that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Why are you acting like it's at all difficult to understand?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Because you can teach a teen to do it in two weeks. He was a constitutional law professor, as well as the first elected African-American president in the United States. I learned LLMs in a couple months and I never used a comp until 2021. Why are you gatekeeping?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Using the end product and having any idea how it works are two VERY different things.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I agree, my argument is that both aren't challenging for even the average person if they really want/need to understand how these models produce refined noise informed by human patterns.

There are electricians everywhere you know.

This isn't a random person thoughtlessly yelling one-sentence nonsense pablum on the Internet like you.

You think this person can't understand something as straightforward as programming, coming from law?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama

Please link your Wikipedia below 🫠

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's a bit more complicated than you're making it out to be lmfao, there's a reason it's only really been viable for the past few years.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

The principles are really easy though. At its core, neural nets are just a bunch of big matrix multiplication operations. Training is still fundamentally gradient descent, which while it is a fairly new concept in the grand scheme of things, isn't super hard to understand.

The progress in recent years is primarily due to better hardware and optimizations at the low levels that don't directly have anything to do with machine learning.

We've also gotten a lot better at combining those fundamentals in creative ways to do stuff like GANs.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

AI researcher (PhD) here and for what it's worth, Obama got it extremely right. I saw this and went "holy shit, he gets it"

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Yeah I dont believe you at all. I got my master in AI 8 years ago and have been working in the field ever since and no one with any knowledge would agree with you at all. In fact I showed a couple of my colleagues the headline of this article and they both just laughed.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you don't think ai will get there and surpass everything humans have done in the past, you should change career.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm saying this because I do this for a living. It has become obvious to everyone in research (for example - https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.00059) that "AI"s don't understand what they are outputting. The secret sauce with all these large models is the data scale. That is, we have not had real algorithmic breakthroughs - it's just model scale and data scale. So we can make models that mimic human language and music etc but to go beyond, we need multiple fundamentally different breakthroughs. There is a ton of research attention now so it might happen, but it's not guaranteed - the improvements we've seen in the past few years will plateau as data plateaus (we are already there according to some, i.e we've used all the data on the Internet). Also, this - https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17493v2

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

You do it for a living and you can't even understand what a general ai is. Alas I long since understood that mostly everyone is profoundly incompetent at their own jobs.