18al

28 days agodiscuss

What does the author mean by "win"?

Does he mean that the _best model_ should be an open source one (eg: today, something better than Fable 5), or just that open source models should be the default choice for most task?

The former seems an impossibility, closed labs can work off of open and their own closed research. Closed source will always be better. Well, at least until some late-stage enshittification dynamics cause the providers to hobble them.

The latter, becoming a default, not so much. But considering the deep-rooted nature of (for instance) Google, it certainly won't be a walk in the park. This seems to be a similar hurdle as dethroning Chrome as the default browser.

For the average ChatGPT user, I surmise that open-source models are already capable enough. Most people I know who use it (me included) are not paying for it, they are routed to the cheaper models.

What's needed here is everything else other than the model to be in place. Which is to say there isn't a sufficiently good open source ChatGPT app, every open source option requires more fiddling than the ChatGPT app.

No precedent comes to mind for non-tech-user software that is open source and also a default choice. The limitation is rarely from the core-tech capability; core-tech is often the same as what closed source uses.

18al

3 months agodiscuss

Could you elaborate on what you mean by OOD detection seeming ill-posed?

18al

3 months agodiscuss

The wish for an _AI revolution_ in learning seems to have been granted by a monkey's paw. Articles like this, or [0], or browsing r/teachers [1], or even talking close-ones in college, give a rather grim view of AI use.

A para from from [0] makes it seem that students understand that LLM use doesn't lead to learning, but still do so. Do they not see effort put into learning worthwhile?

  A few months ago, I overheard some college students talking about their classes.
  One was complaining about an assignment they needed to do that night, and
  another incredulously asked why they wouldn’t just have ChatGPT do it. The first
  replied, “This is my major, I actually need to learn stuff in this class. I use
  AI for my other classes.”

I myself use LLMs for learning (using ChatGPT's study mode for instance r.i.p) and can see that there's a right way to use it—you reach for it when you hit a wall, not to avoid the friction of developing an understanding.

From what I understand tho, most of LLM use for learning is just LLM used as a tool for cheating. Even tfa mentions something of the sort:

  few of Musall’s most advanced students have taken advantage of AI to learn new
  topics. But, as far as she can tell, more students are using it to just find
  answers

The article attributes _skill issue_ as part of the problem, but how much of that is a motivation or awareness issue. How do you make student realize that learning is worth it?

[0] https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/04/to-teach-in-the-time...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/

18al

4 months agodiscuss

Depends on how the transformer has been trained. If it has seen 11 digit examples while training it might work, else the input will be out of distribution and it will respond with a nonsensical number.

For instance the current high score model (311 params [0]), when given 12345678900 + 1, responds with 96913456789.

An interesting experiment would be: what's the minimum number of parameters required to handle unbounded addition (without offloading it to tool calls).

Of course memory constraints would preclude such an experiment. And so a sensible proxy would be: what kind of neural-net architecture and training would allow a model to handle numbers lengths it hasn't been trained on. I suspect, this may be not be possible.

[0] https://github.com/rezabyt/digit-addition-311p

Submissions

What's Wrong with Artificial Intelligence – Rich Sutton (2001)

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