François Chollet Profile picture
Jan 8, 2023 18 tweets 4 min read Read on X
The current climate in AI has so many parallels to 2021 web3 it's making me uncomfortable. Narratives based on zero data are accepted as self-evident. Everyone is expecting as a sure thing "civilization-altering" impact (& 100x returns on investment) in the next 2-3 years
Personally I think there's a bull case and bear case. The bull case is way way more conservative than what the median person on my TL considers as completely self-evident. And the actual outcome we'll see is statistically likely to lie in between, somewhat closer to the bear case
The bull case is that generative AI becomes a widespread UX paradigm for interacting with most tech products (note: this has nothing to do with AGI, which is a pipe dream). Near-future iterations of current AI models become our interface to the world's information.
The bear case is the continuation of the GPT-3 trajectory, which is that LLMs only find limited commercial success in SEO, marketing, and copywriting niches, while image generation (much more successful) peaks as a XB/y industry circa 2024. LLMs will have been a complete bubble.
So far there is *far* more evidence towards the bear case, and hardly any towards the bull case. *But* I think we're still very far from peak LLM performance at this time -- these models will improve tremendously in the next few years, both in output and in cost.
For this reason I believe the actual outcome we'll see is somewhere between the two scenarios. "AI as our universal interface to information" is a thing that will definitely happen in the future (it was always going to), but it won't quite happen with this generation of the tech.
Crucially, any sufficiently successful scenario has its own returns-defeating mechanism built-in: commoditization. *If* LLMs are capable of generating outsized economic returns, the tech will get commoditized. It will become a feature in a bunch of products, built with OSS.
As far as we know OpenAI made something like 5-10M in 2021 (1.5 years after GPT-3) and 30-40M in 2022. Only image generation has proven to be a solid commercial success at this time, and there aren't that many successful players in the space. Make of that what you will.
One thing I've found endlessly fascinating is to search Twitter for the most popular ChatGPT tweets, to gain insight into popular use cases. These tweets fall overwhelmingly into one category (like 80%). Can you guess what that is?
That's right, it's SEO/marketing engagement bait. ChatGPT has completely revolutionized the engagement bait tweet routine in these niches.

Some of it directly monetized (pay to unlock 10 ChatGPT secrets!), most of it is just trying to collect eyeballs. ImageImage
Now, seeing such tweets is compatible with both the bull case and the bear case. If the tech is revolutionary, it *will* be used in this way. What's interesting to me is that ~80% of ChatGPT tweets with >2000 likes fall into this category.
This is consistent with the primary learning from the 2020-2021 class of GPT-3 startups (a category of startups willed into existence by VCs and powered by hype), which is that commercial use cases have been falling almost entirely into the marketing and copywriting niches
I think the actual potential of ChatGPT goes significantly further than that, though. It will likely find success in consumer products, and perhaps even in education and search.
Whatever happens, we will know soon enough. Billions of dollars are being scrambled to deploy ChatGPT or similar technology into a large number of products. By the end of the year we will have enough data to make a call.
Anyway, hype aside, I really believe there's a ton of cool stuff you can build with deep learning today. That was true 5 years ago, it's true today, and it will still be true 5 years from now. The tech is super valuable, even if it attracts a particularly extreme form of hype men
One last thought -- don't overindex on the web3 <> LLMs comparison. Of course web3 was pure hot air while LLMs is real tech with actual applications -- that's not the parallel I'm making. The parallel is in the bubble formation social dynamics, especially in the VC crowd.
The fact that investment is being driven by pure hype, by data-free narratives rather than actual revenue data or first-principles analysis. The circularity of it all -- hype drives investment which drives hype which drives investment. The influx of influencer engagement bait.
Most of all, the way that narratives backed by nothing somehow end up enshrined as self-evident common wisdom simply because they get repeated enough times by enough people. The way everyone starts believing the same canon (especially those who bill themselves as contrarians)

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More from @fchollet

Jun 22
Fact check: my 3-year old builds Lego sets (age 5+ ones) on his own by following the instruction booklet. He started doing it before he turned 3 -- initially he needed externally provided error correction and guidance, but now he's just fully autonomous. Can't handle sets for ages 8+ yet though. We'll see what he does at 5.
He also builds his own ideas, which feature minor original inventions. Like this "jeep" which has a spare tire on the back -- not something he saw in any official set. Lego is the best toy ever by the way
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Or this Lego garden (fresh from today). It has a hut with a cool door. It looks chaotic, but everything on here has a purpose. Everything is intended to be something (the tire on a stick is a tree, the tiny cone on the ground is a water sprinkler...)
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Read 4 tweets
Jun 11
I'm partnering with @mikeknoop to launch ARC Prize: a $1,000,000 competition to create an AI that can adapt to novelty and solve simple reasoning problems.

Let's get back on track towards AGI.

Website:

ARC Prize on @kaggle: arcprize.org
kaggle.com/competitions/a…
I published the ARC benchmark over 4 years ago. It was intended to be a measure of how close we are to creating AI that can reason on its own – not just apply memorized patterns.
ARC tasks are easy for humans. They aren't complex. They don't require specialized knowledge – a child can solve them. But modern AI struggles with them.

Because they have one very important property: they're designed to be resistant to memorization.
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Read 8 tweets
May 14
It's amazing to me that the year is 2024 and some people still equate task-specific skill and intelligence. There is *no* specific task that cannot be solved *without* intelligence -- all you need a sufficiently complete description of the task (removing all test-time novelty and uncertainty), and you can achieve arbitrary levels of skills while entirely by-passing the problem of intelligence. In the limit, even a simple hashtable can be superhuman at anything.Image
The "AI" of today still has near-zero (though not exactly zero) intelligence, despite achieving superhuman skill at many tasks.

Here's one thing that AI won't be able to do within five years (if you extrapolate from the excruciatingly slow progress of the past 15 years): acquiring new skills as efficiently as humans, using the same data. The ARC benchmark is an attempt at measuring roughly that.
The point of general intelligence is to make it possible to deal with novelty and uncertainty, which is what our lives are made of. Intelligence is the ability to improvise and adapt in the face of situations you weren't prepared for (either by your evolutionary history or by your past experience) -- to efficiently acquire skills at novel tasks, on the fly.
Read 5 tweets
Apr 28
Many of the people who are concerned with falling birthrates aren't willing to consider the set policies that would address the problem -- aggressive tax breaks for families, free daycare, free education, free healthcare, and building more/denser housing to slash the price of homes.

Most people want children, but can't afford them.
I always found it striking how very rich couples (50M+ net worth) all tend to have over 3 children (and often many more). And how young women always say they want children -- yet in practice they delay family building because they are forced to focus on financial stability and therefore career. When money is not an object, families have 3+ children.
For middle incomes (below 1M/year) fertility goes down as income goes up, because *the cost of raising children increases with income* due to *opportunity cost*. If you make $150k and stand to eventually grow to $300k, you are losing a lot of money by quitting your job to raise children (on top of the prohibitive cost of raising children -- which also goes up as your incomes and thus standards go up). You are thus *more* likely to postpone having children.

Starting at 1M/year, fertility rates rise again. And couples that make 5+M/year get to have the number of children they actually want -- which is almost always more than 3, and quite often 5+.Image
Read 4 tweets
Mar 31
That memorization (which ML has solely focused on) is not intelligence. And because any task that does not involve significant novelty and uncertainty can be solved via memorization, *skill* is never a sign of intelligence, no matter the task.
Intelligence is found in the ability to pick up new skills quickly & efficiently -- at tasks you weren't prepared for. To improvise, adapt and learn.
Here's a paper you can read about it.

It introduced a formal definition of intelligence, as well as benchmark to capture that definition in practical terms. Although it was developed before the rise of LLMs, current state-of-the-art LLMs such as Gemini Ultra, Claude 3, or GPT-4 are not able to score higher than a few percents on that benchmark.arxiv.org/abs/1911.01547
Read 4 tweets
Mar 13
We benchmarked a range of popular models (SegmentAnything, BERT, StableDiffusion, Gemma, Mistral) with all Keras 3 backends (JAX/TF/PT). Key findings:

1. There's no "best" backend. The fastest backend often depends on your specific model architecture.

2. Keras 3 with the right backend is consistently a lot faster than reference PT (compiled) implementations. Often by 150%+.

3. Keras 3 models are fast without requiring any custom performance optimizations. It's all "stock" code.

4. Keras 3 is faster than Keras 2.

Details here: keras.io/getting_starte…
Finding 1: the fastest backend for a given model typically alternates between XLA-compiled JAX and XLA-compiled TF. Plus, you might want to debug/prototype in PT before training/inferencing with JAX or TF.

The ability to write framework-agnostic models and pick your backend later is a game-changer.Image
Finding 2: Keras 3 with the best-performing backend outperforms reference native PT implementations (compiled) for all models we tried.

Notably, 5 out of 10 tasks demonstrate speedups exceeding 100%, with a maximum speedup of 340%.

If you're not leveraging this advantage for any large model training run, you're wasting GPU time -- and thus throwing away money.Image
Read 6 tweets

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