我忘了感到兴奋
2 分•作者: bkaae•3 个月前
我觉得从一开始，人们就在讨论大型语言模型（LLM）将如何改变世界，以及它对商业和环境是好是坏。但昨天，我遛狗的时候，突然意识到这项技术有多么酷炫。
我不想谈论我在支持者和怀疑者之间的立场。我厌倦了听到这些争论，而且在当前这个语境下，这些争论并不重要。
我职业生涯的前八年，一直致力于让计算机通过图像理解现实——扫描收据、检测风力涡轮机叶片上的缺陷，以及其他一些细分但重要的领域。仅仅是为了读取一张收据并大致正确地提取文本，就付出了巨大的努力……这简直是疯狂的。虽然这是很有趣的工作，但要让真实世界符合预设的“盒子”是极其困难的。
我觉得我完全错过了对 LLM 感到兴奋的时刻，反而被卷入了关于“它意味着什么”的讨论中。这并不是因为我失去了关心能力；我可以为新的哈希算法和其他奇特的技术感到兴奋，但 LLM 呢？它甚至没有被我识别为一项技术。也许这是一种“恐怖谷”效应——它不像经典计算机科学的东西，所以我的大脑没有将其识别为技术？
散步时，我开始思考它的可能性。我知道你的思绪可能会立刻跳到宏大的解决方案，但请试着让它在思维的另一部分空间里停留——那个认为它很酷、而不是用来改变社会的工具的部分。我们不知道会发生什么——这没关系——我们以前也从未知道过。但我们确实知道，我们现在拥有这项可以在自己电脑上运行的、非常酷的技术。
你真的可以，在现实生活中，自己编写一个 Python 程序，你可以与之对话，它能理解你并执行任务。所有这一切都在你自己的机器上完成。无需其他！这就像一项完全正常的技术！它太酷了，我简直不敢相信。它甚至可以查看图像并为你解释，而我只是……我现在太兴奋了。
不要让别人夺走这项技术的乐趣，花几秒钟想想那个让我们能够与“沙子”（指代数据或信息）对话的酷炫小技巧。
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I feel like from day one, LLMs was talked about in relation to how it will change the world, how it's good or bad for business and the environment. But then yesterday, I was out walking with the dog, and it hit me how freaking cool this technology is.<p>I don't want to talk about where I am on the spectrum between booster and denier. I'm so sick and tired of hearing about it, and it doesn't matter in this context.<p>I spent the first 8 years of my career trying to make the computer understand reality through images - scanning receipts, finding defects on wind turbine blades, and other niche-but-important things. The amount of work it took to just read a receipt and get the text somewhat right.. It was insane. It was really fun work, but it was so hard to make the real world fit into boxes.<p>I feel like I completely missed being excited about LLMs - instead I got dragged into discussions about <i>what it means</i>. And it's not because I've lost the ability to care; I can get excited about a new hashing algorithm and other weird tech, but LLMs? it didn't even register as a technology. Maybe it's an uncanny valley kind of thing - where it doesn't look like a classic computer science thing, so my brain didn't register it as such?<p>During my walk I started thinking of the possibilities. And I know your mind might immediately jump to fully-fledged big-scope solutions, but just try to give it space in that other part of the mind - the part where it's cool and not a tool to change our society. We have no idea what's gonna happen - and that's fine - we've never known that. But what we do know is that we have this really cool technology that you can run on your own computer now.<p>You can actually literally IRL for real, make a python program yourself that you can talk to and it understands you and do things. All on your own machine. No nothing! IT'S LIKE A TOTALLY NORMAL TECHNOLOGY! It's so cool, I can't really believe it. It can even view images and explain it you, and I just.. I'm so excited now.<p>Don't let them take the fun out of this technology, and spend a few seconds thinking about that cool little trick that made it possible for us to talk to sand.