kushalc (u/kushalc) - Readit News

kushalc commented on The Bitter Lesson Is Misunderstood obviouslywrong.substack.c... · Posted by u/JnBrymn

FloorEgg · 6 months ago

10+ years ago I expected we would get AI that would impact blue collar work long before AI that impacted white collar work. Not sure exactly where I got the impression, but I remember some "rising tide of AI" analogy and graphic that had artists and scientists positioned on the high ground.

Recently it doesn't seem to be playing out as such. The current best LLMs I find marvelously impressive (despite their flaws), and yet... where are all the awesome robots? Why can't I buy a robot that loads my dishwasher for me?

Last year this really started to bug me, and after digging into it with some friends I think we collectively realized something that may be a hint at the answer.

As far as we know, it took roughly 100M-1B years to evolve human level "embodiment" (evolve from single celled organisms to human), but it only took around ~100k-1M for humanity to evolve language, knowledge transfer and abstract reasoning.

So it makes me wonder, is embodiment (advanced robotics) 1000x harder than LLMs from an information processing perspective?

kushalc · 6 months ago

Not a robotics guy, but to extent that the same fundamentals hold—

I think it's a degrees of freedom question. Given the (relatively) low conditional entropy of natural language, there aren't actually that many degrees of (true) freedom. On the other hand, in the real world, there are massively more degrees of freedom both in general (3 dimensions, 6 degrees of movement per joint, M joints, continuous vs. discrete space, etc.) and also given the path dependence of actions, the non-standardized nature of actuators, actuators, kinematics, etc.

All in, you get crushed by the curse of dimensionality. Given N degrees of true freedom, you need O(exp(N)) data points to achieve the same performance. Folks do a bunch of clever things to address that dimensionality explosion, but I think the overly reductionist point still stands: although the real world is theoretically verifiable (and theoretically could produce infinite data), in practice we currently have exponentially less real-world data for an exponentially harder problem.

Real roboticists should chime in...

kushalc commented on The Bitter Lesson Is Misunderstood obviouslywrong.substack.c... · Posted by u/JnBrymn

kushalc · 6 months ago

Hey folks, OOP/original author and 20-year HN lurker here — a friend just told me about this and thought I'd chime in.

Reading through the comments, I think there's one key point that might be getting lost: this isn't really about whether scaling is "dead" (it's not), but rather how we continue to scale for language models at the current LM frontier — 4-8h METR tasks.

Someone commented below about verifiable rewards and IMO that's exactly it: if you can find a way to produce verifiable rewards about a target world, you can essentially produce unlimited amounts of data and (likely) scale past the current bottleneck. Then the question becomes, working backwards from the set of interesting 4-8h METR tasks, what worlds can we make verifiable rewards for and how do we scalably make them? [1]

Which is to say, it's not about more data in general, it's about the specific kind of data (or architecture) we need to break a specific bottleneck. For instance, real-world data is indeed verifiable and will be amazing for robotics, etc. but that frontier is further behind: there are some cool labs building foundational robotics models, but they're maybe ~5 years behind LMs today.

[1] There's another path with better design, e.g. CLIP that improves both architecture and data, but let's leave that aside for now.

kushalc commented on 61% of “Entry-Level” Jobs Require 3+ Years of Experience talent.works/blog/2018/03... · Posted by u/giffarage

stinkytaco · 8 years ago

Hmmmm... what have you got for someone with no experience?

j/k, but I am curious how much time you think is average for a job search in terms of both hours spent and days/weeks before finding something. You talk about "time and stubbornness" but I'm interested just how much time and how much stubbornness. I realize this varies widely by industry, but I would expect there's some sort of white collar average.

kushalc · 8 years ago

We're actually hiring for no-experience positions too! (TBH, some of my best hires were no-experience, high-potential fresh grads who've turned into powerhouses.) I don't suppose you want to be a Marketing Assistant? ;)

To your specific Q, yes, it does vary dramatically by location and specialty. In fact, we did an analysis about exactly that a few months ago! Even for white-collar positions, it ranges from ~14 weeks (software engineers) to ~90 days (HR specialists) to >>90 days (mechanical engineers):

https://talent.works/blog/2017/09/22/how-long-does-it-take-t...

When you dig in, even specialties that take the same time have very different reasons. For instance, mechanical engineers see a pretty high interview callback rate to job applications, it's just that there aren't _enough_ mechanical engineer job openings out there! OTOH, there are tons of HR specialist job openings but you need to apply to a million jobs to even get one reply.

kushalc commented on 61% of “Entry-Level” Jobs Require 3+ Years of Experience talent.works/blog/2018/03... · Posted by u/giffarage

jamestimmins · 8 years ago

The buried lede here seems to be "In real life, folks need to apply to 150-250 jobs to get a job".

I'd be so, so interested to see the breakdown here, and what causes these types of numbers. Are there just enormous numbers of applicants for every job? Are people applying for jobs they aren't qualified for? How does this compare in tech vs the rest of the job market?

The signal/noise ratio must be absurdly low if this is possible.

kushalc · 8 years ago

These numbers vary dramatically by location and specialty, e.g. a Marketing Assistant in Chicago has very different prospects (and expected # applications to job offer) vs. a Software Engineer in SF vs. an HR specialist in Ohio.

We did an analysis on this awhile ago, specifically about # of days to get a job, but it also has some analysis about # of applications:

https://talent.works/blog/2017/09/22/how-long-does-it-take-t...

kushalc commented on 61% of “Entry-Level” Jobs Require 3+ Years of Experience talent.works/blog/2018/03... · Posted by u/giffarage

faitswulff · 8 years ago

This also explains why I started to get so many callbacks on job applications at year 5 in my programming career:

> 3, 5 and 8 are your magic numbers. After 5+ years of experience, you (officially) qualify for most mid-level jobs. After 8+ years, you qualify for senior ones. And 3+ for entry-level, obvs.

kushalc · 8 years ago

Right? We see it all the time.

Waterluvian commented below about the hiring markets self-optimizing themselves to efficiency.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16702612

In short, we see so many market inefficiencies in hiring, it'd be hilarious if it weren't folks' lives we were talking about. There's no practical difference between someone who has 4.750 years of experience and 5.250 years of experience, but the market dramatically prefers the latter.

kushalc commented on 61% of “Entry-Level” Jobs Require 3+ Years of Experience talent.works/blog/2018/03... · Posted by u/giffarage

sixdimensional · 8 years ago

There is an interesting catch-22 I've experienced regarding a recommendation the article makes - if you remove things like graduation dates, previous positions / etc. once you reach a certain age (35+ per the article), potential employers now don't have that information.

The catch-22 is, if you're not careful, now employers may think you are NOT senior and so you may be able to get a job, however, it might not be appropriate for your skill level. It can be frustrating for an experienced person.

Although, I've found that, once you have a job, generally typical employers don't really care what you've done before and forget your past experience (which is a shame for them!). Depending on the employer, most of them care, "Can you do what I want from you when I ask it of you?" and that's about it.

I've also heard the advice that says, if you have the experience, and you want a job, your resume should be explicitly tailored to no more and no less than what a job posting requests. I think the advice of obscuring your information to make yourself difficult to gage from an age perspective is an interesting approach, but it probably fits into the same category of advice.

I know this article is likely just a promotional piece for the author's business, but, I have to admit, a number of points felt pretty accurate based on my personal anecdotes.

kushalc · 8 years ago

Definitely not just a promotion. We're a mission-driven company and a we've explicitly chosen as a company to share our learnings with folks (even if it reduces our competitive edge a tiny bit) because we believe it's important to good. Not quite open source, but maybe open knowledge?

And while it's nowhere near peer-reviewed academic paper quality (we won't be submitting to Nature or NIPS anytime soon), my personal background is ML — everything we write is backed by cold, hard internal data and we try to stick to the facts.

All of that said, yes, people really like our data-driven insights and it does drive traffic. :)

kushalc commented on 61% of “Entry-Level” Jobs Require 3+ Years of Experience talent.works/blog/2018/03... · Posted by u/giffarage

kushalc · 8 years ago

Hey guys, I'm the author of this post! (And also happen to be TalentWorks CEO.) A friend sent me this link, I'm happy to answer any Qs.

Also, we're hiring. :) If you're sick of spending all your hard-earned education and experience to help Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc. increase ad CTR by 0.001%, we're working on some pretty cool technical problems. Just email me at kushal@talent.works.

kushalc commented on Stop building dumb stuff obviouslywrong.org/2012/1... · Posted by u/kintan

seagreen · 13 years ago

If you want to help the developing world it's worth the time to take a look at what has actually worked to get countries out of poverty and what hasn't. As far as I can tell there are only two proven ways for countries to get out of poverty:

(1) Kill a bunch of other people and take their stuff.

(2) Industry.

Notice that aid isn't on the list. So it seems that if you actually care about a country you should spend your time helping them get better at (1) or (2). May I humbly suggest (2)? Notice that (2) is going to involve building (or investing, if you're a foreigner) in a lot of dumb stuff. China builds lots of plastic widgets for Americans. China's also bringing tens of millions of people out of poverty.

The problem with the big fix strategy (malaria vaccines, non-profits, etc -- basically non-dumb stuff) is that it always leaves the people in poverty dependent on others. I'm sure you, Kushal, have the highest of motives. Unfortunately not everyone does, which makes leaving the poor dependent on others a very bad strategy for them.

Anyway, welcome to HN!

P.S. Can anyone think of a country that has gotten out of poverty based on aid? All the modern examples I can think of (Korea, Taiwan, China, Singapore, Latvia, Lithuania, etc.) haven't.

kushalc · 13 years ago

(Am original author)

YES, I totally agree! :) —

At Vittana (the org I founded), we joke there are only three ways to _really_ change the world.

* religions: whether you believe in God or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, you gotta agree that religion has affected world history

* governments: law & order, basic needs, wars -- name it, it's probably there

* markets: biotech, microchip, Internet, space -- need I say more?

In fact, I'd argue that if you look at the past 50 years, even in the United States but certainly elsewhere (e.g. the Asian Tigers), and all of the incredible things we've seen -- the biotech, microchip, Internet, space revolutions -- you could trace it all back to education.

And in particular (at least in the United States), I'd wager you could probably trace it all back to the GI Bill: that, for the first time, an entire generation could finish college if they wanted. You see similar investments in education elsewhere.

When that happens (assuming non-dysfunctional governments like in Egypt, etc.), you see a generation of people both creating and filling in opportunity for themselves through industry. That's what excites us.

At Vittana, we focus on providing education micro-loans to fight youth poverty. It's very much about a hand up, not a hand out: not a donation and not aid, but a business partnership among equals.

Take Ana Lizbeth, for instance, one of my favorite students: she wanted to be a programmer but needed $713 to graduate -- because of a Vittana Loan, that became possible.

http://blog.vittana.org/ana-lizbeth-a-mothers-dream-and-dete...

We're not starting the cult or island nation of Vittana anytime soon -- I'm certainly not ;) -- so that leaves us with free markets. Our hope is that by going first, we can show others that education micro-loans are _possible_ to do and spark others to do it too.

Big fixes don't really work, but sometimes crazy, risky small ideas turn into big movements. That's our hope at least. :)

And thank you for the welcome! I've actually been with HN almost since the beginning (2,046 days — just happened to see earlier) but haven't been active/been busy building Vittana. I just logged in today when I saw a whole bunch of referrers coming in from HN.

kushalc commented on Stop building dumb stuff obviouslywrong.org/2012/1... · Posted by u/kintan

geuis · 13 years ago

I disagree with this. It's essentially the same argument that there should be a single societal focus on shipping all of our extra food to those who are starving. True, in sheer numbers we have the gross resources to do just that. We have the infrastructure in terms of ships, planes, and boots on the ground. But there are other reasons we don't do this.

Capitalism doesn't work like this. Resources are allocated via crazy, unfair market actions. 300 years ago, most of Europe resembled what we would call the Third World now. Epidemics, warfare, starvation, etc. The big driving force that changed Europe wasn't the generosity of kings, but the base-level trading and investing among the poor and emerging middle classes.

There were a lot of resources being misspent back in those days. Anyone remember a particular Dutch fascination with tulips? Money was spent on doomed voyages of exploration, fake medicines, flower-based stock bubbles, and any number of other "follies" that in hindsight could have been avoided.

But among all the mispenditure of resources over hundreds of years, hundreds of millions of people were lifted out of poverty. We went from an average lifespan of 40 years to over 80. We live in an actual age of marvels.

In our modern world, we have people building entire companies and fortunes around what are the silliest things. We have even more people copying the first successes and failing. In amongst that, there are the smaller numbers of people building companies that will laterally help those who's lives need improving.

If we lived in a society where our resources could be marshaled enmasse towards one goal or another, it wouldn't be the world we have now.

Telling entrepreneurs that one class of businesses is more socially correct than others isn't how the world works. People will find opportunities in many ways, and those will benefit the people in need. The poor will find edges in the market to improve their own lives. What might seem worthless to you might be valuable to someone else.

So if you have an idea for Bitly 4.0, do it. If you want to build cheap rockets to space, do it. If you want to build a social networking app that uses cheap cell phones to let goat herders in sub-Saharan Africa poke each other over hundreds of miles, do it. You never know how or when your product will be used, or who it will help.

kushalc · 13 years ago

Thanks for the great critique, geuis.

I'm absolutely in agreement with you about unpredictable markets, the massive power of market forces to effect change and that no one entity has (or should have) control over those forces. No one -- certainly not me -- is advocating any form of socialism and central control over economic resources.

What I'd argue instead, however, is organizations (companies, NGOs, whatever) that create meaningful value for humanity actually create MORE value for themselves. It's really, really hard to foresee what is meaningful value. Facebook was similar to MySpace, but (at least for me) creates infinitely more value. Microsoft was born because IBM miscalculated the value of DOS. The list goes back decades and centuries.

However, I'd wager that today we have more clones than original work. Now, maybe bit.ly 4.0 will be what Facebook was to MySpace, but my guess would be no. Instead, if an entrepreneur chose to work on, say, cheap rockets for space -- something original, regardless of immediate perceived value -- I'd wager that'd create far greater value, probably both for themselves and humanity.

My goal was to less tell an entrepreneur to do something more socially correct -- I'm an entrepreneur myself and I probably wouldn't listen to anyone _telling_ me to do anything -- but rather to try building riskier, original stuff.