If you have to advertise - shove your product in people's faces - to keep sales, your product is not supplying enough real value, does not have staying power, and you should lose.
"Just being a bit better or a little cheaper isn't necessarily going to win over a lot of people if they never bother trying it due to existing brand loyalties"
This is a feature, not a bug. Brand loyalties are built when products are reliable and good. Your product should be enough of an improvement to make people move of their own accord.
If your new product solves frustrations present in an incumbent, on a long enough timescale, your product will come out on top.
If both products are presented equally in a marketplace, the better one will win. If your company does not survive because you can't shove it in people's faces, this is a good thing.
> If your new product solves frustrations present in an incumbent, on a long enough timescale, your product will come out on top.
I've got numerous examples where this didn't happen because of other brand awareness. Neato had a very competitive and better bot vacuum to iRobot for years and yet they failed to gain traction. A large part of that would be because everyone knew about iRobot's offerings and yet ask any random person if they've ever heard of Neato Botvac and you'll get crickets. You're imagining an ideal world where clear better performers always win. This doesn't often happen in practice.
First mover advantage, brand awareness, word of mouth, early reviewers, etc. People then build a brand connection of "robot vacuum" == "roomba", everything else is just a fake imitation.
Imagine you're a normal random consumer and not an electronics nerd. You've heard people on the morning TV news show talk about these robot vacuums and showed a Roomba. You have a friend that got one last Christmas and said their Roomba was pretty cool. You go to the store, and you see a few Roombas and some other brands you've never heard of. You're probably only going to spend a few minutes looking at the shelf. Which one are you likely to get?
And in the end iRobot managed to coast on that brand connection of "robot vacuum" == "roomba" for a lot of people for nearly 20 years. It really only took until competitors were way cheaper and way better that got people to really start to switch. Their products have not been competitive for over a decade and yet they've only finally died. That power of linking a brand to a specific item or service is powerful, and its not purely push advertising and forced video ads that build it.
Its somewhat the same thing for Google. Sure, they do some amount of advertising especially at top of line events, but overall it seems their direct outbound marketing is kind of low overall. They spend a bunch of defaults and continue to build the connection that to search the internet is to Google, even as they continue to inject more paid results and the quality declines. Other competitors are out there which are comparable or better, but even with them heavily advertising they fail to unseat that brand connection.
I've been messing around with GA recently, esp indirect encoding methods. This paper seems in support of perspectives I've read while researching. In particular, that you can decompose weight matrices into spectral patterns - similar to JPEG compression and search in compressed space.
Something I've been interested in recently is - I wonder if it'd be possible to encode a known-good model - some massive pretrained thing - and use that as a starting point for further mutations.
Like some other comments in this thread have suggested, it would mean we can distill the weight patterns of things like attention, convolution, etc. and not have to discover them by mutation - so - making use of the many phd-hours it took to develop those patterns, and using them as a springboard. If papers like this are to be believed, more advanced mechanisms may be able to be discovered.
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interesting! Super cool idea to augment software built with traditional DBs
I had some thoughts [1] around a concept similar to this a while ago, although it was much less refined. My thinking was around whether or not we could have a neural net remember a relational database schema, and be able to be queried for facts it knows, and facts it might predict.
This seems like a much more sensical (and actualised) stab at this kinda concept.
I wonder if, for a given dialect (and even DDL), you could use that token masking technique similar to how that Structured Outputs [1] thing went:
Quote:
"While sampling, after every token, our inference engine will determine which tokens are valid to be produced next based on the previously generated tokens and the rules within the grammar that indicate which tokens are valid next. We then use this list of tokens to mask the next sampling step, which effectively lowers the probability of invalid tokens to 0. Because we have preprocessed the schema, we can use a cached data structure to do this efficiently, with minimal latency overhead."
I.e. mask any tokens that would produce something that isn't valid SQL in the given dialect, or further, a valid query for the given schema. I assume some structured outputs capability is latent to most assistants nowadays, so they probably already have explored this
I'm quite enthusiastic about reading this. Since watching the progress by the larger LLM labs, I've noted that they're not making material changes in model configuration that I think to be necessary to proceed toward more refined and capable intelligence. They're adding tools and widgets to things we know don't think like a biological brain. These are really useful things from a commercial perspective, but I think LLMs won't be an enduring paradigm, at least wrt genuine stabs at artificial intelligence. I've been surprised that there hasn't been more effort to transformative work like in the linked article.
The two things that hang me up on current progress in intelligence is that:
- there don't seem to be models which possess continuous thought. Models are alive during a forward pass on their way to produce a token and brain-dead any other time
- there don't seem to be many models that have neural memory
- there doesn't seem to be any form of continuous learning. To be fair, the whole online training thing is pretty uncommon as I understand it.
Reasoning in token space is handy for evals, but is lossy - you throw away all the rest of the info when you sample. I think Meta had a paper on continuous thought in latent space, but I don't think effort in that has continued to anything commercialised.
Somehow, our biological brains are capable of super efficiently doing very intelligent stuff. We have a known-good example, but research toward mimicking that example is weirdly lacking?
All the magic happens in the neural net, right? But we keep wrapping nets with tools we've designed with our own inductive biases, rather than expanding the horizon of what a net can do and empowering it to do that.
Recently I've been looking into SNNs, which feel like a bit of a tech demo, as well as neuromorphic computing, which I think holds some promise for this sort of thing, but doesn't get much press (or, presumably, budget?)
is "becoming truth seeking" not some sort of religion - like the sports team - and the bay area is your tribe? Perhaps you were already suggesting this in your article and I've missed this - if so I apologise.
you seem to suggest that truth-seeking > tribalism, and we should pity the poor fools who are about tribalism. In this way, you're being tribalist against tribalism, no?
If ignorant tribalism brings people community and happiness, isn't that just as valid and commendable as truth-seeking?
Truth-seeking might provide a level of understanding of the world which is of value to your operating in life. It is not necessarily a sublime good of it's own right. Too much of it will alienate you from your mates.
I'd wager types like you might find on HN, Bay Area, could do with a little less seeking, in fact.
The Underground Man comes to mind, and presents the extreme of this spectrum. But then maybe he'd find mates in an area filled with other Underground Men?
haha yes I was wondering if someone would pick up on this, totally agree
I absolutely joke I am "tribal against tribalists", which to me is sorta like someone implying their greatest fear is fear itself.
I do mention it is a totally fair belief to have in that piece, and respect conscious decisions to value that like I respect people's decisions to follow more traditional religions, but only have issue when it's passed off as a truth-seeking value
Have not heard of the Underground Man, will check it out -- thanks for reading btw!
the inferior methods were slower but more flexible - could handle any and all edge cases. Currently we have a UX that really efficiently realises 80% of cases.
To relate to the article - google flights is the Keyboard and Mouse - covering 80% of cases very quickly. Conversational is better for when you're juggling more contextual info than what can be represented in a price/departure time/flight duration table. For example, "i'm bringing a small child with me and have an appointment the day before and I really hate the rain".
Rushed comment because I'm working, but I hope you get the gist.
Current flight planning UX is overfit on the 80% and will never cater to the 20% because cost/benefit of the development work isn't good
A mate of mine built a works scheduler using RL + MCTS. It was interesting seeing the scheduler get smarter as they added in reward for real life constraints. For example, certain types of work couldn't happen on a tuesday - they add that in to the reward calculation, retrain, it now avoids Tuesdays. Build up that reward calculation based on available data, and it got to be super capable at making a workable schedule. Also orders of magnitude faster than linear solvers (albeit without guarantee of "optimality").
"Just being a bit better or a little cheaper isn't necessarily going to win over a lot of people if they never bother trying it due to existing brand loyalties"
This is a feature, not a bug. Brand loyalties are built when products are reliable and good. Your product should be enough of an improvement to make people move of their own accord.
If your new product solves frustrations present in an incumbent, on a long enough timescale, your product will come out on top.
If both products are presented equally in a marketplace, the better one will win. If your company does not survive because you can't shove it in people's faces, this is a good thing.