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Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

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Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#121

Post by koliber »

I've recently joined the tech org at a company that grows flowers, at a huge scale. The kinds of tech and product problems that they are dealing with are as far removed from the kinds of problems AI can help with as I can imagine. There may be places where generative AI might be able to optimize some things.

This is the real world. Manufacturing. Logistics. Managing people. Building tools for streamlining one tiny part of a workflow and getting people to use them effectively.

This latest client has opened up my eyes to the fact that I've been living in a bubble. I could not be more glad, as I was beginning to suspect that OpenAI is taking over the world.

Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#122

Post by imdsm »

Gigachad wrote: post #110
lrem wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hype is real. But this time it’s backed by something more real than free money out of thin air.

10 years of crypto and still no real use cases. Less than a year of chat gpt and the average person is using it to genuinely provide value.

I mean, to say crypto has no real use cases is wrong. A lot of people are against crypto, and I can understand that, the whole cultural side of it is tough to digest. But if you strip away all of that: the twitter bots, the airdrops, the spam, the shills, the whole cultural lot, and you just look at the core, there are real use cases. Buying the pizza with bitcoin was the first proof.

That being said, I can understand why people dislike it, same way that my grandparents only use cash, they don't trust bank cards. Imagine if we still only used cash?

Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#123

Post by laurent123456 »

kmarc wrote: post #92

FWIW I have the exact opposite experience: people around me, who are _NOT_ in tech, keep talking about AI and lately especially ChatGPT, whereas serious (not only senior) IT professionals don't really. Besides the science behind it, currently it feels like the same hype as crypto a couple years before.

Hype, maybe, but it's obviously not a passing fad like crypto was. Back then many people were trying to figure out what to do with it and we still don't really know.

A week after ChatGPT was out and plenty of people were already using it for writing code, emails, and plenty of other tasks. It would be weird to argue that AI is not going to have a massive impact at many levels.

Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#124

Post by imdsm »

29_29 wrote: post #102
kmarc wrote: post #92

FWIW I have the exact opposite experience: people around me, who are _NOT_ in tech, keep talking about AI and lately especially ChatGPT, whereas serious (not only senior) IT professionals don't really. Besides the science behind it, currently it feels like the same hype as crypto a couple years before.

Friends I know who previously worked on crypto side projects are suddenly LLM experts.

With exception to the term experts, which I imagine is a term you've applied, I don't think there's anything inherently bad with people changing their focus to the latest tech.

Could this perhaps be a you issue? How do you feel when you think about people changing from microservice architecture to blockchain to crypto and now to language models?

Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#126

Post by demarq »

azangru wrote: post #89
demarq wrote: post #81

Same experience, talked to a young, highly educated person about ChatGPT… they had no clue what I was going on about. But the more surprising thing is that even after I explained what it could do, they weren’t even slightly impressed. “So it tells you wrong answers? Sounds utterly pointless” I was flabbergasted. I think we do live in a bubble. I’m sure architects and surgeons have equally exciting advances in their f…

> “So it tells you wrong answers? Sounds utterly pointless”. I was flabbergasted. Could you tell a bit more about why this objection surprised you so much? I am often seeing this in the same tech circles that rejected the web3 craze; and I have to confess, it does sound reasonable to me. There is a recent PR opened in the MDN docs repository after MDN added the "AI explain" button, pointing out how utterly useless a…

I explained all it could do, and I felt I was doing great. But the moment I mentioned that it can get things wrong and sound totally confident, pretty much the conversation was me trying to justify why it’s still useful and I didn’t get anywhere beyond that.

I was shocked because I felt that being occasionally wrong would be a foot note, but to the person I was talking to its entire usefulness hinged on it being fully reliable.

For the capabilities we’re getting surely, the occasional wrong answer is barely a sacrifice!

Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#127

Post by ethanbond »

danpalmer wrote: post #109
kmarc wrote: post #92

FWIW I have the exact opposite experience: people around me, who are _NOT_ in tech, keep talking about AI and lately especially ChatGPT, whereas serious (not only senior) IT professionals don't really. Besides the science behind it, currently it feels like the same hype as crypto a couple years before.

I've seen this but it's only the people outside tech who were into crypto, and who were invested in GameStop, who min-max credit card offers or air miles, etc. It's those who are into the latest hustle-culture fad. My family who are mostly non-technical have heard of ChatGPT but couldn't tell you what it is or does. In tech I see a wide spectrum of skepticism, with many people using it well and getting a lot of value…

> it's only the people outside tech who were into crypto

This is obviously not true. There was a lot of skepticism within the tech world but also a LOT of hype and hubris, even coming from some of the most important (even if not most credible) voices in the industry like Andreessen.

Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#128

Post by detaro »

KaiserPro wrote: post #106
detaro wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it doesn't mean "remote drivers". Yes, an automated network is going to have people monitoring it and the ability of remote control for emergencies or failures, but that's not the same as "remote drivers" for normal operations. (in the case of DLR, the staff on the train can take control if needed, but other networks don't have staff on every train)

I know this is getting into "technically correct" territory, but I think its reasonably important to qualify. As we are getting into AI automates when it turns out that actually was largely automated already. For the tube, places like the victoria, jubilee, the driver doesn't actually "drive" if that makes any sense. They open the doors and hold down a button that indicates the line is clear. The driver has no real c…

> In the sense that there is a central operator that opens and closes the doors and tells the train to move to the next station.

Is it that remote controlled? Other systems I'm familiar with don't need a human for that.

> As we are getting into AI automates when it turns out that actually was largely automated already.

Oh, I fully agree with that point. You don't need AI-hype to automate a subway system, it's in many ways in the real of "classic" industrial automation.

Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#129

Post by matwood »

kmarc wrote: post #92

FWIW I have the exact opposite experience: people around me, who are _NOT_ in tech, keep talking about AI and lately especially ChatGPT, whereas serious (not only senior) IT professionals don't really. Besides the science behind it, currently it feels like the same hype as crypto a couple years before.

> people around me, who are _NOT_ in tech, keep talking about AI and lately especially ChatGPT

Same, and they are using it. Tech tends to look at the exception cases or try to use it for exact answer types of things. But non-tech are happily using it as they would Google to come up with ideas for parties and events, write the mundane emails many people have to send, etc... I've been using it to bounce ideas off of and build things like marketing plans. Basically dynamic templates. The challenge right now is prompt engineering.

Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#130

Post by hnfong »

samuellevy wrote: post #112
joshuahedlund wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how does the "hallucination" issue differ from the same behaviour we see in humans? In humans “hallucination” means observing false inputs. In GTP it means creating false outputs . Completely different with massively different connotations.

That's kind of the point, but also kind of not. GPT isn't making true or false outputs. It's just making outputs. The truthiness or falseness of any output is irrelevant because it has no concept of true or false. We're assigning those values to the outputs ourselves, but like... it doesn't know the difference. It's like blaming a die for a high or a low roll - it's just doing rolls. It has no knowledge of a good or…

You could apply the same logic to humans.

Whenever a human speaks, it's just vibrations of wave molecules, triggered by the mouth and throat, which in turn are controlled by electric signals in the human's neural network. Those neurons, they just make muscles move. They don't have any concept of true of false. At least nobody has found a "true of false" neuron in the brain.

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