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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?

#131

Post by ethanbond »

imdsm wrote: post #124
29_29 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

IMO being a good technologist entails being skeptical of technologies. Someone has to and should be blindly optimistic, and some people’s jobs borderline depend on it (like VCs) because the risk-reward is asymmetric for them. Overall though, we need to maintain a culture of skepticism around technology — much like scientists do around science. That’s especially true when discussing tech that either: discredits the industry in the eyes of the non-tech public; enables widespread fraud against vulnerable people; or could have significant negative impacts on “the commons” like spam, pollution, reckless political or economic disruption, etc.

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

#132

Post by chaosbolt »

Hacker News is the real echo chamber, color me surprised that using the same system of posts and comments that turned Reddit into the ** show that it's today would also turn HN into the same thing.

People who aren't in tech or aren't informed don't know about the latest development in tech, same reason you don't know about the latest development in healthcare or construction...

But, and I'll only speak for myself, GPT allowed me to add more features to my side project in 2 months than I did in 3 years... If you know how to use it then it becomes a great tool, the 16k context 3.5 or the 32k tokens context in GPT 4 (when necessary because expensive) are really good and can do a lot and infer context and assume things about your project etc.

You shouldn't be a contrarian to be a contrarian, same thing happened with the blockchain, HN is still shitting on it in 2023 but I just transfered some crypto to my sister in another country instantly, where if I had to do it using the usual financial system it'll involve a lot more headache and will usually take a couple days... and all of this on the ethereum proof of stake blockchain aka not as power hungry as it was, this is objective value it adds.

Now the contrarians usually see posts written by 90 IQ "journalists" (bots) that say "AI will make humans irrelevant" or "blockchain will kill all banks" and they start responding against this but also miss the actual value these things add, of course chatGPT will not build you a house that's obvious and only another bot would argue for and against it, but it can help you become a lot more efficient.

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

#133

Post by samuellevy »

narag wrote: post #111
samuellevy wrote: post #31

There's definitely a few echo chambers around AI, but it's definitely not something that "just techies" are onto. ChatGPT made some waves at the end of last year. My in-laws were wanting to talk to (at) me about it at Christmas. There's plenty of awareness outside of the tech circles, but most of the discussion (both out and in of the tech world) seems to miss what LLMs actually _are_. The reason why ChatGPT was impr…

It's not AI. As accurate as it may ever seem, it's simply not actually aware of what it's saying. Conflating intelligence and awareness seems to me the biggest confusion around this topic. When non-technical people ask me about it, I ask them to consider three questions: - is alive? - thinks? - can speak (and understand)? A plant, microbe, primitive animals... are alive, don't think, can't speak. A dog, a monkey... a…

Ehh... my dog is alive, thinks, and "speaks" in a manner - not a cute term for barking, but he communicates (with relatively high effectiveness) his wants and desires. Maybe not using human words, but he certainly has his own sort of crude language, as does my cat.

The problem is that LLMs aren't alive, and they _don't think_. The speaking is arguable.

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

#134

Post by doctor_eval »

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 was on a shuttle bus in the early hours of this morning in regional SE Queensland and they had some Triple-M talkback show talking about it. Someone was talking about how their kid had told them that they can just get GPT to write responses to emails for them.

To their credit, they said, "wtf would we want to do that?!"

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

#135

Post by matwood »

camillomiller wrote: post #84
Yizahi wrote: post #74

All professions who need to write a lot of bullshit text are adopting NNs. So basically any advertisements, corporate news and emails etc. And parsing and responses to such ads or corpoletters, if they are required. Another area to be taken over - translations and language learning. Half a year ago my teacher had been suggesting different resources for different issues, like this online translator for this task, that…

Bullshit text is the right definition. ChatGPT can replace writers only in the head of those who’ve never actually written, don’t understand what writing actually is, and don’t care about a skillset that is not just summed up by being able to spit out coherent sentences. In my view, companies who fire their writers or believe that chatGPT can take their place already will experience a very harsh reckoning in the medi…

A lot of copy doesn't need top writers. I think what we'll see is companies who adopt LLMs in tandem with their writers will get more productive than companies that go all one way or the other. And over time, there may be less writers required. I say 'may' here because humans have a knack for using any available capacity.

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

#136

Post by daniel-cussen »

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.

[dead]

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

#137

Post by viraptor »

Not sure if tech, but some kind of echo chamber. I've introduced ChatGPT to multiple people in both tech and not; they all ended up actually using it and getting some benefit out of it. Then became actively interested in the topic. (they initiated conversations about it later on)

So, are LLMs as popular outside of HN and similar communities - no. Are people outside of them interested - definitely yes.

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

#138

Post by sensanaty »

Definitely. The tech is impressive but anyone I've spoken to thinks of it as Cleverbot 2.0, and among the more technically minded I've found that people mostly are indifferent. Hell, IRL most people I know don't think much of it, though on HN and elsewhere online I see a lot of people praising it as the next coming of Christ (this thread included) which puts it in a similar tier as crypto and other Web3 hypetrains as far as I'm concerned.

Every "AI" related business idea I've seen prop up recently is people just hooking up a textbox to ChatGPT's API and pretending they're doing something novel or impressive, presumably to cash in on VC money ASAP. The Notion AI is an absolute fucking joke of epic proportions in its uselessness yet they keep pushing it in every newsletter

And a funny personal anecdote, a colleague of mine tried to use ChatGPT4 when answering a customer question (they work support). The customer instantly knew it was AI-generated and was quite pissed about it, so the support team has an unofficial rule to not do that any more.

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

#139

Post by rsynnott »

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.

Similar experience; a lot of laypeople seem to be viewing it as world changing magic, whereas that view is far more niche in tech.

This feels like a common pattern; a few years back many of my non-tech friends believed self-driving cars were coming imminently, whereas ~no-one working in tech believed that.

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

#140

Post by doctor_eval »

wildrhythms wrote: post #104

There's a recent Pew article you might like. >Overall, 18% of U.S. adults have heard a lot about ChatGPT, while 39% have heard a little and 42% have heard nothing at all. >However, few U.S. adults have themselves used ChatGPT for any purpose. Just 14% of all U.S. adults say they have used it for entertainment, to learn something new, or for their work. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/05/24/a-majorit...

Wait, 14% of US adults have used a product released 7 months ago?

And this is considered "few adults" ?!

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