anyone who believes that "AI" (meaning current, ChatGPT level tech and the next iteration of it) is a bigger threat to humanity than climate change, because of some "Skynet, rise of the machines" scenario nonsense, is 100% inside an AI echo chamber.
Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
141–150 of 755 posts
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#142Same 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…
I mean, I’d be inclined to agree with your friend here, to an extent. A machine for confidently being wrong has rather limited practical applications.
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#143Definitely. 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…
Many people lose their incredulity once more than a few sentences have been read.
By the time someone has read a second paragraph, they have internalized what was at the beginning, and to be told that those two paragraphs were fiction is now to attack the reader instead of the text.
As though reading were so laborious, there's a sunk cost fallacy.
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
> “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 full…
So; I think many people in our sector have a progress-bias from years of Moore's law etc. and run under the assumption that all things tech that display problems (in this case "incorrect information") will just resolve with time and progress.
People outside of tech don't necessarily think this way. So hearing that "it produces incorrect answers" is kind of a deal breaker, no?
Who is right in this case? I actually think that the LLM approach has limits that we could hit the wall of, and for that technique at least never get past the "I'm just making shit up" problem, and in fact the skeptics are quite right.
LLMs are exciting as an automatic language content generation tool, they chain words together in ways that sound like humans, and extract reasoning patterns that look like human reasoning. But they're not reasoning, it doesn't take much to trip them up in basic argumentation. But because they look like they're "thinking" some people with a tech-optimist bias get excited and just assume that the problems will resolve themselves. They could be very wrong, there could in fact be very strong limits to this approach.
... More worrisome is if LLMs because omnipresent despite having this flaw, and we just accept bullshit from computers the way we seemingly now accept complete bullshit from politicians and businessmen....
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
> “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…
There is nothing wrong about the specific objection but, to borrow an analogy from Scott Aaronson, it is rather like dismissing the Wrights’ early airplanes as being slower than a train and only carrying one passenger. What is missing is an appreciation for how intractable the problem seemed five years before.
Bear in mind that for every Wright Brother, there’s a Ferdinand Von Zeppelin. Most heavily hyped technologies don’t have a huge long-term impact.
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Students want someone to do writing for them, and they only have to do a trivial amount of vetting. Now you can hand Lorem Ipsum in for homework!
That probably speaks more to the quality of our homework assignments than the quality of the student. In this day and age, why is our education still based on rote regurgitation?
I agree. They should be chatting to ChatGPT instead.
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#147I don't think it's people in tech specifically - I think that "fire your workers because they're going to be replaced by AI" is a great excuse for firing workers without looking bad. Thus, anyone who might use that excuse has a strong incentive to play up the potential of AI (and thus the plausibility of their excuse), regardless of the actual value of AI. Also, we're all calling it "AI" for some dumbass reason. That…
We (some of us at least) have been calling simple logic in computer games AI. And an artificial plant means some plastic shaped like a plant, it can't do photosynthesis, it can't grow, it can't reproduce. Meanwhile current AIs can code, explain a joke, etc.
After all an artifice: (the use of) a clever trick or something intended to deceive
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 understan…
Buying pizza with a bitcoin? Is that the only use case you can come up with?
Electronic money, instead of paper or coins, is there to stay. However, bitcoin is a very poor implementation of this. The mining alone has contributed significantly to the earth's yearly electricity consumption.
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
In your opinion, how does the "hallucination" issue differ from the same behaviour we see in humans? I don't claim or believe that any LLM is actually intelligent. It just seems that we (at least on an individual basis) can also meet the criteria outlined above. I know plenty of people who are confidently incorrect and appear unwilling to learn or accept their own limitations, myself included. In my opinion, even if…
So humans have a level of knowledge, understanding, and reasoning ability that LLMs simply don't have. I'm writing a response to you right now, and I "know" a certain amount of information about the world. That knowledge has limits, and I can expand it, I can forget it, all sorts of things... "Hallucination" is a term that works well for actual intelligence - when you "know" something that isn't true, and has no path…
> I'm writing a response to you right now, and I "know" a certain amount of information about the world.
How do you know? And more importantly, how do you prove it to others? The only way to prove it is to say: "OK, you are human, I am human, each of us know this is true for ourselves, let's be nice and assume it's true for each other as well".
> But that doesn't really work for LLMs, because there's no knowledge at all.
How do you know? I know your argument saying that the LLM "is just" guessing probabilities, but surely, if the LLM can complete the sentence "The Harry Potter book series was written by ", the knowledge is encoded in its sea of parameters and probabilities, right?
Asserting that it does not know things is pretty absurd. You're conflating "knowledge" with the "feeling" of knowing things, or the ability to introspect one's knowledge and thoughts.
> As a thought experiment, imagine that you're given a book with every possible or likely sequence of coloured circles, triangles, and squares.
I'd argue thought experiments are pretty useless here. The smaller models are quantitatively different from the larger models, at least from a functional perspective. GPT with hundreds of parameters may be very similar to the one you're describing in your thought experiment, but it's well known that GPT models with billions of parameters have emergent properties that make them exhibit much more human-like behavior.
Does your thought experiment scale to hundreds of thousands of tokens, and billions of parameters?
Also, as with the Chinese Room argument, the problem is that you're asserting the computer, the GPU, the bare metal does not understand anything. Just like how our brain cells don't understand anything either. It's _humans_ that are intelligent, it's _humans_ that feel and know things. Your thought experiment would have the human _emulate_ the bare metal layer, but nobody said that layer was intelligent in the first place. Intelligence is a property of the _whole system_ (whether humans or GPT), and apparently once you get enough "neurons" the behavior is somewhat emergent. The fact that you can reductively break down GPT and show that each individual component is not intelligent does not imply the whole system is not intelligent -- you can similarly reductively break down the brain into neurons, cells, even atoms, and they aren't intelligent at all. We don't even know where our intelligence resides, and it's one of the greatest mysteries.
Imagine trying to convince an alien species that humans are actually intelligent and sentient. Aliens opens a human brain and looks inside: "Yeah I know these. Cells. They're just little biological machines optimized for reproduction. You say humans are intelligent? But your brains are just cleverly organized cells that handles electric signals. I don't see anything intelligent about that. Unlike us, we have silicon-based biology, which is _obviously_ intelligent."
You sound like that alien.
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#150What I've noticed is that interest in ChatGPT is spotty. Within any given discipline, some people are excited, and are using it. Others are ambivalent. I don't think either group of people are getting more stuff done, discovering more useful things, etc.
I don't think this is unusual. Adoption of iPhones and GUI-based computers was that way too. People who had those things were by definition more active on them, but not necessarily getting more done.
There could be some self selection going on here. Someone who was really fluent at the old way might not see such a boon from the new way.
I confess to being among the ambivalent, but I see it being used around me, chatted with people about it etc., so I'm not ignorant about it.