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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?

#151

Post by iamben »

imdsm wrote: post #122
Gigachad wrote: post #110

Earlier 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…

I get the analogy, but banking without cash is pretty convenient. I mean, I don't even have to carry a wallet around if I don't want to (my cards are on my phone). I can send money anywhere in minutes, I can pay online, or over the phone and everything is pretty secure (and insured).

I'm sure there's some niche edge cases I'm missing, but where the 'post cash'/bank cards world has real advantages, how would cryptocurrency improve any normal persons day to day? I see no real advantage, it all seems more "you could also do this with crypto" - except maybe not as well/fast/cheaply/securely?

FWIW I don't hate crypto at all, I just can't see it becoming 'the thing'. AI I can definitely see having a place (already). I find ChatGPT insanely useful for some things.

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

#152

Post by kspacewalk2 »

rvense wrote: post #68

On October 17th, 1979, VisiCalc was released. I'm sure pretty much every accountant in the world got up and went to work that day exactly like they'd been doing all of their career. It probably didn't feel different for that many of them. Most of them had probably never used a computer then, and a lot of them probably didn't feel any particular need to, at least until they tried it. There were probably more than a fe…

You have to go back a whole lot further if you're making an analogy between chatGPT and spreadsheets. Back to Ada Lovelace, probably. VisiCalc did already useful and already transformative, the only things missing was better user experience and adoption. ChatGPT is a nice thought provoking toy, but not really useful other than as a novel search engine interface.

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

#153

Post by RayVR »

sensanaty wrote: post #138

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…

I think there’s a meaningful difference between sota LLM tech and crypto. I’ve not yet seen a real problem which was better solved by crypto beyond just being not official money.

I’ve already used the openai api to automate several genuinely difficult things for myself. Mostly acting as a translator from natural language to structured output.

I do agree it is massively overhyped and there will be an inevitable sentiment correction.

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

#154

Post by BizarreByte »

Yes we are and nearly everyone is convinced it'll change the world, but they're simply guessing. None of us know how this will, or won't play out.

Personally? I think we're sleep walking into social disaster and this tech is only going to make people's lives more difficult.

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

#155

Post by matwood »

threeseed wrote: post #27
throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #8

This isn't just a tech echo chamber, it's the YC/SV echo chamber. Nobody is seriously looking at AI for normal products, because it's not trustworthy. Never really will be. Why do you think subways still have human operators? The combined investment & risk of full automation aren't worth it. It'll be useful for customer support bots, and backend things like spam filtering and other statistical analysis. But otherwise…

It's not just about it being trustworthy but about quality. AI looks to be great for ideation and development. But it's not there if you value a high quality output.

> AI looks to be great for ideation and development.

Agreed. I don't see this current version of AI as a calculator, but as an adaptable companion to work ideas with. The calculator side will continue to get better, but there's already so much value in the ideation side. Obvious is augmenting writing. The other I have found is in planning. If we expand to images, there's things like Firefly.

Getting an email just right is so much easier/faster now. It's increased my productivity from that one thing alone. Coding is also very helpful, and while not always 100%, it presents ideas which then I can use to get to the solution.

This is the first time I've seen a fairly straight line to a Star Trek like computer assistant at some point in the future.

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

#156

Post by rsynnott »

HKH2 wrote: post #33
jhugo wrote: post #4

> maybe AI mainstream adoption will take longer than we anticipate I mean, I'm in "tech", and I don't anticipate it happening soon. People want something they can trust, and current solutions are nowhere near that.

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!

There was a fun example from a history lecturer a while back. Did you know that the Romans developed special anti-elephant crossbows to fight Hannibal? Because ChatGPT knows that. I think people who rely on this sort of thing for essay writing may be in for a rude awakening, especially when they have to write a thesis.

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

#157

Post by pophenat »

laurent123456 wrote: post #123
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.

Why obviously? It might as well be a passing fad, and all those uses oof ChatGPT might turn out to be a temporary amusement rather than real and lasting improvement of people's workflows. It's interesting how something comes out, and then all of a sudden so many people are immediately absolutely certain that it will have a massive impact at many levels, even before we've seen any meaningful ROI. To me it is a bit absurd and somewhat annoying. Of course, the tech is cool, it does have some amazing uses, but to forecast growth to trillions of dollars over the next few years and massive job losses seems premature and fuelled by relentless promotion, not only by the likes of OpenAI, but also by all the investment-hungry tech businesses - large and small.

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

#158

Post by monk_e_boy »

Ameo wrote: post #18

Young people all know about AI. There are 24/7 live AI generated SpongeBob shows on TikTok, character.ai is immensely popular, ChatGPT is used by students for homework and stuff, Snapchat AI was all posted all over (mostly memes about how bad and out of touch it is), I get ads for AI anime girl generators, etc. I think there is certainly more talk about it inside tech circles, but I feel like it's more of a generatio…

All my students us it a lot. We use it a lot in the office - we have a lot of digital paperwork to do, ChatGPT is fine at doing it all.

It can write lectures, generate worksheets, come up with interesting quizzes, D&D stuff.

It's just a tool, some people will find it useful, some won't. A bit like a chainsaw.

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

#159

Post by nfw2 »

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 would say it's more akin to AR/VR as far as hype.

In other words, the tech is real and amazing, but it doesn't seem as immediately useful in the short term as some people expect.

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