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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?

#161

Post by brigadier132 »

Here is the question, it took 5 years from the "Attention is all you need" paper for us to get GPT-4. I've been using GPT-4 api for generating structured content. Right now it's a pain but you can get it to work with some effort.

Do you think this doesn't get 100% better in the next few years with the billions of dollars that are pouring in? Because a GPT-4 that is 100% better at generating useful content is a game changer. Now what if instead of a 2x improvement we see a 3,4,5 or even 10x improvement in the ability of the technology?

All the people comparing the hype around AI with crypto have good pattern matching without any judgement. I personally never got into crypto. I'm very into AI.

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

#162

Post by Xenoamorphous »

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.

> Back then many people were trying to figure out what to do with it and we still don't really know

Same thing is happening with “AI”. I think it’s not a fad but at the same time it is.

In the company I work for, in the media sector, there’s clear and direct use of LLMs (it’s already being done, and yes it will mean quite a few people will lose their jobs, despite many HNers saying that it won’t happen), but with all the hype they want to get some sort of “AI” everywhere and the most ridiculous ideas are being POC’ed.

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

#163

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

RayVR wrote: post #153
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 sentim…

>Mostly acting as a translator from natural language to structured output.

Can I ask what exactly that means/does?

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

#164

Post by azangru »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #144
demarq wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thi…

> People outside of tech don't necessarily think this way. So hearing that "it produces incorrect answers" is kind of a deal breaker, no?

I think it's a deal-breaker for many people inside tech either :-)

It looks like it may be useful in doing grunt work in the field where you are an expert and can check and correct anything that it produces.

Where people expect it to be useful though is in providing them with information they do not already know; and the fact that you cannot trust anything it says makes it unusable for this case.

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

#165

Post by ajkjk »

demarq wrote: post #126
azangru wrote: post #89

Earlier 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…

Well, 90% of the applications people are shouting about and raising money over are complete non-starters as long as 'being wrong sometimes' is a feature. Not that there isn't a good use for a generative system that lies, but.. Everyone is just going around pretending it doesn't, because it's convenient for them, and it feels like a big dumb joke.

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

#166

Post by deadlast2 »

Andrex wrote: post #6
coldtea wrote: post #3

Very much so. But also a hype wave. It's the successor the the big data wave, the ML wave, and countless others

Seems like the successor the crypto craze after that crashed. I'm expecting a wave of grifters fairly soon.

What I love is the same guys that were pushing crypto are now big into AI. The true entrepreneurs.

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

#167

Post by ajkjk »

mannykannot wrote: post #114
azangru wrote: post #89

Earlier 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.

It's not really like that? A small plane with one passenger is a concept that you can extrapolate to a bigger, faster plane. Afaik an often-wrong generative AI is _not_ a concept that extrapolates to a never-wrong generative AI: that's just not how it works at a fundamental level.

Although presumably very smart folks are working on it.

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

#168

Post by iso1631 »

> he hadn’t even heard of ChatGPT

Practically every mainstream comedy show I hear in the UK mentions chatgpt, it's been constantly in the news over the last 6 months. Every high school child knows how to use it, hell there was a south park episode a couple of months about chatgpt written by chatgpt.

This isn't niche stuff.

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

#169

Post by Karunamon »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #163
RayVR wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sentim…

>Mostly acting as a translator from natural language to structured output. Can I ask what exactly that means/does?

"Give me a JSON document when the keys are countries in the G20 and the values are their GDP for the year 2020"

With the Wolfram plug-in, this works and provides good data! It stops three short of the goal probably due to rate limiting, but I think you can get the point: https://chat.openai.com/share/9d6695a9-5ba8-44d8-9ec8-11fcba...

This same kind of query works with any reasonable structured data format.

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

#170

Post by ajkjk »

kortilla wrote: post #26
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…

> Why do you think subways still have human operators? They don’t always. This sucked the wind out of your whole argument. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_driver-less_train_syst...

It really didn't affect their argument.
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