Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 755 posts

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

#171

Post by SanderNL »

Yes.

I think we just witnessed something akin to the birth of personal computers which puts us around the ‘60-‘70s. It’ll take a while to (vastly) improve and eventually disseminate into society. I’d say a decade at least.

A lot of the surrounding “infrastructure” is still missing, like in the olden days. Techies are scarce and needed for other things. Energy and thus compute is expensive and society still has some important open questions left to answer about its own stability if it wants to survive this next wave of evolution.

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

#172

Post by Yizahi »

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…

Can't generalize of course, but in my company there is a "healthy" mix of both bullshit texts and useful texts. And I'm guessing that this is the case in other companies. E.g. we have technical writes who are responsible to writing proper documentation and they are not going anywhere (yet). There is a majority of internal communication and it is mostly technical and on point. And at the same time there are many bullshil letters send to the company. Almost all letters from the C-suit fall there, because they need to pad one sentence (John Doe is appointed as a Director of Directorship) to a full page of A4 text. Most of the letters from HR/LND unless they are about some factual info, like here is a new service and how to use it. Monthly/Quarterly updates are often padded so much that they are unreadable.

I'm guessing that most of the C-suit are already using NNs to write (and read) those kilometers of word salad.

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

#173

Post by krageon »

Xenoamorphous wrote: post #162
laurent123456 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Question answering and summary generation is miles better with modern AI. What came before does not compare in any way, it is just garbage. If the practical use-case is limited to just this it will be a massive win.

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

#174

Post by kspacewalk2 »

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…

Typically "use case" means not just something a technology can do, but something it's better at than the common alternatives, in some way that matters. Not so with blockchain and financial transactions. Everything it treats like a bug is in fact a valuable, critical feature (i.e. reversibility and tracking). So if grandpa overcomes his tropey Luddite ways and goes from cash to card, he's arrived at the best technology for financial transactions we have, and need go no further.

Crypto's only true significant/impactful use case in finance is money laundering and facilitation of other types of crime.

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

#175

Post by FrustratedMonky »

Yes for now. But that doesn't mean it isn't mind blowing. There is always a bubble. It is just that things moving so fast in the bubble this time, that it seems strange. There is always some lag before new tech diffuses out to rest of industries and public.

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

#176

Post by danpalmer »

ethanbond wrote: post #127
danpalmer wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

With the context of the parent comment, the way to read my point was:

> of the people outside tech, it was only the people who were into crypto (etc) who are into AI.

I hoped this would be clear, especially given that the next paragraph talks about my thoughts on people in tech. Apologies if it wasn't clear enough.

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

#177

Post by deadlast2 »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #141

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.

Maybe there are multiple echo chambers, left, right climate change, ai doom, crypto... we tend to gravitate towards these because we like to get opinions that closely match our current one.

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

#179

Post by refulgentis »

pophenat wrote: post #157
laurent123456 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 abs…

Honestly? It's the tech people who have this weird blinkered view on it. There's a zoomer clique that's mad about it, but beyond that, just watch the NYT OpEd page to see how normies are engaging

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

#180

Post by monero-xmr »

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.

How is crypto a passing fad? ETH is $2k and BTC $30k. Shouldn’t this be 0 by now?
Post reply on HN