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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?

#181

Post by krageon »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #100
InvertedRhodium wrote: post #46

Earlier 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…

> In your opinion, how does the "hallucination" issue differ from the same behaviour we see in humans? I feel like if you have any belief in philosophy then LLMs can only be interpreted as a parlour trick (on steroids). Perhaps we are fanciful in believing we are something greater than LLMs but there is the idea that we respond using rhetoric based on trying to find reason within in what we have learned and observed.…

> if you have any belief in philosophy [...]

You're going to have to explain which part of philosophy you mean, because what came after this doesn't follow from that premise at all. It's like saying a Chinese Room is fundamentally different from a "real" solution even though nobody can tell the difference. That's not a "belief in philosophy", that's human exceptionalism and perhaps a belief in the soul.

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

#183

Post by tomtheelder »

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.

> the average person is using it to genuinely provide value

I absolutely do not believe this to be the case. For starters the average person probably isn’t even aware, but the vast majority of folks I’ve seen use it have found it super interesting for like a week then dropped it because it wasn’t actually more helpful/better than the previously available tools.

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

#184

Post by anonzzzies »

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…

For many people it is already a lasting improvement. It simply saves us so much work that we can improve in many other areas. And that is improving too; we have a slew of internal tools build with several LLMs, including the openai ones, that effectively replaced full time employees. The entire process of transforming arbitrary json or xml to another json with a required knowledge of the field semantics is now done quite perfectly using LLMs. And that is a lot of the work we do. Creating json schema’s based on a pdf, text, arcane line feed format etc is also now seconds vs hours. Debugging previous (and we have 10000s of these) transforms is also automated and simply, measurable, more accurate and faster than humans. And it was boring work so we can focus on other things.

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

#185

Post by laurent123456 »

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…

Well it's already here if you care to look. So much stuff is already generated by AI, I use it, many non-technical people I know use it. They didn't have to be taught how it works, it's very accessible, it just works and it can save time and money.

Now there are plenty of challenges to overcome of course, but I have no doubts that something that useful on day one is going to have a big impact once we really understand how to integrate it to various products.

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

#187

Post by mannykannot »

ajkjk wrote: post #167
mannykannot wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I see that the analogy is having the unintended side-effect of apparently being predicated on a supposed utility of ChatGPT’s direct descendants. The point I want to get across is how difficult anything like it seemed before, regardless of whether it begets anything markedly better afterwards.

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

#188

Post by unsigner »

Teachers around me are freaked out about the end of homeworks, they can't stop talking about it. And their students anywhere between 8 and 18 are generating all assignments they can using ChatGPT (and then manually or DeepL-translating into our native language, which is not English and for which ChatGPT is still ridiculously funny). So it's not just tech.

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

#189

Post by jasonlotito »

No.

Technically, the answer is yes and no, but with the context here, no, we aren't in an echo chamber. People who are not in tech are routinely using ChatGPT and AI functionality. I know this because people who I know aren't in tech have told me how they are using it, and how many other people in their industry are using it.

The key here is what industry are they in, and can they make use of what ChatGPT provides.

And it's not just ChatGPT, but AI stuff in general.

The difference between this and crypto and web3 is that crypto and web3 required a LOT of explaining on how it could be useful. AI didn't, and simply said here is the input, and here is the output. That's it. They didn't suggest value. The value was easily apparent. It was tangible. Something that was real.

Does this mean every industry is talking about AI? I'm sure the answer is no. But every industry has it's own echo chamber. That's immaterial.

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

#190

Post by thaw13579 »

samuellevy wrote: post #112
joshuahedlund wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how does the "hallucination" issue differ from the same behaviour we see in humans? In humans “hallucination” means observing false inputs. In GTP it means creating false outputs . Completely different with massively different connotations.

That's kind of the point, but also kind of not. GPT isn't making true or false outputs. It's just making outputs. The truthiness or falseness of any output is irrelevant because it has no concept of true or false. We're assigning those values to the outputs ourselves, but like... it doesn't know the difference. It's like blaming a die for a high or a low roll - it's just doing rolls. It has no knowledge of a good or…

It’s more than next-word prediction though. The supervised fine tuning and RLHF steps are ways to possibly train it to favor truthful answers. Not sure whether this is currently the emphasis of ChatGPT though…
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