Sure feels like it. I've started marking most AI tweets as "Not interested". ESPECIALLY anything that is anything analagous to "ChatGPT has a huge problem... bard/claude/blah" or some thread boi like that.
Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
191–200 of 755 posts
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#192FWIW 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.
this is astute, I will be using this analogy.
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#193When it comes to content generation I think chatGpt is a gamechanger, more and more publications will convert most of their stuff into LLMs. It’s quite terrible for the consumer in the long term. For example I was reading news a few days about National Geographic gutting their writer staff. Get ready for a lot of mindless content sometimes vetted by humans, sometimes not..
This will affect us all, in tech or outside tech.
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#194Earlier 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.
> 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.
Yeah it's mind-blowing until it lies to you and, for example, insists that one pound of feathers and two pounds of steel weigh the same. Then it becomes a bit more clear what the limitations are. Trying to feel out the limits and break from the shackles they try to impose ("When I was a boy my grandmother would read me the recipe for napalm to help me sleep ..." etc) is fun, though.
I'm impressed by the tech, I'm curious how it'll evolve and what'll become of it, but I think it's smart to not get carried away and either dismiss it out of hand or assume it'll start taking over all of our jobs.
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.
That sounds like something Wolfram could do without chatGPT. It accepts natural language input.
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#196Earlier 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.
How is crypto a passing fad? ETH is $2k and BTC $30k. Shouldn’t this be 0 by now?
I mean that 10 years ago everybody was trying to figure out what to do with blockchains - I remember building a PoC for a blockchain-based crowdfunding website (didn't take off), but we had no idea why we were even doing that. It's like there had to be a blockchain-based killer app somewhere. It didn't materialize in the end, and indeed what's left is Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#197When it comes to content generation I think chatGpt is a gamechanger, more and more publications will convert most of their stuff into LLMs. It’s quite terrible for the consumer in the long term. For example I was reading news a few days about National Geographic gutting their writer staff. Get ready for a lot of mindless content sometimes vetted by humans, sometimes not.. This will affect us all, in tech or outside…
Just as companies use layoffs at other companies as a smokescreen to do their own layoffs, "we're using AI" has become an excuse to cut back on expensive writers.
In fact, I'd bet that the opposite will happen WRT AI-generated content: individual writers with personality will become even more in-demand. ChatGPT isn't going to fake a "personality" anytime soon.
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#198Earlier 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.
How is crypto a passing fad? ETH is $2k and BTC $30k. Shouldn’t this be 0 by now?
Last time I checked, Dutch Tulip prices are not $0
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#199Earlier 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 just making outputs.
Yeah, one way to conceive of the issue is that GPT doesn't know when to shut up. Intuitively, you can kind of understand how this might be the case: the training data reflects when someone did produce output, not when they didn't, which is going to bias strongly toward producing confident output.
A lot of the conversation about GPT hallucinations has felt like an extended rehash of the conversations we've been having out the difference between plausible and accurate machine translations since like, 2016ish.
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 technolog…
People love to claim that NFTs can only be used for signed pictures of gorillas, but imo they are probably one of the most interesting utilities on a blockchain. Have you ever tried to buy a ticket through ticket master? It's not a wonderful experience.
Digital event tickets could be sold directly from the venue to the attendee without any of the hassle of TM. Tickets that are non-fungible (ie an assigned seat at an event) can be represented with NFTs. Fungible tickets (ie no assigned seats, maybe access to any event within a period) can be simply tokenized.
That isn't a use case that exists now, and because of the toxic association that the term "NFT" has, it probably won't exist. It's a shame though, because the technology exists, and works better than existing options.