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

Ask HN: Is anyone else bearish on OpenAI?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 321 posts

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else bearish on OpenAI?

#201

Post by warner25 »

rossant wrote: post #105
ghshephard wrote: post #9

OpenAI, at least in my day-day workflow for the last 9+ months has so superseded anything that google ever was to me that I'm having a difficult time comparing the two. I've got a monitor dedicated 100% of the time to ChatGPT, and I interact with it non stop during the flow of technical scenarios and troubleshooting situations that flow into me - working in areas that I have the slimmest of backgrounds in, and shutti…

I use ChatGPT dozens of times a day and it saves me hours of work. I rarely experienced such a technical breakthrough in my lifetime that affects my workflow so profoundly.

The only breakthrough (technical or not) to which I can draw a comparison is getting always-on, cable Internet access for the first time in 2000.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else bearish on OpenAI?

#203

Post by orochimaaru »

latexr wrote: post #147
orochimaaru wrote: post #25

Nope. Learn how to use it in almost everything you do. It’s a game changer. LLMs aren’t AGI. They’re far it. But they have massive uses for reasoning on available context. I’ll give you an example. I’m trying to set up some bulk monitoring for api across 200k jvm s. The api documents are horribly out of date. But I get the raw uri on the monitoring tools. I can just get these uri, send them into chatgpt and ask for a…

> Learn how to use it in almost everything you do. It’s a game changer. This type of rhetoric is part of the reason so many compare the current crop of AI to cryptocurrency hype: proponents constantly telling others to shove the technical solution into everything, even where it’s not necessary or worse than the alternative.

I'll put it a little differently. It is of immense help if you really know what you're doing but want to do it faster.

I know where you're going. I've had folks say to me: "I really like co-pilot because it enables a beginner like me to write code". This sentiment often comes from folks having non-technical roles who want to create their own software solutions and not have to deal with engineers. I roll my eyes at that one.

You need to be able to spot specific areas of acceleration. Not just tackle it as a hammer for every problem.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else bearish on OpenAI?

#204

Post by dieselgate »

ghshephard wrote: post #9

OpenAI, at least in my day-day workflow for the last 9+ months has so superseded anything that google ever was to me that I'm having a difficult time comparing the two. I've got a monitor dedicated 100% of the time to ChatGPT, and I interact with it non stop during the flow of technical scenarios and troubleshooting situations that flow into me - working in areas that I have the slimmest of backgrounds in, and shutti…

This seems like an extreme case, I'm glad it works for you but remain skeptical and indifferent personally

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else bearish on OpenAI?

#205

Post by OJFord »

yunwal wrote: post #189
OJFord wrote: post #20

When I've tried to use it myself for verifiable things (i.e. code basically) I've had the 'confidently wrong' experience. When I've seen colleagues visibly use it (i.e. mentioned in commit messages) that confidence has rubbed off on them. Given that, why would I believe it when asking something medical, legal, historical, or otherwise outside of my domain or that I can't somehow verify?

You should be able to verify facts outside of your domain of expertise. Every time a new study comes around saying “actually, everyone should be drinking 3 glasses of wine a night”, do you take a trip to the liquor store? LLMs are far from the only thing you rely on that will confidently lie to you.

Some things are inherently not verifiable, but actually what I meant was something like 'verifiable easily by me in a reasonable amount of time that makes the whole exercise worthwhile'. You can make some medical claim for example and describe your (or whoever's) methodology sufficiently for me to reproduce the result in theory, but I'm not going to.

> Every time a new study comes around saying “actually, everyone should be drinking 3 glasses of wine a night”, do you take a trip to the liquor store?

No, and doing so would be an example of blindly trusting something that you haven't or can't verify, so that supports my argument?

> LLMs are far from the only thing you rely on that will confidently lie to you.

Sure, but it's a new class of thing that will and does and yet people are trusting or haven't yet learnt that they can't. I mentioned seeing people trust it via commit messages; I don't see SO the same way, people generally realise they need to verify it, or it at least has a voting mechanism as a proxy. With GPT so far there seems to be a lot more assuming it's correct going on.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else bearish on OpenAI?

#206

Post by sgarland »

meiraleal wrote: post #157
sgarland wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> having to dig in and learn the fundamentals on a lot of things - which is unsustainable if you are touching 30-50 different technology stacks. IMO, this is the crux of the problem, and it’s caused by allowing dev teams to use whatever stack they want, without also requiring them to support it. More cynically, it will always be the case if teams are allowed to use whatever they want, regardless of “service ownership…

> More cynically, it will always be the case if teams are allowed to use whatever they want Are you a manager? My cynical take is that this happens when managers choose tech as they know nothing and push for LinkedIn driven development

Nope, SRE/DBRE. I’ve seen both absolute freedom and a centralized authority for choosing tech stacks. The latter was waaaaay more stable.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else bearish on OpenAI?

#207

Post by __rito__ »

lucideer wrote: post #191

> What am I missing here? > I just don't see this company (or any others for that matter) GPTing their way to AGI > I'm not saying the company will go bankrupt but I'm also not buying into the hype that it's going to become the next Google or better / create AGI for us all. What I'm missing is the connection between AGI & profitability. OpenAI has huge revenues from ChatGPT which look set to continue - they're distin…

Yep, AI doesn't need to be AGI to be profitable or useful.

I am bullish on AI but don't see AGI happening, yet I developed AI solutions that solved real world problems, and made companies tons of money and helped people solve non-AI, non-IT problems.

So, I never buy the AI-crypto-equivalence.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else bearish on OpenAI?

#208

Post by bastawhiz »

badpun wrote: post #162
bastawhiz wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that I'm trying to change your mind, but some specific things that LLMs do for me: - Helping to refactor SQL - writing jq commands (I simply cannot) - writing shell code (it happens just infrequently enough that I can't justify spending the time to get good) - brainstorming names or puns. Word association is easier with a second person (or an LLM) - figuring out why my AWS CLI commands aren't doing what I'm expec…

This is just helping out with trivial tasks, which sounds very much in scope of LLMs. The OP was talking about replacing "world class consultants", which I'm very sceptical of.

How many people actually hire consultants, let alone "world class" consultants? Especially on a regular basis. The value delivered by solving problems you encounter daily (hourly?) will outstrip the value you get from problems you need to solve every year or two (or more).

I get a half decent expert to solve problems I don't have the patience or experience to solve myself. That's literally the definition of what a consultant does. What you call "trivial" is what lots of other people describe what consultants largely do.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else bearish on OpenAI?

#209

Post by RecycledEle »

latexr wrote: post #151
RecycledEle wrote: post #83

OpenAI has changed education. I'm a teacher who is constantly learning new things. I can learn things I would have never been able to learn before because of AIs like ChatGPT. My students are learning more and faster than ever before. Learning Management Systems like Canvas and Blackboard made a lot of money. I could argue they are obsolete now.

> OpenAI has changed education. No, it objectively has not. Maybe it has changed how you teach, but “education” is much larger than any of us. Until school curriculums around the world incorporate ChatGPT—quite the dystopian scenario—they have not changed education.

Obsolete does not mean something is no longer used. It means that new technology beats the obsolete system every time.

I'm spending most of today updating my Canvas courses, and Canvas is obsolete. Students are much better off asking AIs how to do thing and what they should learn next rather than working through my Canvas courses.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else bearish on OpenAI?

#210

Post by RecycledEle »

kyawzazaw wrote: post #115
RecycledEle wrote: post #83

OpenAI has changed education. I'm a teacher who is constantly learning new things. I can learn things I would have never been able to learn before because of AIs like ChatGPT. My students are learning more and faster than ever before. Learning Management Systems like Canvas and Blackboard made a lot of money. I could argue they are obsolete now.

no way Canvas and Blackboard will be obsolete in a few years. schools can't maintain all this infra system on own

The infrastructure will not be needed. Why keep a static book or a semi-interactive LMS when AIs act as tutors and mentors?
Post reply on HN