As an AI language model, I don't have an opinion on whether people on tech are inside an AI echo chamber.
Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
211–220 of 755 posts
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#212When 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.
Yeah, as a professional writer that is somewhat acclaimed (my domain has a lot of karma here) I'm not worried about ChatGPT. It's going to be a rough transition, but I feel that my genuinely having the skills not only means I can use the tools better (ex: I have a conversation snippet character that is a container for LLM generated stuff), but also use them for the really important things: LinkedIn post writing. It works so well at LinkedIn posts, which is really sad. https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7080465...
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#213FWIW 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.
It's not even hype like we used to see in the build up to a big video game release.
It's just cargo culting and wishful thinking. People staring into the magic mirror, hoping it will clone their desires.
The phrase cargo culting or some meaningful equivalent should make a come back. Even after the 'great youtubening' of technical knowledge, it is easy to find people stuck in habituated imitation of tech skills and tech talk.
I love that people are interested, but cargo culting is no good water to drink from.
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#214Yes. It’s cool. But, it’s hardly revolutionary. They built a Siri that doesn’t suck.
It has the potential to be a Google killer as it’s much more effective at sussing out specific information. But, the ideological guard rails OpenAI insist upon are super annoying. You can never fully trust that you’re getting a non-politically biased output.
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#215Earlier 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…
> 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.
Great point, perhaps “confabulation” is a better way of describing it, which means “the replacement of a gap in a person's memory by a falsification that they believe to be true”. For example, the term is sometime used to describe dementia patients, who might wander somewhere and forget how they got there. The patient then might confabulate a story about why they are there, e.g. they were getting their keys so they could drive to the store to run an errand, despite the fact they no longer have a car.
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#216FWIW 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.
Similar experience; a lot of laypeople seem to be viewing it as world changing magic, whereas that view is far more niche in tech. This feels like a common pattern; a few years back many of my non-tech friends believed self-driving cars were coming imminently, whereas ~no-one working in tech believed that.
> whereas ~no-one working in tech believed that.
Company execs sure did. "Autonomous vehicles" is the mirage that Uber, Waymo and others dangled in front of investors and press for years. Can't blame the public for not figuring out that it was a fig leaf to paper over their eye-watering losses.
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#217Definitely. 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…
>puts it in a similar tier as crypto Comparisons between AI and crypto are horribly misguided IMO. Is AI overhyped? Sure. However - AI/ML is creating utility everywhere in our lives - speech to text, language translation, recommendation engines, relevancy ranking in search, computer vision, etc. and seems to be getting embedded in more and more processes by the day. Crypto never amounted to anything beyond a currency…
This—100%. The AI revolution with LLMs is creating a new type of interface with computers—the AI interface. Will it kill us all? Eh, probably not. Will it completely change human civilization forever? Eh... maybe not? (But also maybe).
But what it already has begun to do, and will continue to do is change the way we interact with computers. The era of having a personal voice assistant that is capable, adaptable, and intuitive is VERY close and that is something that's exciting. Siri and Alexa are going to look downright primitive compared to what we'll have in the next 2-5 years and that is going to be VERY mainstream, and VERY useful for huge swaths of the population.
Crypto still hasn't proven itself to be useful in any way shape or form that isn't immediately over-shadowed by a different medium.
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.
You could have tested this easily. It doesn't look like you can get JSON directly out of it, nor any other type of data that meets the criteria of the query.
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=Give+me+a+JSON+document...
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
Friends I know who previously worked on crypto side projects are suddenly LLM experts.
With exception to the term experts, which I imagine is a term you've applied, I don't think there's anything inherently bad with people changing their focus to the latest tech. Could this perhaps be a you issue? How do you feel when you think about people changing from microservice architecture to blockchain to crypto and now to language models?
"Changing their focus to" vs "appointing themselves as an expert at" are two very different things.
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#220I spoke to my 70-year-old step-aunt about this yesterday for exactly this reason. She's a self-employed piano teacher with zero technical interest or knowledge, but a generally astute and clued-up kind of person. She said she's heard a lot about it, but it all sounds like marketing hype, tabloid sensationalism, or open alarmism from people who don't seem to know what they're talking about. She said some of her studen…
I've never met a single person claiming it will cause mass unemployment in 6-12 months. But the impact of ~ChatGPT 10.0 in 5 or 10 years from now? It's a lot more believable given its current state. My anecdote is that everyone is concerned about what it will do in the future gives its current proof of concept.