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Ask HN: Is anyone else getting AI fatigue?

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Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else getting AI fatigue?

#231

Post by lordfrito »

traceroute66 wrote: post #149
dual_dingo wrote: post #32

The "I" in AI is just complete bullshit and I can't understand why so many people are in a awe of a bit of software that chains words to another based on some statistical model. The sad truth is that ChatGPT is about as good an AI as ELIZA was in 1966, it's just better (granted: much better) at hiding its total lack of actual human understanding. It's nothing more than an expensive parlor trick, IMHO. Github CoPilot?…

> The "I" in AI is just complete bullshit and I can't understand why so many people are in a awe I agree. And the worst thing is that the bullshit hype comes round every decade or so, and people run around like headless chickens insisting that "this time its different", and "this time its the REAL THING". As you say, first(ish) there was ELIZA. Than this that and everything else. Then Autonomy and all that dot-com er…

> And the worst thing is that the bullshit hype comes round every decade or so, and people run around like headless chickens insisting that "this time its different", and "this time its the REAL THING".

This. To answer the OPs question, this is what I'm fatigued about.

I'm glad we're making progress. It's a hell of a parlor trick. But the hype around it is astounding considering how often it's answers are completely wrong. People think computers are magic boxes, and so we must be just a few lever pulls away from making it correct all the time.

Or maybe my problem is that I've overestimated the average human's intelligence. If you can't tell ChatGPT apart from a good con-man, can we consider the Turing test passed? It's likely time for a redefinition of the Turing test.

Instead of AI making machines smarter, it seems that computers are making humans dumber. Perhaps the AI revolution is about dropping the level of average human intelligence to match the level of a computer. A mental race to the bottom?

I'm reminded of the old Rod Serling quote: We're developing a new citizenry. One that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles, but won't be able to think.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else getting AI fatigue?

#232

Post by billythemaniam »

rxhernandez wrote: post #134
Enginerrrd wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a Civil Engineer with a modest background including some work in AI. I'm pretty impressed with it. It's about as good or better than an average new intern and it's nearly instant. I think a big part of my success with it is that I'm used to providing good specifications for tasks. This is, apparently, non-trivial for people to the point where it drives the existence of many middle-management or high-level enginee…

I can't speak to the rest of what you wrote because I couldn't be further from the field of civil engineering but if you feel impressed with it on chess, ask it to play game of tic tac toe; for me it didn't seem to understand the very simple rules or even keep track of my position on the grid. There are so few permutations in tac tac toe that it's lack of memory and lack of ability to understand extremely simple rule…

Let's talk about what ChatGPT (or fine-tuned GPT-3) actually is and what it is not. It is a zero-shot or few-shot model that is pretty good at a variety of NLP tasks. Playing tic tac toe or chess is not a traditional NLP task so shouldn't expect it to be good at that. But board games can be completely played in a text format so it is not unexpected either that it can kinda play a board game.

If GPT-3 was listed on Huggingface, its main category listing would be a completion model. Those models tend to be good at generative NLP tasks like creating a Shakespeare sonnet about French fries. But they tend not to be as good at similarity tasks, used by semantic search engines, as models specifically trained for those tasks.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else getting AI fatigue?

#233

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl »

flumpcakes wrote: post #148

AI leaves a bad taste in my mouth but I think it is because we have moved away from ML/Vision problems with a strong background in academic research, and high impact and purposeful development of these into products. We are now exposed to companies hyping huge general purpose models with whatever tech is the latest fad, which resonates with the average person who wants to generate memes, etc. This is impressive only…

I dread the coming "age of buggyness" when imprecise LLMs pervade UIs and make everything always a little broken.

I don't deny that LLM represent a coming revolution in computer interaction. But as someone who's already mastered the command line, programming, etc. I already know how to use computers. LLMs will actually be slower for me for a huge variety of tasks like finding information. English is so clumsy compared to programming languages.

I feel like for nerds like me "user friendlyness" is often just a hindrance. For me this has been the case with GUI in general, touch GUI especially, and probably will be for most LLM applications that don't fundamentally do something I cannot(like stable diffusion).

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else getting AI fatigue?

#234

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK »

kriops wrote: post #214
rsynnott wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ChatGPT and similar models are revolutionary For _what purpose_, tho? It's a good party trick, but its tendency to be confidently wrong makes using it for anything important a bit fraught.

If you work at a computer, it will increase your productivity. Revolutionary is not the word I'd use, but finding use cases isn't hard.

But will it? After accounting for the time needed to fix all the bugs it introduces?

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else getting AI fatigue?

#235

Post by codeptualize »

chx wrote: post #81
codeptualize wrote: post #24

I'm working on a project that uses GPT-3 and similar stuff, even before the hype. I think the overhype is really tiring. Just like with most of these hype cycles there is an actual useful interesting technology, but the hype beasts take it way overboard and present it as if it's the holy grail or whatever. It's not. That's tiring, and really annoying. It's incredibly cool technology, it is great at certain use cases,…

> GPT-3 it's good at generative writing made up bullshit > summarization except you can't possibly know the output has any relation whatsoever to the text being summarized > information search and extraction except you can't possibly know the output has any relation whatsoever to the information being extracted people still fall for this crap?

I think this is sort of the other side of the hype, totally dismissing it is also incorrect imo.

Yes, it's overhyped, but it's not useless, it actually does work quite well if you apply it to the right use cases in a correct way.

In terms of accuracy, in ChatGPT the hallucination issue is quite bad, for GPT3 it's a lot less and you can reduce it even further by good prompt writing, fine tuning, and settings.

Can we just recognize it for what it is?

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else getting AI fatigue?

#236

Post by sfpotter »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #220
sfpotter wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I try to take a more inductive approach. We don’t know what intelligence is, but we assume it’s something we exhibit. We also clearly recognize other animals as possessing the same trait to varying degrees. Since we don’t know what it is, and since (I would argue) we can only convincingly claim that exists in other biological organisms without meeting a high burden of proof, to claim that it exists in an…

Intelligence is a capability not a mechanism, and therefore if you're able/willing to define what that capability is, there should be no problem measuring/gauging the intelligence of any system, biological or not. You don't need to look inside the black box - you only need to test if the black box has this capability. Intelligence may be a fuzzily defined word in everyday usage, but I don't think it's the mystery you…

You and I are clearly referring to two different things when we use the word “intelligence”. It is also not nearly so easy to come up with a simple/mechanical/verifiable definition for the thing that you’re referring to. Unless you have a good definition—in which case, you might want to put your money where your mouth is and get busy revolutionizing multiple fields of human inquiry!

It’s also plain that many people are very interested in looking inside the black box and think the contents of the black box are relevant and important. This fact doesn’t change just by your saying so.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else getting AI fatigue?

#237

Post by rxhernandez »

Sunhold wrote: post #199
rxhernandez wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't speak to the rest of what you wrote because I couldn't be further from the field of civil engineering but if you feel impressed with it on chess, ask it to play game of tic tac toe; for me it didn't seem to understand the very simple rules or even keep track of my position on the grid. There are so few permutations in tac tac toe that it's lack of memory and lack of ability to understand extremely simple rule…

This is like complaining that your computer isn't able to toast bread. It's a language model based on multicharacter tokens, outputting grids of single characters is not something you would expect it to succeed at. If you explained the rules carefully and asked it to respond in paragraphs rather than a grid, it might be able to do it. Can't test since it's down now.

You're acting like it's a grid of arbitrary size and an arbitrary amount of characters. It's a 3x3 with 2 choices for each square.

Neglecting that (only because it's harder to navigate whether I should expect it to handle state for an extremely finite space; even if it's in a different representation than it's directly used to), I know I saw a post where it failed at rock, paper, scissors. Just found it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/zjld09/chat_gpt_isn...

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else getting AI fatigue?

#239

Post by latexr »

auctoritas wrote: post #141
dual_dingo wrote: post #32

The "I" in AI is just complete bullshit and I can't understand why so many people are in a awe of a bit of software that chains words to another based on some statistical model. The sad truth is that ChatGPT is about as good an AI as ELIZA was in 1966, it's just better (granted: much better) at hiding its total lack of actual human understanding. It's nothing more than an expensive parlor trick, IMHO. Github CoPilot?…

I'm more fatigued by people denying the obvious that ChatGPT and similar models are revolutionary. People have been fantasizing about the dawn of AI for almost a century and none managed to predict the rampant denialism of the past few months. I suppose it makes sense though. Denial is the default response when we face threats to our identity and sense of self worth.

> I suppose it makes sense though. Denial is the default response when we face threats to our identity and sense of self worth.

Respectfully, that reads as needlessly combative within the context. It sounds like the blockchain proponents who say that the only people who are against cryptocurrencies are the ones who are “bitter for having missed the boat”.¹

It is possible and perfectly reasonable to identify problems in ChatGPT and similar technologies without feeling threatened. Simple example: someone who is retired and monetarily well off, whose way of living and sense of self worth are in no way affected by developments in AI, can still be critical and express valid concerns when these models tell you that it’s safe to boil a baby² or give other confident but absurdly wrong answers to important questions.

¹ I’m not saying that’s your intention, but consider that type of rhetoric may be counterproductive if you’re trying to make another understand your point of view.

² I passed by that specific example on Mastodon but I’m not finding it now.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else getting AI fatigue?

#240

Post by nightski »

traceroute66 wrote: post #216
pixl97 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, if this were 1800 you'd be stating that man would never fly and the horse would never be supplanted by the engine. I honestly don't believe you have any scientific or rational reasoning for the point you are attempting to make in your post, because if you were you'd be stating that animal intelligence is magical.

> Man, if this were 1800 you'd be stating that man would never fly and the horse would never be supplanted by the engine. I'm sorry, what sort of bullshit argument is that ? Flight and engines are both natural evolution using natural physics and mechanics. Artificial Intelligence is nothing but a square-peg-round-hole, when you have a sledgehammer everything looks like a nut scenario.

They are natural to you maybe with hindsight? Powered flight was most definitely not considered natural at the time. In fact, most attempts at flight were trying to mimic birds at first.
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