Depends.
Yesterday I was having a drink with some friends, one of whom is like me in tech. The others in shipping, finance and sales. They all had experimented with ChatGPT and/or Midjourney.
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?
#232Definitely. 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…
Certain personalities and communication styles are able to generate useful prompts. A 10% efficiency boost that some programmers are experiencing could translate into an extra 5 weeks off if you are smart about it, so it is quite life changing for some.
"Certain personalities and communication styles are able to generate useful prompts."
Would you mind expanding on that a bit? I've largely had great experiences getting what I want out of ChatGPT. But I've been continually surprised by the number (and variety) of people who don't see the utility of it.
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#233Definitely. 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…
Everywhere??
That’s exactly the hype talk that’s going to burst this bubble.
Here’s tech’s dirty little secret. Despite all the screams about automation and universal basic income… the exact numbers where job replacement would show are in the labor productivity numbers. If GDP stays flat or grows while the number of jobs is reduced… bingo… you’d see that number climb.
Productivity has actually stayed flat or gone down over the last 15 years. Despite the fact that we’ve had trillion dollar corporate behemoths now. Despite that fact that we’re enabling a surveillance state Orwell couldn’t imagines. Despite the polarization we see. And teen anxiety going through the roof along teen/pre-teen suicides.
When you said AI (and in my view tech in general) are everywhere, I’m guessing this wasn’t what you meant…
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#234FWIW 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.
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.
> but it's obviously not a passing fad
Citation needed.
I put it in the same bucket as deep CNNs - very good for specific tasks, but ultimately their lasting impact will be something trivial and faily non-world-changing like being able to search your photo collection in a slightly more clever way.
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
You could apply the same logic to humans. Whenever a human speaks, it's just vibrations of wave molecules, triggered by the mouth and throat, which in turn are controlled by electric signals in the human's neural network. Those neurons, they just make muscles move. They don't have any concept of true of false. At least nobody has found a "true of false" neuron in the brain.
all of it coheres to consciousness, we know what it's like to be a human, but I think it'd be hubris to think we've cracked the code and made a blueprint of anything other than a word calculator
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#236All you can get in a survey like this is anecdotes and opinions. This may be sufficient for your purposes - here's my story:-)
My sister is not technically minded. She has used chatgpt to create a request for permit for a backyard deck to city Hall, a letter to her boss requesting attendance to a conference, and her performance reviews.
Another non techie and I use chatgpt to help us learn French and music theory.
My mother in law uses it to create funny rhyming stories for kids.
Meanwhile the techie friends of mine are... Completely ignoring it. My two best friends are vmware senior architect and a Java developer / tech manager, and I've been urging them for months to try it.
So I personally live in a completely opposite situation to that which you describe :-). Techie are skeptical of the toy, and endlessly discuss it's limitations and impact. Non Techies are just using it as a tool.
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#237Big mixed bag for me:
* All the techies I know have heard about and used it, and most have a healthy dose of skepticism paired with some optimism that it can be used to help solve some previously hard to solve problems. This alone, I think, makes it clear that LLM has staying power in a way that blockchain did not: obvious use cases.
* The normies in my life run the whole spectrum from "never heard of it" to "use it at least sometimes." One interesting subset are the folks who have heard a LOT about it but haven't used it. My lawyer said he had already attended panel discussions about the ethical implications of AI usage in law. I asked if he had USED ChatGPT and he said no; I had to direct him to the URL and walk him through signing up so he could see it for himself. And he's pretty tech-saavy as non-techies go.
Burying the lede, now. Here is my unpopular opinion: there is an outsized "wow factor" when you specifically use ChatGPT because of the fact that it outputs the text seemingly in real-time. It makes it look like it's thinking/talking and viscerally our minds are blown. Bing and Bard generate the response in the background and output it all at once like a search result, doesn't hit the same way.
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#238Earlier 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?
Btc is a genuine intranational and international currency in the developing world. It is more trustworthy than many sovereign currencies. The fx applications of btc alone are enough to grant it legitimacy and fx is a the biggest of all the markets. In a de-dollarizing world btc is a genuine factor.
The stable coins are an issue but stable coins aren't a necessity for btc transactions, they're a utility for traders. Btc's biggest danger is its price volatility. As it increases in value and market cap it will become more valuable to large players who will in turn be motivated to protect its integrity.
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#239Earlier 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.
For me, it’s already a jetliner in the context of coding assist. It’s correct more often than top hits provided by a top search engine (and any coworker), and it is a very enjoyable user experience (no ads and SEO garbage to filter out). I’d say the wright brothers version was something like BERT or earlier GPTs.
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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…
> Crypto never amounted to anything beyond a currency for black market transaction Do you understand what a massive impact that has been? It has disrupted one of the largest industries on the planet, which is drug trafficking.
Did it disrupt the whole industry? Only the payment part of it, no?