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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?

#261

Post by tuxracer »

capableweb wrote: post #51
nunodonato wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can say with a certain degree of confidence that you haven't actually used CoPilot daily.

I've worked with teams that used Copilot. They claim it's great "Hey, now I don't have to actually spend any time writing all this boilerplate!" while for me, the person who has to review their code before releasing stuff, easier ways of writing boilerplate is not a positive, it's a negative. If writing boilerplate becomes effortless, then you'll write more of it, instead of feeling the pain of writing it and then tr…

It would be helpful if people could include in their assessment roughly how much time they've personally spent using these tools.

Helping write boilerplate is to Copilot what cropping is to Photoshop.

Some of the ways I've found Copilot a powerful tool in my toolbox: Writing missing comments (especially unfamiliar code bases), "translating" parts of unfamiliar code to a more familiar language, suggesting ideas for how to implement a feature (!) in comments.

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

#262

Post by falcor84 »

rsynnott wrote: post #200
auctoritas wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

It seems to me that the tendency to be confidently wrong is entirely baked into intelligence of all kinds. In terms of actual philosophical rationality, human reasoning is also much closer to cargo cults than to cogito ergo sum, and I think we're better for it.

I cannot but think that this approach of "Strong Opinions, Weakly Held" is a much stronger path forward towards AGI than what we had before.

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

#263

Post by dr_dshiv »

liveoneggs wrote: post #160
auctoritas wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So, to you, ChatGPT is approaching AGI?

Yes. It is obviously already weak AGI (obvious to anyone if they saw it 20 years ago).

It is also obvious that we are in the middle of a shift of some kind. Very hard to see from within, but clearly we will look back at 2022 as the beginning of something…

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

#264

Post by jefe_ »

I have a bit of AI fatigue around this wave of tools, but also understand why they are garnering so much attention. Many of the innovation hype categories of the past decade have appeared stuck in the 'early days but just wait...' phase. Self-driving cars, drone delivery, crypto as a currency, crypto as a(n) _____, plant-based meats, virtual reality, etc. While there has been great progress in each of these areas, not one has yet matched market demand with current capabilities in a way that enables it to become a 'game changer.'

To the general public, ChatGPT and the Image Generators 'just appeared,' and appeared in a very impressive and usable form. Of course there were many waves of ML advances leading up to these models, but for many people these tools are their first opportunity to play with ML models in a meaningful way that is easy to incorporate into daily life and with very little barrier to entry.

While impressive and there are many applications, my questions surrounding the new AI tools relate to the volume of information they are capable of producing and our capacity to consume it. Tools can be used to synthesize the information, tools can act on it, but there is already too much 'noise.' There is a market for entertainment tailored to exact preferences, but it won't provide the shared cultural connection mass media provides. In the workplace, e-mails and documents can be quickly drafted. This is a valuable use case, but it augments and increases productivity. It will lower the bar necessary for certain jobs, and it will increase productivity expectations, but it will become a tool like Excel rather than a replacement like a factory robot (for now).

The Art of Worldly Wisdom #231 - Never show half-finished things to others. <- ChatGPT managed it's release perfectly in this regard.

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

#265

Post by foldr »

addcommitpush wrote: post #192
auctoritas wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's a fellow that kinda predicted it in 1950 [0]: > These arguments take the form, "I grant you that you can make machines do all the things you have mentioned but you will never be able to make one to do X." > [...] > The criticisms that we are considering here are often disguised forms of the argument from consciousness, Usually if one maintains that a machine can do one of these things, and describes the kind…

>Every time "learning machines" are able to do a new thing, there's a "wait, it is just mechanical, _real_ intelligence is the goalpost".

Just because people shift the goalposts doesn't mean that the new position of the goalposts isn't closer to being correct than the old position. You can criticise the people for being inconsistent or failing to anticipate certain developments, but that doesn't tell you anything about where the goalposts should be.

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

#266

Post by deepsquirrelnet »

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 think you hit on some good points. It seems like in common language, AI has taken the meaning “general purpose”, rather than satisfying some criterion of the futurist definition.

Personally, I care very little about whether the machine is intelligent or not. If it actually happens in my lifetime, I believe it will be unmistakable.

I am interested in how people solve problems. If you built and trained a model that solves a challenging task, THAT is something I find noteworthy and what I want to read about.

Apparently utility is boring, and “just ML” now. There’s tons of academic papers I see fly under the radar probably because they solve specific problems that the average person doesn’t know exists. Much of ML doesn’t foray into “popular science” enough to hold general public interest.

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

#267

Post by FrustratedMonky »

haswell wrote: post #158
FrustratedMonky wrote: post #103

Engineers are always building things that are incredible, then turning their back on it as ordinary once the problem is solved, “oh that’s so normal, it was just a little math, a little tweak, no big deal”. AI has gone through a lot of stages of “only X can be done by a human”-> “X is done by AI” -> “oh, that’s just some engineering, that’s not really human” or “no longer in the category of mystical things we can’t e…

I generally agree that we quickly adjust to new tech and forget how impactful it is. But I can’t fully get on board with this: > but how is re-enforcement “Learning”, not exactly the same as reading books to a toddler and pointing at a picture and having them repeat what it is? Start digging into the human with the same engineering view, and suddenly it also just become a bunch of parts. Where is the human in the hum…

I think the point is that we have been “meaningfully closing” the gap rapidly, and at this point it is only a matter of time, the end can be seen, even if currently not completely written out in some equations.

It does seem like on HN, the audience is heavily weighted towards software developers that are not biologist, and often cannot see the forest for the trees. They know enough about AI programming to dismiss the hype, and not enough about biology, and miss that this is pretty amazing.

The understanding of the human ‘parts’ are being chipped away, just as quickly as we have had breakthroughs in AI. These fields are starting to converge and inform each other. I’m saying this is happening fast enough that the end game is in sight, humans are just made of parts, an engineering problem that will be solved.

Free will and consciousness are overrated, we think of ourselves as having some mystically exceptional consciousness, which clouds the credit we give advancements in AI. ‘AI will never be able to equal a human’, when humans just want lunch, and our ‘free will’ is based on how much sleep we got. DNA is a program; it builds the brain that is just responding to inputs. Read some Robert Sapolsky, human reactions are just hormones, chemicals, responding to inputs. We will eventually have an AI that mimics a human because humans aren’t that special. Even if the function of every single molecule in the body, or every equation in AI, is all fully mapped out, enough is to stop claiming 'specialness'.

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

#270

Post by Shinchy »

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,…

> I'm kinda worried AI will get a scam/shitty product connotation

I think we're already there. A legion of AI based startups seem to be coming out daily (https://www.futuretools.io/) that offer little more than gimmicks.

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