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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?

#261

Post by BowBun »

DebtDeflation wrote: post #206
sensanaty wrote: post #138

Definitely. 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…

I'm not necessarily arguing that they're the same, but let's be honest with ourselves - crypto said the _same_ things as it was ramping up. Just replace all the applications of AI you listed with the many hypothetical use-cases crypto-pushers were listing out.

As always, sounds cool. Actually do some of it and then let's talk more.

Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#262

Post by kkfx »

DebtDeflation wrote: post #206
sensanaty wrote: post #138

Definitely. 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…

> 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.

For most people that's a promise for the future, but beside some translation tools (who are far from perfect) there is not much.

For instance: semantic search is and was a big topic, but so far even ChatGPT is not a real answer, Stable Diffusion is very nice if you want to produce some cartoon alike graphics or some porn deepfakes, but just not ready for simple common photo editing tasks. OCRs have gotten better, but still nothing that "by magic" makes a badly scanned piece of paper into an almost-native clean pdf and so one.

Yes, there is much progress and potential, but not much for real world usages.

Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#264

Post by rsynnott »

rchaud wrote: post #216
rsynnott wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean... company execs _knew that their VCs_ believed it, anyway. I would wonder to what extent they believed it themselves.

Upton Sinclair probably applies too:

> it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it

If you're Uber leadership, well, you're strongly incentivised to believe that there is _some_ way out, even if that way out might seem pretty implausible to a dispassionate observer.

Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#265

Post by ThrowawayTestr »

sensanaty wrote: post #138

Definitely. 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…

As someone that did use the original cleverbot, every time I use chatgpt I'm blown away.

Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#266

Post by fwungy »

oxfordmale wrote: post #148
imdsm wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, to say crypto has no real use cases is wrong. A lot of people are against crypto, and I can understand that, the whole cultural side of it is tough to digest. But if you strip away all of that: the twitter bots, the airdrops, the spam, the shills, the whole cultural lot, and you just look at the core, there are real use cases. Buying the pizza with bitcoin was the first proof. That being said, I can understan…

Buying pizza with a bitcoin? Is that the only use case you can come up with? Electronic money, instead of paper or coins, is there to stay. However, bitcoin is a very poor implementation of this. The mining alone has contributed significantly to the earth's yearly electricity consumption.

I'm able to make legal purchases that payment processors will deny pr otherwise aggravate with btc. The fact that a third party isn't involved with with transactions is important and serves as a reminder to payment processors to not politicize transactions lest they lose more of them to btc and other cryptos.

Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#267

Post by hackinthebochs »

samuellevy wrote: post #65
InvertedRhodium wrote: post #46

Earlier 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…

So humans have a level of knowledge, understanding, and reasoning ability that LLMs simply don't have. I'm writing a response to you right now, and I "know" a certain amount of information about the world. That knowledge has limits, and I can expand it, I can forget it, all sorts of things... "Hallucination" is a term that works well for actual intelligence - when you "know" something that isn't true, and has no path…

"Picking the most likely token based on probabilities" doesn't accurately describe their architecture. They are not intrinsically statistical, they are fully deterministic. The next word is scored (and then normalized to give something interpretable as a probability), But the calculation performed to determine the score for the next token considers the full context window and features therein, while leveraging the meaning of the terms by way of semantic embeddings and its trained knowledge base. It is not obvious that the network does not engage with the meaning of the terms in the context window when scoring the next word, and it certainly can't be dismissed by characterizing it as just engaging with probabilities. There is reason to believe that the network does understand to some degree in some cases. I go into some detail here: https://www.reddit.com/r/naturalism/comments/1236vzf/on_larg...

Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#268

Post by Forgeties79 »

Honestly, I’m a little surprised to see this! I’m not a “coder” and adjacent like most of the folks I see on HN. I work in video production.

My In-laws talk about chatGPT (lawyer and store owner) my parents (doctors) ask me about ChatGPT, my colleagues ask me about it re: its impact on film production, my siblings talk about it. Hell the WGA is talking about chatGPT as part of the strike.

Again, I obviously have my own little social bubble of somewhat like-minded people, but I feel like I’m talking about AI and ChatGPT every other day. I see articles on main stream publications at least weekly. It’s basically as well known as Bitcoin - if not more so - as far as I can tell. Very surprising to me this person still hasn’t heard about it!

Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#269

Post by ryandrake »

rchaud wrote: post #207
laurent123456 wrote: post #123

Earlier 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.

> Hype, maybe, but it's obviously not a passing fad like crypto was. Currently, nobody is talking about ChatGPT more than the crypto/NFT hustlers who now need a new angle.

This was going to be my reply, too.

Most of the actual techies in my circles, as in: practicing software engineer for 20 years kind of people, looked at it, maybe tried it out of curiosity, and went back to work.

The people who are really into it are the same people who were really into SEO, and then leadgen marketing, briefly online poker, and then blockchain/crypto, and then NFTs: the eternal hustlers who just look for the next hype train and ride it until the next train enters the station...

The interesting difference with AI / LLMs is that for whatever reason, the big companies have fallen under the spell, and they're all trying to cram generative AI into all their products now. I work at one of these companies and it's bizarre how they've turned the huge ship on a dime and are now trying to AI All The Things.

Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#270

Post by thaw13579 »

weevil wrote: post #93

I 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…

What’s innovative about the LLM chat interface is that it requires no technical expertise to use. Aside from logging in, it’s not much different than sending a text message or email, so most people could experiment with it if they were at all inclined. So when I hear people hold opinions about LLMs who haven’t even tried them out, I assume they are not curious or informed.
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