I have noticed some non-tech individuals, such as lawyers, are utilizing ChatGPT. Even my mother asks me to use ChatGPT for her business, and my girlfriend loves it as well.
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?
#282People outside the bubble aren't declaring AI to be literally as dangerous as nuclear weapons and I think anyone that thinks this with any gravity needs to take a very deep time out to step out of the bubble, calm down and think about their thought processes. The "AI is as dangerous as nuclear weapons" petition from the tech scene was ridiculous and frankly kind of embarrassing.
I wrote up my thoughts about it last month https://kyledrake.com/writings/ai
Christopher Nolan just finished a movie profile of J Robert Oppenheimer, has presumably spent a lot of time thinking about nuclear weapons, and has similar lesser-concerns about AI https://www.wired.com/story/christopher-nolan-oppenheimer-ai...
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#283On October 17th, 1979, VisiCalc was released. I'm sure pretty much every accountant in the world got up and went to work that day exactly like they'd been doing all of their career. It probably didn't feel different for that many of them. Most of them had probably never used a computer then, and a lot of them probably didn't feel any particular need to, at least until they tried it. There were probably more than a fe…
Agreed. On my Twitter timeline lots of people are saying "the world will be completely different in 6-12 months' time". On October 17th, 1980, most accountants' work day still looked the same as a year before. It took decades for spreadsheets to get widespread adoption. I think LLMs are revolutionary, but the (r)evolution will take decades to materialize. Our work days will look completely different... in 2043.
> I think LLMs are revolutionary, but the (r)evolution will take decades to materialize.
1980s was a different world. Today, the distribution that BigTech has, enabled by this thing called the Internet, changes the dynamic completely.
Given the investment, I believe LLMs will change some of the industries within 5 years, simply because it is a new but natural way to interact with Computers; and Google/Apple already put an Internet-connected Computer in everyone's hands.
This LLM hype is very real and is nothing like web3 (which lacked 10x utility over web2, imo).
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#284Earlier 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…
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 dow…
> When you said AI (and in my view tech in general) are everywhere, I’m guessing this wasn’t what you meant…
That person gave a list of tech they were talking about in their comment immediately afterwards: "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."
I'm not sure it's worth quibbling over whether we should use the term "everywhere" or "in many places"; the general point stands that it's found many different uses, and has done what effective tech does - fade into the background in many cases, just becoming part of our daily lives.
Sure, we're not seeing the off the wall predictions from the singularity crowd, but it seems to be tech that most people find broadly useful.
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#285A while back I was meeting nontechnical people in their 50s and 60s and they were all asking me about ChatGPT. I asked if they tried it. "No." --"You know it's free, right?" "Yes." I found this inexplicable and infuriating. Perhaps someone can shed light on the psychology of such people?
Because they are simply not that interested in trying the new thing. I will drink craft beer, but if someone invented the most amazing craft beer ever, I wouldn't go out of my way to try it even if it was free. I just don't care that much about craft beer. Different people are interested in different things...and that is okay.
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#286Just met a rando marketing college student and she was using 3.5 for business homework. Wouldn't have been someone I expected to be an early adopter. Also the high school student I am mentoring has told me that he knows people feeding chat gpt their essay writing styles and asking it to write about other topics with the same style. This is in the Midwest.
What's unexpected here? Marketing is a discipline about bullshitting people into overpaying for products and services.
This discipline about bullshitting people does itself consist mostly of bullshit being poorly taught by outdated teachers on outdated courses.
That's pretty common among students to bullshit their clueless dinosaur kind of a teacher with modern technologies that make look bullshit seem legit.
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#287FWIW 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.
> serious (not only senior) IT professionals don't really.
Which part of the industry are you working in?
I work for Google and hear a lot of talk about LLMs from my serious colleagues.
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#288Definitely. 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…
Agreed, and when people seem to simply correlate them on no other quality than being widely observed in popular culture they lose me entirely.
The tech religious overhype train is here to stay. There has never been a more established need for calm honesty.
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#289On October 17th, 1979, VisiCalc was released. I'm sure pretty much every accountant in the world got up and went to work that day exactly like they'd been doing all of their career. It probably didn't feel different for that many of them. Most of them had probably never used a computer then, and a lot of them probably didn't feel any particular need to, at least until they tried it. There were probably more than a fe…
Agreed. On my Twitter timeline lots of people are saying "the world will be completely different in 6-12 months' time". On October 17th, 1980, most accountants' work day still looked the same as a year before. It took decades for spreadsheets to get widespread adoption. I think LLMs are revolutionary, but the (r)evolution will take decades to materialize. Our work days will look completely different... in 2043.
I hate and am terrified of what LLMs will do to society, and I do think they're overhyped, but the revolution won't take years.
They can already fully replace human proofreaders and content marketers. They're very close to being able to replace graphic designers, voice actors, and commercial photographers. I expect we'll see many more unsexy jobs like those being replaced within 5 years.
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#290FWIW 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.
Same. My friends in other white-collar-ish jobs, which require lots of writing, are smitten with ChatGPT and think it's amazing. Friends in tech are largely dismissive/critical of it's abilities while being skeptical/fearful of its impact.
My take is that, for most non-tech people, this is their first experience directing a computer to perform a precise task - ie programming. They're accustomed to using applications, not having a hand in making them. Maybe they've used Excel before and felt a bit of this power. But ChatGPT allows them to dream up a novel idea and get the computer to execute it - something that feels like magic to non-tech folks but is rather pedestrian for most of us in tech.