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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?

#291

Post by andsoitis »

blitz_skull wrote: post #217
DebtDeflation wrote: post #206

Earlier 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…

This—100%. The AI revolution with LLMs is creating a new type of interface with computers—the AI interface. Will it kill us all? Eh, probably not. Will it completely change human civilization forever? Eh... maybe not? (But also maybe). But what it already has begun to do, and will continue to do is change the way we interact with computers. The era of having a personal voice assistant that is capable, adaptable, and…

> The era of having a personal voice assistant that is capable, adaptable, and intuitive is VERY close and that is something that's exciting.

Intuitive to use? Or has intuition?

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

#293

Post by throwawaaarrgh »

natch wrote: post #202
threeseed wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just about it being trustworthy but about quality. AI looks to be great for ideation and development. But it's not there if you value a high quality output.

If you see specific aspects of a chat reply where quality is bad, tell it. It will improve the answer. Iterating this you can get way beyond the quality of the first answer. You have full control over the quality but you have to bring something to the collaboration.

That's part of the problem. People think that using their own human bias to alter the machine is a good thing, when it's clear that human bias leads to negative outcomes. You need a separate thing to remove the human input bias.

Quality is a complex thing that requires design, safeguards, process, as well as iteration. You can't design test suites or checklists with just AI, because you don't know if the AI will decide to override them because of some other instruction or signal. And how do you determine the quality of the signal anyway? The quality of input of each human varies.

It's "too adaptive" for QA. You would need a QA for the QA.

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

#295

Post by MailleQuiMaille »

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…

Funny. As someone within the crypto community, you could switch « AI » with « Crypto » and the meaning would be the same to me. There’s even a worse sentiment, well deserved at this time, regarding cryptocurrencies.

And the answers below, reducing the industry to « drugs » go in the same vein. Stuff like Chainlink working with Swift is not common knowledge and even if it is, it is considered as another nothingburger.

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

#296

Post by samhuk »

I whole-heartedly disagree, but on a more technical note: "echo chamber" is a pajorative that implies a bunch of people "sniffing their own farts and enjoying it" - more accurately, a group of people believing in a false because of groupthink.

To expand and to tell of a very recent story: For work I used ChatGPT to help me write a 500 line bash script to automate a bunch of stuff. It took me around 1 day versus the 5 it would have taken me if I would go the google/ddg/stack overflow route of slowly crawling through outdated content and SEO noise to find the signals.

It worked, completely!

Solely from that experience, I'm convinced that it's not just farts and kool-aid. To go one step further, even, i'de say that anybody who doesn't at least have a cursory awareness or AI is in fact the one in the "echo chamber", isolated from the possible.

It's not the do-all solution, of course, but in certain scenarios, it's quite obviously, trivially demonstrably, revolutionary.

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

#297

Post by Karunamon »

sensanaty wrote: post #254
fkyoureadthedoc wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could have tested this easily. It doesn't look like you can get JSON directly out of it, nor any other type of data that meets the criteria of the query. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=Give+me+a+JSON+document...

It's a paid feature but you can, in more formats than JSON too. If you click the little Data icon it expands and gives you a bunch of options.

Where ChatGPT then wins is the ability to progressively tweak the output until it is exactly what you want.

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

#298

Post by rossdavidh »

In the late 90's I got a Master's degree, specializing in neural networks. This caused me to learn about the hype cycle in AI, and since then I have seen it continue. Remember Watson, IBM's AI technology that was going to drive its growth? IBM got lots of press by making computers that could play chess and Jeopardy, which seemed impressive to people at the time, but they never found a way to make money from it. "AI winter" is the term for the trough of the AI hype cycle.

Note that every "AI summer" prior to this one has produced something useful, just never all that world-changing compared to people's expectations. Most people think that if it can BS (excuse me, generate convincing text), then it can do lots of other jobs. Well, in previous AI summers, people thought that if it can play chess, or answer Jeopardy questions, it could do many other things that it turned out, it could not do (or could not do well enough).

For that matter, the ability to do math, at one time, was thought of as a sign of great intelligence. But, it turned out that computers could do math, long before they could do anything else. Our intuition about, "if it can do this, soon it will be able to do that", is not very good.

I have heard ChatGPT described as a better autosuggest, which sounds about right. It's not that autosuggest isn't useful, it can be very useful, but it's not a thing that is going to change the world, and the jobs which it will automate are neither numerous, nor very well paid even now.

If you're trying to pump that VC hype machine for $$, though, cryptocurrency is not going to work anymore, so they need something.

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

#299

Post by edgyquant »

veidr wrote: post #227
jychang wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time I checked, Dutch Tulip prices are not $0

True. But they also aren't $30,000.00.

Anymore. At the top of bubble they were way more than bitcoin has ever been

>e best of tulips cost upwards of $1 million in today’s money (but with many bulbs trading in the $50,000–$150,000 range

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dutch_tulip_bulb_market...

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

#300

Post by bigger_inside »

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…

I teach college, and in the beginning days, everyone was screaming about "the students will have chatGPT write papers now".

Well, apart from the fact that chatGPT is really incapable of developing a thought, and also apart from the fact that half will fail to delete sentences like "I'm a language model, so I can't..." (insert gist of question here), it's painfully obvious if something is LLM generated.

The moment a sentence like "it's crucial to remember" pops up, I know what this is. Then, there's also the element that it always sounds like it's speaking to a child, and it avoids actually saying things unequivocally without some sort of disclaimer, as the legal department's CYA filter will ensure.

I remain thoroughly unimpressed by the entire venture. If this is Skynet 1.0, we're all safe for centuries to come.

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