Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber? • Hacker News Board

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

#31

Post by samuellevy » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 4:03 AM UTC

There's definitely a few echo chambers around AI, but it's definitely not something that "just techies" are onto.

ChatGPT made some waves at the end of last year. My in-laws were wanting to talk to (at) me about it at Christmas. There's plenty of awareness outside of the tech circles, but most of the discussion (both out and in of the tech world) seems to miss what LLMs actually _are_.

The reason why ChatGPT was impressive to me wasn't the "realism" of the responses... It was how quickly it could classify and chain inputs/outputs. It's super impressive tech, but like... It's not AI. As accurate as it may ever seem, it's simply not actually aware of what it's saying. "Hallucinations" is a fun term, but it's not hallucinating information, it's just guessing at the next token to write because that's all it ever does.

If it was "intelligent" it would be able to recognise a limitation in its knowledge and _not_ hallucinate information. But it can't. Because it doesn't know anything. Correct answers are just as hallucinatory as incorrect answers because it's the exact same mechanism that produces them - there's just better probabilities.

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

#32

Post by trazire » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 4:08 AM UTC

There definitely is an echo chamber, but not related to the existence of ChatGPT and other AI technologies (even the "menial" laborers I know being relatively aware of it, and my parents and family members frequently talking about it in the context of deepfakes/cheating (at school)/automation/healthcare.

Common reactions to ChatGPT and a lot of the fear are definitely overemphasized in the tech field, but that makes sense.

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

#33

Post by HKH2 » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 4:10 AM UTC

jhugo wrote: post #4

> maybe AI mainstream adoption will take longer than we anticipate I mean, I'm in "tech", and I don't anticipate it happening soon. People want something they can trust, and current solutions are nowhere near that.

Students want someone to do writing for them, and they only have to do a trivial amount of vetting.

Now you can hand Lorem Ipsum in for homework!

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

#34

Post by kitsunesoba » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 4:13 AM UTC

threeseed wrote: post #20

ern wrote: post #15

I know a lot of people who are using ChatGPT who aren't in tech. My spouse works in early childhood education and they use ChatpGPT routinely for low-value boilerplate stuff (social media posts that no one reads, etc). A relative is in commercial real-estate management, and they also use ChatGPT routinely (in fact they started using it before I did). So I don't think it's an echo chamber.

My partner runs an ecommerce business and her team uses ChatGPT dozens of time a day. Everything from writing emails to suppliers, correcting grammar, responding to customers, brainstorming new product ideas, explaining contracts etc. Where as for me I can't find a use for it. Even as a coding assistant I find that I spent more time trying to understand/correct what it did than if I just wrote it myself.

The majority of my usage of ChatGPT as a dev has been to synthesize examples of APIs/tools/etc in usage when those aren't easy to find and/or when documentation is sparse/scarce.

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

#35

Post by Mizoguchi » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 4:14 AM UTC

throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #8

This isn't just a tech echo chamber, it's the YC/SV echo chamber. Nobody is seriously looking at AI for normal products, because it's not trustworthy. Never really will be. Why do you think subways still have human operators? The combined investment & risk of full automation aren't worth it. It'll be useful for customer support bots, and backend things like spam filtering and other statistical analysis. But otherwise…

Subways have human operators for difference reasons not because trains cannot be fully automated. Some are partially automated because they run on old infrastructure which is difficult and expensive to revamp. Others are fully automated but regulations prohibit full autonomy, or labor is unionized and operators are guaranteed work. Automation is not AI anyway, automation today is done through control systems, that is sensors, some type of control like a PID loop (or more advanced Level 2 models) and devices that allow for controlled movement/positioning. There's no artificial intelligence there.

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

#36

Post by adrianN » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 4:19 AM UTC

samuellevy wrote: post #31

There's definitely a few echo chambers around AI, but it's definitely not something that "just techies" are onto. ChatGPT made some waves at the end of last year. My in-laws were wanting to talk to (at) me about it at Christmas. There's plenty of awareness outside of the tech circles, but most of the discussion (both out and in of the tech world) seems to miss what LLMs actually _are_. The reason why ChatGPT was impr…

AlphaGo is not aware that it’s playing a game either, but it’s better than humans at it. Awareness is not necessary to make people lose their jobs.

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

#37

Post by p-e-w » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 4:20 AM UTC

No. Quite the opposite. Everyone else is in an echo chamber telling them that AI is a cool fad, a toy that will never fully replace people, etc., when in reality AI is the most disruptive technology since the Internet, and the most dangerous technology since the atomic bomb.

I can't stop shaking my head whenever I read any article on AI written by non-tech journalists (and even many by tech journalists). AI is vastly more dangerous and more urgent than climate change, than Russia and China, than literally any other hot topic today, and it's being treated like a combination of a science fiction story and an entertainment tool.

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

#38

Post by jpgvm » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 4:22 AM UTC

p-e-w wrote: post #37

No. Quite the opposite. Everyone else is in an echo chamber telling them that AI is a cool fad, a toy that will never fully replace people, etc., when in reality AI is the most disruptive technology since the Internet, and the most dangerous technology since the atomic bomb. I can't stop shaking my head whenever I read any article on AI written by non-tech journalists (and even many by tech journalists). AI is vastly…

Not really.

AI -might- kill us if there is some quantum leap that makes it sentient.

Climate change -will- kill us if we do nothing.

For now one is simply not like the other, it may change but there is no guarantee we every breach that barrier.

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

#39

Post by selcuka » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 4:24 AM UTC

jhugo wrote: post #4

> maybe AI mainstream adoption will take longer than we anticipate I mean, I'm in "tech", and I don't anticipate it happening soon. People want something they can trust, and current solutions are nowhere near that.

It is already happening [1][2][3][4]. People want something that makes their jobs easier, not essentialy something they can trust.

Not all tasks need to be 100% accurate, and, to be honest, people are not known for their trustworthiness either.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36097900

[2] https://futurism.com/neoscope/microsoft-doctors-chatgpt-pati...

[3] https://github.com/features/copilot

[4] https://www.electropages.com/blog/2023/06/researchers-demons...

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

#40

Post by Animats » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 4:24 AM UTC

ern wrote: post #15

I know a lot of people who are using ChatGPT who aren't in tech. My spouse works in early childhood education and they use ChatpGPT routinely for low-value boilerplate stuff (social media posts that no one reads, etc). A relative is in commercial real-estate management, and they also use ChatGPT routinely (in fact they started using it before I did). So I don't think it's an echo chamber.

Those are people talking to echo chambers.