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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?

#311

Post by ipython »

Zambyte wrote: post #200
kspacewalk2 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typically "use case" means not just something a technology can do, but something it's better at than the common alternatives, in some way that matters. Not so with blockchain and financial transactions. Everything it treats like a bug is in fact a valuable, critical feature (i.e. reversibility and tracking). So if grandpa overcomes his tropey Luddite ways and goes from cash to card, he's arrived at the best technolog…

People love to claim that NFTs can only be used for signed pictures of gorillas, but imo they are probably one of the most interesting utilities on a blockchain. Have you ever tried to buy a ticket through ticket master? It's not a wonderful experience. Digital event tickets could be sold directly from the venue to the attendee without any of the hassle of TM. Tickets that are non-fungible (ie an assigned seat at an…

Sure, Ticketmaster sucks. But just to give one example, 11 years after Tim Berners Lee invented the web, Ticketmaster was selling tickets to the 2004 Olympic Games online: https://web.archive.org/web/20040206011648/http://www.ticket...

The Bitcoin paper was published in 2008. It’s been almost 15 years now - plus all of the advantages that you have with modern development practices that were unavailable in the early 2000s - and yet still nobody uses blockchain at scale for this use case.

If this worked better than existing options at a lower cost, then businesses would be rushing to adopt it.

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

#312

Post by voidfunc »

perrygeo wrote: post #290
kmarc wrote: post #92

FWIW 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,…

This reason makes sense, but that's insanely powerful (and valuable) if it ends up working out. It basically democratizes programming.

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

#313

Post by rsynnott »

P_I_Staker wrote: post #306
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.

People working in tech believed this. Hell, people directly working on the tech seemed to think this a few years ago, and are only now admitting reality. Of course, one tends to be optimistic of these things when they work on them.

I don't think anyone working on self-driving tech believed the breathless "next year" predictions. Or, at least, it's hard to understand how they could have. I'd buy that they believe that maybe someday there will be self-driving cars.

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

#314

Post by archsurface »

Not just an echo chamber - it's something to sell. Whether or not it measures up to the hype doesn't matter once you've been paid for it. This is not the first buzzword from tech, and won't be the last. The finance industry is another example of an industry that will jump on a buzzword to sell - currently also AI.

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

#315

Post by cardosof »

People don't see it being this revolutionary because they don't know how to use it. My wife (literary translator) my close friends (2 doctors and one business executive) and myself are seeing massive gains in productivity by using simple prompt techniques such as chain-of-thought. Heck, my cardiologist friend from one of the country's top hospitals is writing a book with chatgpt. It's there and it's great, and will only get easier to use, smarter, faster etc.

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

#316

Post by sno0ks »

usrbinbash wrote: post #67
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…

> AI is vastly more dangerous and more urgent than climate change, than Russia No it isn't, and I say that as a user and Integrator of ML tech. Climate Change: Literally our planetary habitat becoming uninhabitable for our species. Russia: A country with one of the largest nuclear arsenals literally threatening a large portion of the world with nuclear annihilation. Excuse me when the prospect of changes in the econo…

Russia isn't "literally threatening a large portion of the world with nuclear annihilation". Any 'threat' they have issued has been in response to 'threats' issued by 'our' side... including at the time UK PM Liz Truss being willing to push the nuclear button against Russia. If that's not a threat then neither is Russia saying that they'll be willing to use nukes too.

Our politicians together with our sycophantic media and their weapons salesmen talking heads really do spread the most egregious disinformation throughout every wartime situation we are involved in, by proxy or otherwise.

Glass houses... stones...

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

#317

Post by sdenton4 »

runlaszlorun wrote: post #233
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…

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…

I've seen some indication that this is a measurement problem. Tech enables computers to do things that would be originally expensive for humans to do.

Translation is an interesting example: some labor has been displaced, but not nearly all because there's still value in having human eyes carefully checking the translation of high value documents. But free translation let's regular people translate things freely - a new capability which displaced no one.

However, productivity measures human productivity and human labor. The very cheap new translation modality is therefore completely missed by productivity measurements.

Meanwhile, there's /more/ jobs available right now, despite all of this. The US has hit a historic low in unemployment and wages are going up, leading to a decline in measured productivity. Productivity is output per dollar of wages, which means we twist our hands in anxiety when workers start doing better...

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

#318

Post by wefarrell »

bigger_inside wrote: post #300
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 s…

GPT-4 is capable of fairly complex reasoning and it's possible to mitigate the obvious giveaways by prompting it to write in the style of a particular author.

Students who pay the $20 a month for it and are aware of its limitations will absolutely use it and it won't be obvious.

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

#319

Post by welshwelsh »

rsynnott wrote: post #142
demarq wrote: post #81

Same experience, talked to a young, highly educated person about ChatGPT… they had no clue what I was going on about. But the more surprising thing is that even after I explained what it could do, they weren’t even slightly impressed. “So it tells you wrong answers? Sounds utterly pointless” I was flabbergasted. I think we do live in a bubble. I’m sure architects and surgeons have equally exciting advances in their f…

I mean, I’d be inclined to agree with your friend here, to an extent. A machine for confidently being wrong has rather limited practical applications.

I was just about to comment something similar to this:

"Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a 60 minutes interview, 'one Google AI program adapted on its own after it was prompted in the language of Bangladesh, which it was not trained to know'. This is obviously wrong, so does that mean Pichai was hallucinating?"

At the last second I fact-checked myself, and found that it actually wasn't Pichai who said that. Crazy how close I came to confidently spewing bullshit in a comment about how humans can also confidently spew bullshit.

Anyway, my point is- to be on par with humans, LLMs don't need to be right all of the time, only some of the time.

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