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Ask HN: Is anyone else getting AI fatigue?

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Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else getting AI fatigue?

#321

Post by mattkrause »

I’m very excited about the methods themselves, but I’m so tired of the manic “vibes” around them——-and how they’re starting to affect related fields too. I work at the border between neuroscience and AI, and there are some undeniably cool developments but there’s also so much hype and overkill.

In a better world, it’d be possible to occasionally pause, take a breath and think about what the models are actually doing, how they’re doing it, and if that’s what we want something to do. However, it’s hard to find space to do so without getting run over by people “moving fast” and breaking things and feels like doing the hard corrective work is so much less rewarded.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else getting AI fatigue?

#322

Post by rchaud »

not_a_shill wrote: post #293
_hcuq wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The business cases are pretty obvious ??? What are they? - bad code, with non obvious bugs? I would prefer the original slashdot/GitHub/blog post. Google used to do that. - chat bots? The customer service will still be shit. Your problem will still not be solved. But I guess some call center staff can be fired. Customers will be very happy to never be able to speak to a human. - Writing mediocre overlong content fo…

Think every day office jobs and try to figure out where you can use it as a productivity multiplier. You can figure out Microsoft's next step from there.

I'd be interested to know what productivity areas Microsoft identified before launching Teams.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else getting AI fatigue?

#323

Post by haswell »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #267
haswell wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally agree that we quickly adjust to new tech and forget how impactful it is. But I can’t fully get on board with this: > but how is re-enforcement “Learning”, not exactly the same as reading books to a toddler and pointing at a picture and having them repeat what it is? Start digging into the human with the same engineering view, and suddenly it also just become a bunch of parts. Where is the human in the hum…

I think the point is that we have been “meaningfully closing” the gap rapidly, and at this point it is only a matter of time, the end can be seen, even if currently not completely written out in some equations. It does seem like on HN, the audience is heavily weighted towards software developers that are not biologist, and often cannot see the forest for the trees. They know enough about AI programming to dismiss the…

> I think the point is that we have been “meaningfully closing” the gap rapidly

In your opinion, how wide is this gap? To claim that it is closing at a meaningful pace brings the implication that we understand the width. Has anyone made a credible claim that we actually understand the width of the gap?

> The understanding of the human ‘parts’ are being chipped away, just as quickly as we have had breakthroughs in AI.

This is a thinking trap. Without an understanding or definition of the breadth of the problem space, both fields could be making perfectly equivalent progress and it would still imply nothing regarding the width of the gap or the progress made closing it.

> These fields are starting to converge and inform each other.

Collaboration does not imply anything more than the existence of cooperation across fields. Do you have specific examples where the science itself is converging?

My understanding is that our ability to comprehend neural processes is still so limited that researchers focus on the brains of worms (e.g. a flatworm’s 53 neurons), and we still don’t understand how they work.

> and at this point it is only a matter of time, the end can be seen

Who is claiming we have any notion of being close enough to see the end? Most experts on the cutting edge cite the enormous distance yet to be covered.

I’m not claiming the progress made isn’t meaningful by itself. I’m struggling with your claim that we have any idea how much further we have to go.

Landing rovers on Mars is a huge achievement, but compared to the array of advancements required to colonize space, it seems like just a small step forward in comparison.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else getting AI fatigue?

#324

Post by housecarpenter »

carlosjobim wrote: post #226
FrustratedMonky wrote: post #103

Engineers are always building things that are incredible, then turning their back on it as ordinary once the problem is solved, “oh that’s so normal, it was just a little math, a little tweak, no big deal”. AI has gone through a lot of stages of “only X can be done by a human”-> “X is done by AI” -> “oh, that’s just some engineering, that’s not really human” or “no longer in the category of mystical things we can’t e…

> The human is computation also, unless you believe in souls or other worldly mysticism. I think it is incredibly sad that a person can be reduced to believing humans don't have souls. Do something different with yourself so you can discover the miracle of life. If you don't believe there is anything more to people and to the world than mechanical processes, I would challenge you to do a powerful spiritual activity.

What's sad about it?

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else getting AI fatigue?

#325

Post by Rattled »

RamblingCTO wrote: post #12

I had that since I was doing my masters in data science (5 years ago?). I love the models, the statistics and just the cleverness of everything but I just can't stand the "scene" anymore and moved almost entirely away from it. It's not as exciting as it was anymore. When I started with the topic I watched a documentary with Joseph Weizenbaum ([1]) and felt weirded out that someone would step away from such an interes…

Yes, PoW crypto is now a much more concrete example of the potential damage from poorly aligned utility functions, as well as the challenges in containing a system once it is released.

I'm finding the current hype cycle very frustrating from both sides. On one side there is frequent overplaying current capabilities, and cherry picked examples given as it they're representative. On the other side there is an over simplistic "AI is evil" reaction. It's hard to deny that progress in the past few years greatly exceeds expectations and could make a significant improvement to individual creativity and learning, as well as how we cooperate but so much of the discussions are fear based.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else getting AI fatigue?

#326

Post by gptgpp »

NobleLie wrote: post #165
chx wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> GPT-3 it's good at generative writing made up bullshit > summarization except you can't possibly know the output has any relation whatsoever to the text being summarized > information search and extraction except you can't possibly know the output has any relation whatsoever to the information being extracted people still fall for this crap?

Agreed. Been testing out responses to parsing complex genomics papers (say, a methodology section describing parameters of some algorithm) and its mostly rephrasing rather than digesting and responding with useful information / interpretation. And it will use so many words and imbue so little to the conversation, yet appear like it's helping because ... words.

Yeah you can't use it for academic research, it's really, really terrible at it.

It will even claim it can generate citations for you too, which is pretty messed up because when I tried it just fabricated them replete with faked DOIs.

Where it shines is at squishy language stuff, like generating the framework of an email, paraphrasing a paragraph for you, or summarizing a news article.

It really is revolutionary at language tasks, but unfortunately the hype machine and these weird "AI sycophants" have caused people to dramatically overestimate it's use cases.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else getting AI fatigue?

#327

Post by lordfrito »

Eupraxias wrote: post #289
lordfrito wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And the worst thing is that the bullshit hype comes round every decade or so, and people run around like headless chickens insisting that "this time its different", and "this time its the REAL THING". This. To answer the OPs question, this is what I'm fatigued about. I'm glad we're making progress. It's a hell of a parlor trick. But the hype around it is astounding considering how often it's answers are completely…

>>Instead of AI making machines smarter, it seems that computers are making humans dumber. Perhaps the AI revolution is about dropping the level of average human intelligence to match the level of a computer. A mental race to the bottom? I came here to make this comment. Thank you for doing it for me. I remember feeling shocked when this article appeared in the Atlantic in 2008, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?": https:/…

> perhaps we were never as intelligent as we suspected?

Yeah, I think you're right. Intelligence is just something our species has evolved as a strategy for survival. It isn't about intelligence, it's about survival.

The cognitive skills needed to survive/navigate/thrive in the digital era are very different than the cognitive skills required to survive in the pre-digital era.

We're biologically programmed through millions of years of evolution to survive in a world of scarcity. Intelligence used to be about tying together small bits of scarce information to find larger patterns so that we can better predict outcomes.

Those skills are being rendered more and more irrelevant in a world of information abundance. Perhaps the "best fit" humans of the future are those that possess new form of "intelligence", relying less on reason and more on the ability to quickly digest the firehose of data thrown at them 24-7.

If so, then the AI we were trying to build in the 1950s would necessarily be different than the AI that our grandchilden would find helpful.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else getting AI fatigue?

#328

Post by rchaud »

latexr wrote: post #195

> AI is great. ChatGPT is incredible. Imagine how the HN users who disagree with that feel. It is beyond fatiguing. I’m frequently reminded of the companies who added “blockchain” to their name and saw massive jumps in their stock price, despite having noting to do with blockchains¹. ¹ https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/21/16805598/companies-block...

I don't mind the companies that got a temporary bump from adding blockchain to the name.

I'm more concerned about the Twitter hype-men and women adding '.eth' to their name and singing DeFI praises all day long....and then quietly removing it without so much as a word, once the hype is dead and keeping the '.eth' makes you look like a sucker.

BTW a lot of influential people were on that train, current CEO of YCom being one of them.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else getting AI fatigue?

#329

Post by bioemerl »

hhjinks wrote: post #272
bioemerl wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do believe if we are going to get AGI without some random revolutionary breakthrough, to achieve it iteratively, It's going to come through language models. Think about it. What's the most expressive medium we have which is also absolutely inundated with data? To broadly be able to predict human speech you need to broadly be able to predict the human mind. To broadly predict a human mind requires you build a model…

> To broadly be able to predict human speech you need to broadly be able to predict the human mind This is a non sequitur. The human mind does a whole lot more than string words together. Being able to predict which word would logically follow another does not require the ability to predict anything other than just that.

Exactly. Since language is a compressed and transmittable result of our thought, to predict text as accurately as possible requires you do the same. A model with understanding of the human mind will outperform one without.

> Being able to predict which word would logically follow another does not require the ability to predict anything other than just that.

Why? Wouldn't you expect that technique to generally fail if it isn't intelligent enough to know what's happening in the sentence?

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else getting AI fatigue?

#330

Post by codeptualize »

gptgpp wrote: post #313
codeptualize wrote: post #24

I'm working on a project that uses GPT-3 and similar stuff, even before the hype. I think the overhype is really tiring. Just like with most of these hype cycles there is an actual useful interesting technology, but the hype beasts take it way overboard and present it as if it's the holy grail or whatever. It's not. That's tiring, and really annoying. It's incredibly cool technology, it is great at certain use cases,…

Finally, a take on chatgpt and similar LLMs I agree with! I've criticized it whenever it gets brought up as an alternative for academic research, coding, math, other more sophisticated knowledge based stuff. In my experience at least, it falls apart at reliably dealing with these and I haven't gone back. But man, is it ever revolutionary at actually dealing with language and text. As an example, I have a bunch of bor…

Haha that's amazing. This is exactly what I mean, for the right use cases it's absolutely amazing.

Good luck with the drama! Make sure to read a summary for the next family meeting haha.

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