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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?

#321

Post by DonHopkins »

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…

Comparing AI with religion is ridiculous.

Doesn't the next coming of Christ involve Rapture and Armageddon, if you take the people who believe in him seriously, which I wouldn't recommend?

And for that matter, aren't the people who believe in Christ all living in a delusional bubble inside a hermetically sealed reality denying echo chamber of over-promised and under-delivered miracles, which has been going on for thousands of years?

Can you name any AI companies who are doing anything as outrageous as declaring crackers are flesh and wine is blood, and that eating them will save your eternal soul (while calling for refusing to save the souls of anyone who supports gay marriage or abortion), and who even invented a special word "Transubstantiation" that tries to explain why you shouldn't trust your own lying eyes, and instead unquestioningly believe their unsubstantiated unscientific easily disproven claptrap, dogma, and brutally violent fairy tales?

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/3764086-same-sex...

>Conservative Catholic bishops had called for the church not to offer communion to Biden or other pro-abortion rights politicians, but, in November of last year, the USCCB signaled an end to the debate by issuing a document on communion without mentioning the president or other politicians.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transubstantiation

>Transubstantiation (Latin: transubstantiatio; Greek: μετουσίωσις metousiosis) is, according to the teaching of the Catholic Church, "the change of the whole substance of bread into the substance of the Body of Christ and of the whole substance of wine into the substance of the Blood of Christ". This change is brought about in the eucharistic prayer through the efficacy of the word of Christ and by the action of the Holy Spirit. However, "the outward characteristics of bread and wine, that is the 'eucharistic species', remain unaltered". In this teaching, the notions of "substance" and "transubstantiation" are not linked with any particular theory of metaphysics.

At least the AI echo chamber isn't literally over-promising salvation and eternal life like religion has for millinia, and hasn't been perpetuated by governments and wars and crusades and inquisition for thousands of years, like religion inflicts on society.

AI has got a LONG LONG way to go and a shitload more people to torture and kill before it sinks to the level of religion and promises of the second coming of Christ, and it's already delivering a hell of a lot more useful tangible benefits than any religion ever did or ever will.

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

#322

Post by hunter2_ »

andsoitis wrote: post #291
blitz_skull wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There might be sufficient overlap between all such concepts that a distinction hardly matters anyway: if the assistant says what's most likely to come next according to a LLM, or if a person says what they think should come next based on intuition, the listener would probably find each to be about equally intuitive to converse with due in large part to each of those qualities.

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

#323

Post by one_level_deep »

hagbarth wrote: post #274
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…

I mean. We can compare the hype pattern between the two and still acknowledge that one has utility while the other doesn't. Both have resulted in a bunch of hopefuls starting companies, in order to attract mountains of venture capital. Companies that will only have a loose connection to the tech that drives the hype.

The same could be said about the microprocessor or any other tech innovation throughout history. They all lead to new companies chasing investment dollars.

Is there any insight from this observation?

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

#324

Post by andsoitis »

fwungy wrote: post #238
monero-xmr wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is crypto a passing fad? ETH is $2k and BTC $30k. Shouldn’t this be 0 by now?

Btc is a genuine intranational and international currency in the developing world. It is more trustworthy than many sovereign currencies. The fx applications of btc alone are enough to grant it legitimacy and fx is a the biggest of all the markets. In a de-dollarizing world btc is a genuine factor. The stable coins are an issue but stable coins aren't a necessity for btc transactions, they're a utility for traders. B…

> In a de-dollarizing world btc is a genuine factor.

In practice, dedollarisarion has been about shifting to other major national currencies, like the yuan. Bitcoin doesn’t really feature.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dedollarisation

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

#325

Post by yieldcrv »

DebtDeflation wrote: post #206
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…

>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…

Financial services is the biggest industry on the planet but as soon as crypto is involved “a vehicle for speculation“ is invalid

So speaking of echo chambers…

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

#326

Post by janoc »

andsoitis wrote: post #291
blitz_skull wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

And that actually anyone wants?

Google and Amazon have tried to sell theirs for a long time. And none were actually selling much. Amazon admitted to be selling theirs at a loss. Facebook has tried their own - and quickly cancelled them. Google's is in every Android device - and yet pretty much nobody uses them. Even Apple's Siri is more annoyance than help.

That something can be built doesn't mean it will sell or that people will actually want to use it. If you create a solution looking for an imaginary problem that your marketing thinks is what people want instead of a solution that solves a real existing problem, you do get a solution looking for a problem ...

Also, answering questions and communicating in natural language is the easy part of such assistant. For the thing to be useful it must be able to actually do something too. Which is incredibly difficult beyond the (closed) ecosystem of its vendor. Thirdparty integrations are usually driven by who pays the manufacturer for the SDK and partner contract (seen as a marketing opportunity), not by what the users actually want it to integrate with. Hoping for one of these with an open API that anyone could integrate whatever they want with, I am not holding my breath here.

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

#327

Post by adrianN »

samuellevy wrote: post #77
adrianN wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't really know anything about AlphaGo. There's more types of "AI" than LLMs, but that's not really the point. You don't need AI for people to lose their jobs... but nobody is losing their jobs to AlphaGo, and in the grand scheme of things it's unlikely that people are going to lose their jobs to GPT, too.

If you make people who produce text 25% more productive you can fire one in four and increase your profits.

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

#329

Post by hunter2_ »

zirgs wrote: post #307
BowBun wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not necessarily arguing that they're the same, but let's be honest with ourselves - crypto said the _same_ things as it was ramping up. Just replace all the applications of AI you listed with the many hypothetical use-cases crypto-pushers were listing out. As always, sounds cool. Actually do some of it and then let's talk more.

Crypto pushers pushed two contradictory messages: 1. hodl, don't sell, don't spend! 2. Try to replace fiat with crypto in your life! No wonder that its adoption for legal purposes didn't go anywhere.

Saving more than spending has also been popular advice for fiat, at times. More for medium/long-term personal purposes at the expense of immediate macro purposes, but I think that applies to both systems.

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

#330

Post by mikhmha »

mannykannot wrote: post #114
azangru wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “So it tells you wrong answers? Sounds utterly pointless”. I was flabbergasted. Could you tell a bit more about why this objection surprised you so much? I am often seeing this in the same tech circles that rejected the web3 craze; and I have to confess, it does sound reasonable to me. There is a recent PR opened in the MDN docs repository after MDN added the "AI explain" button, pointing out how utterly useless a…

There is nothing wrong about the specific objection but, to borrow an analogy from Scott Aaronson, it is rather like dismissing the Wrights’ early airplanes as being slower than a train and only carrying one passenger. What is missing is an appreciation for how intractable the problem seemed five years before.

Can we stop making analogies like this. It’s so bizarre. The circumstances around each invention are completely different. To always reference the conditions of some past technology is to be stuck in this bizarre form of thinking.

A few days ago some poster tried to compare denying LLM’s to being a naysayer in Gallileos time. Is this all we can do? Make references to past events and fail to evaluate the present properly?

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