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?

#331

Post by butler14 » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 2:05 PM UTC

voidfunc wrote: post #312

perrygeo wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's exactly what it does. It closes the gap. Even now with all its shortcomings and issues.

It's actively solving problems for people and saving time / creating efficiency. That has value and economic utility.

I honestly don't get what a lot of the cynics in this thread and their "highly technical/IT friends" are missing.

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

#332

Post by andsoitis » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 2:06 PM UTC

imdsm wrote: post #122

Gigachad wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10 years of crypto and still no real use cases. Less than a year of chat gpt and the average person is using it to genuinely provide value.

I mean, to say crypto has no real use cases is wrong. A lot of people are against crypto, and I can understand that, the whole cultural side of it is tough to digest. But if you strip away all of that: the twitter bots, the airdrops, the spam, the shills, the whole cultural lot, and you just look at the core, there are real use cases. Buying the pizza with bitcoin was the first proof. That being said, I can understan…

> Buying the pizza with bitcoin was the first proof.

While some thing might work, it doesn’t imply that it is practical.

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

#333

Post by codegeek » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 2:06 PM UTC

imdsm wrote: post #122

Gigachad wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10 years of crypto and still no real use cases. Less than a year of chat gpt and the average person is using it to genuinely provide value.

I mean, to say crypto has no real use cases is wrong. A lot of people are against crypto, and I can understand that, the whole cultural side of it is tough to digest. But if you strip away all of that: the twitter bots, the airdrops, the spam, the shills, the whole cultural lot, and you just look at the core, there are real use cases. Buying the pizza with bitcoin was the first proof. That being said, I can understan…

"grandparents only use cash, they don't trust bank cards"

You may not have meant it but it sounds like an argument made in bad faith. Cash has real world application and can be used anywhere. Not trusting bank card is a choice but the alternative can be used anywhere which is cash.

Crypto at best is used for get rich quick schemes, scams, dark web payments, ransom demands etc. You said buying pizza with bitcoin. Where ? Is it an anecdote ?

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

#334

Post by nerdbert » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 2:07 PM UTC

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…

To many people, a computer program that can output in kind of natural-sounding sentences but can't be trusted to give you the right answers is not progress. I am sympathetic to that view.

It's an impressive technical feat to mimic human writing and drawing with its level of fidelity, but until it can make the leap to knowing what it's talking about - and there's no clear basis for assurance that the current vector will get us there - real-world use cases are mostly limited to replacing the some of the more boring email jobs.

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

#335

Post by veidr » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 2:08 PM UTC

carlosjobim wrote: post #228

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…

> Crypto never amounted to anything beyond a currency for black market transaction Do you understand what a massive impact that has been? It has disrupted one of the largest industries on the planet, which is drug trafficking.

I mean... sure, it outcompeted Tide detergent. But the illegal drug trade has historically used all kinds of currencies. I'd say "disrupted" is hugely overstating the case.

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

#336

Post by 23B1 » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 2:08 PM UTC

smt88 wrote: post #276

23B1 wrote: post #275

I'd argue that AI insiders are also out of touch with the wider world and are missing opportunities to develop tools that'd be useful for everyone. For instance, hallucinations. They're a function of LLMs. But they're also something that everyday people have to deal with from each other in the miasma of the post-truth world. What an opportunity, within the artificial intelligence field, to think of these tools not ju…

LLMs are not an opportunity to teach humans how to avoid hallucinations because they don't work even the slightest bit like human brains and we don't even know how to make them stop hallucinating in the first place.

Ahh but we known that both humans and LLMs 'hallucinate'. The study of the latter potentially provides insight to former; after all, isn't the core question we're asking in all of these discussions is 'what is intelligence?'

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

#337

Post by nerdbert » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 2:08 PM UTC

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.

Except that people could explain how you could make an airplane faster and larger.

Nobody can explain how you can make an LLM understand what it's saying.

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

#338

Post by butler14 » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 2:09 PM UTC

dboreham wrote: post #328

It's the opposite in my experience: people inside tech are (probably rightly) skeptical, making comments about "Eliza 2.0", meanwhile I am listening to car podcasts where the people are using ChatGPT to write valentines cards for their wives...

My dog walker - a man with a fairly troubled life and very low levels of literacy - used it to write product descriptions for an eCommerce website he's in the process of launching.

Part of me thinks the tech echo chamber is working the other way around here: a lot of techies who just know and and talk to other techies are all in a bubble thinking it's all overhyped blahablhabah without stepping back and thinking how it can enable every day people (whatever that means) to do things they previously could not -- at speed.

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

#339

Post by pier25 » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 2:09 PM UTC

Traubenfuchs wrote: post #240

carlosjobim wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Crypto never amounted to anything beyond a currency for black market transaction Do you understand what a massive impact that has been? It has disrupted one of the largest industries on the planet, which is drug trafficking.

Did it disrupt the whole industry? Only the payment part of it, no?

Well no because the dark markets enabled any small dealer to sell worldwide.

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

#340

Post by laeri » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 2:10 PM UTC

I hear people about it talking everywhere. Students that use it to write some work or learn for exams. Colleagues that use it for generating code examples for specific things. Someone from HR writing text. This is definitely not an echo chamber as many people know about it and are using it in some kind or other or are at least curious.