I think of GPT as a new UI paradigm. It was not obvious why the world needed GUIs, or touchscreens, but they took over pretty quickly. Conversational interfaces could disrupt them both.
Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
351–360 of 755 posts
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
> Is there any insight from this observation?
Yes: be deeply skeptical of anyone claiming tech they are personally invested in is revolutionary.
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#353I think it's worse than that, it's a bubble. There I've said it. So much money is being poured into AI right now, and things are changing so fast, and products are being deployed, then matched, then overrun weekly, all with no regard to the law, safety, understanding any of the tech that's just been built, or even building a real business around it that it's become absolute nonsense right now.
Two anecdotes:
1. I saw a posting for a prompt engineer which had virtually no requirements beyond some passing familiarity with LLMs, who's job it was to think up clever prompts and archive them in a library. Salary - $350k+
2. I heard a real conversation between two highly trained technical folks around using an LLM to do a simple data transform from one wire format to another. Yes, let's use a cluster of GPUs and some faulty hacked together prompt to transform a well written structured format to another at speeds that approach molasses. Nobody had a clue as to how much the runtime costs of this would be. The solution to it being slow? Add more clusters. -- absolute idiocy.
We're burning money on this stuff like it's mid-80s Japan spending money on slightly different variations of pocket calculators and American real-estate. Meanwhile we're exploiting Kenyan workers to some of the worst filth humanity can produce in an effort to keep one of these AIs of producing child gore porn because it's illegal to pay first world people $2/hr to do the same job -- and there's not a psychotherapist to be found anywhere in the chain.
And then it's being pushed at the regular consumer as if it's some kind of knowledge oracle to replace the "horrors" of the search box that:
a) won't only know what the state of the world was when it was trained 2 years ago
b) won't produce a worthless hallucinated answer that could send somebody off to take a poison for a cold
This shit is terrible and I just used it to give me advice on updating my resume a few weeks ago for a job in the field.
Fuck it.
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 med…
> Any 'threat' they have issued has been in response to 'threats' issued by 'our' side
Then please, link me the relevant statements. Liz Truss's (who btw. isn't Britains PM any more) remarks were made in late August 2022 [1]. The russian nuclear sabre-rattling started in February 2022 [2].
So who exactly has threatened russia with nuclear weapons to elicit these responses? Helping a souvereign nation defend itself against an invasion and protecting their land and people, is not a threat. Offering a souvereign nation to join a military pact is also not a threat.
[1]: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/08/26/jfvn-a26.html
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_threats_during_the_Rus...
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#355Definitely. 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…
It's not the current implementations that have us wigging out, it's the rate of improvement. We have no idea where we are on the 'S curve', but if it keeps getting exponentially better, this [and alpha, etc] has the potential to greatly* change society
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
Buying pizza with a bitcoin? Is that the only use case you can come up with? Electronic money, instead of paper or coins, is there to stay. However, bitcoin is a very poor implementation of this. The mining alone has contributed significantly to the earth's yearly electricity consumption.
I bought a car with Bitcoin while the banks were closed on the weekend. There are tons of legitimate use cases. However, most of them aren’t immediately apparent to affluent people in the United States as it solves problems most of them don’t have.
> I bought a car with Bitcoin while the banks were closed on the weekend.
> There are tons of legitimate use cases. However, most of them aren’t immediately apparent to affluent people in the United States as it solves problems most of them don’t have.
Are you implying that you cannot buy a car on a weekend in the US?
If you Google, you’ll see that not only can you buy a car on the weekend, but there are articles from insurance companies on adding car insurance, articles about whether it is better to buy on a week day or weekend, and even articles on buying on a 3-day holiday weekend!
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#357Earlier 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…
Maybe you live in a monolinguistic bubble, or speak every language fluently, but when is the last time you hired a human being to translate a language you don't understand instead of using AI like Google Translate?
AI is already so ubiquitous and useful that you blindly take it for granted without even thinking.
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#358Definitely. 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…
> speech to text, language translation, recommendation engines, relevancy ranking in search, computer vision
You know very well that that's not what GP is referring to. Speech to text, natural language translation, recommendation, and computer vision are all very useful things, but also were very much real and in consumer hands long before the current hype cycle.
Generative AIs are in their hype cycle. IMO the tech is overhyped to hell and back, but it will still probably yield better results than Crypto, there are legitimate uses for it. But those uses need to be ok with an 80% correct solution, which is not sufficient for all the things LLM hypelords are saying they can be used for and there is no path forward for closing that 20% gap.
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#359I was speaking to a gym buddy the other day, and she said she was looking into ChatGPT as she was a copy writer and was aware that her job might be at risk within the next few years.
I talked to her about prompt engineering for a little, but not sure that I really got through what I was talking about.
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#360Definitely. 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…
So you aren’t infuriated by automated phone systems? Because let me tell you, the number of companies whose reputation has survived me having to deal with their fucking phone robot can be counted on my middle finger.