Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 755 posts

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

#361

Post by rvz »

MatthiasPortzel wrote: post #308
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…

This is a perfect example of an AI-hype comment. You’re treating it as a fact that LLM are going to replace existing products, at some unknown future date. “In 5 years, all code will be written by AI” “In 5 years, LLM will replace Siri and Alexa” “In 5 years, AI will replace [sector of jobs]” The thing that frustrates me about these statements is that you don’t know what AI technology is going to look like in 5 years…

Exactly. The AI bros here are doing the same thing as the crypto bros and almost all of them don't even know it.

Pontificating their nonsense around the hype about LLMs to the point where they don't even trust it. The same thing they did with ConvNets and they still don't trust that either since they both hallucinate, frequently.

I can guarantee you that people will not trust an AI to fly a plane without any human pilots on board end-to-end (auto-pilot does not count) and it is simply due to the fundamental black-box nature of these so-called 'AI' models being untrustworthy in high risk situations.

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

#362

Post by codegeek »

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…

My worry with AI is that even though it is very impressive and useful in many ways for real world applications, the Hype may end up making it another crypto.

Crypto was a great promise when it was invented and one can make the argument that it could have so many real world uses but it failed to live upto that expectation and one of the reasons is that it was over hyped way too quickly and ultimately became a tool for get rich quick, speculation, scams, dark web payments etc.

AI is already much better with its use BUT the hype is dangerous and we need to be careful. I see a lot of people starting "X-GPT.com" apps and touting 10K MRR in 2 months and what not. THis is what worries me. Every Tom, Dick and Harry is starting yet another AI tool. It can't be because they are so excited. It is because they see it as the new Crypto to get rich quick.

Overall, I think that AI is the new Crypto unfortunately not because it has no real world application (it does and is lot better than crypto) but because of the hype and everyone trying to cash in on it.

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

#363

Post by fknorangesite »

andai wrote: post #251

A while back I was meeting nontechnical people in their 50s and 60s and they were all asking me about ChatGPT. I asked if they tried it. "No." --"You know it's free, right?" "Yes." I found this inexplicable and infuriating. Perhaps someone can shed light on the psychology of such people?

They were curious enough to ask you about it, to make conversation, but without a specific use or utility in mind hadn't (yet?) bothered.

Why did you find this infuriating? There's only so much time in the day; different people have different priorities.

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

#364

Post by andsoitis »

hunter2_ wrote: post #322
andsoitis wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> There might be sufficient overlap between all such concepts that a distinction hardly matters

“Intuitive to use” roughly means that it is easy for a human to interact with.

“Intuition” is the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning.

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

#365

Post by natch »

throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #293
natch wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you see specific aspects of a chat reply where quality is bad, tell it. It will improve the answer. Iterating this you can get way beyond the quality of the first answer. You have full control over the quality but you have to bring something to the collaboration.

That's part of the problem. People think that using their own human bias to alter the machine is a good thing, when it's clear that human bias leads to negative outcomes. You need a separate thing to remove the human input bias. Quality is a complex thing that requires design, safeguards, process, as well as iteration. You can't design test suites or checklists with just AI, because you don't know if the AI will deci…

Human bias is a whole huge area apart from just quality, not sure we want to get into that. I mean is it human bias, or is it reality bias. e.g. Poland hasn't had any terrorist attacks (or very few?), is that human bias, or is it reality?

I definitely don't treat its output with full trust, but I've been pleasantly surprised that even when I give it bad or incorrect guidance (unintentionally) it has caught my mistake, corrected me, and I've learned things.

For the QA case, I suppose what you're getting at is that if it can't be fully trusted, you might get incorrect QA results -- false negatives, false positives -- I'd agree but I think you just have to find an effective way to use the tool. Perhaps the obvious way most people would want to use the tool, is not in fact the best way to use the tool.

But just because the tool isn't delivering the perfection people hope for, doesn't mean there isn't some other way to use it that still catches (some) mistakes and adds value.

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

#366

Post by ericol »

I wouldn't say it's an echo chamber. I'd say it's a bubble (But without the negative connotations).

This tech is in its infancy, and the whole "prompt engineering" thing even though fun and all, will eventually be unnecessary, and _then_ it'll be widespread.

I've even spoke to friends IN the tech industry that are not using it, at least not to the extent of a lot of people is using it.

And even I am not using it as much as I would like, but then I don't have enough free time.

All in all, just give it time. In my case, I hardly use Google these days.

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

#367

Post by rchaud »

keiferski wrote: post #255
rchaud wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> individual writers with personality will become even more in-demand. The demand may be there, but discoverability will be very difficult with so many people already in that arena. The Awl and Splinter News was an online publication made up of ex-Gawker people, exactly the kind of independent voice you'd think people would want to read. And they did, just not in enough volume for those sites to ever make money. And…

I'm not sure why ex-Gawker people are "exactly the kind of independent voice you'd think people would want to read." I certainly wouldn't describe them that way. I was thinking more along the lines of Substack, but with a larger dose of "influencer" personality-driven brands.

Ex-Gawker meaning people who were tiring of trying to write proper articles while also toeing the gossip blog line. The concept is no different than any other person that writes for a publication but wants editorial independence.

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

#368

Post by unyttigfjelltol »

laurent123456 wrote: post #123
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.

Hype, maybe, but it's obviously not a passing fad like crypto was. Back then many people were trying to figure out what to do with it and we still don't really know. A week after ChatGPT was out and plenty of people were already using it for writing code, emails, and plenty of other tasks. It would be weird to argue that AI is not going to have a massive impact at many levels.

I like ChatGPT, but it is literally the autocomplete function from your favorite email interface. Give it a standalone prompt and a new name and everyone will embrace it? No, it's not that helpful and after some initial exploration they will disable it.

My moment was when I realized if you ask ChatGPT a question about itself, like how ChatGPT works, you are not receiving an authoritative or 1st person kind of answer, the way everyone assumes. You are getting a rehash of press releases from a text autocomplete engine. Everyone when they interact with it intuitively feels they are receiving an authentic, slightly flawed, interaction with intelligence, but it's just PT Barnum with a text completion feature. Bravo.

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

#369

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK »

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…

Crypto has been quite useful for me personally, from VPN payments to donating to locally forbidden causes.

AI only does bad things to me so far: surveillance, spam, fakes, search results poisoned, twitter and reddit closed up because of it etc.

Where is my automatic captcha solver? Where is a robot that will get me to a live person in a support call? Where is a spam filter that doesn't send all useful emails to spam? Where is a filter to hide fake reviews on Amazon? To fight against Amazon's crazy product ranking system? Such useful things are nowhere on the horizon.

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

#370

Post by dgroshev »

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…

It's not as clear cut really.

Overall economic productivity didn't shoot up in the last decade despite the dramatic progress we had in software and hardware (e.g. [1]), and it's not clear that AI/ML will dramatically change that. Yes searching pictures on my iphone by text is convenient and Netflix recommendations might be more addictive, but the path from that to ubiquitous economic prosperity, safety, and comfort (the technoutopia many here are striving for) is not clear at all. It's also not very clear if those marginal improvements are worth the substantial share of total human brainpower thrown at them.

[1] https://www.aei.org/economics/good-news-bad-news-on-us-produ...

Post reply on HN