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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?

#381

Post by DonHopkins »

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.

If you looked at Donald Trump Jr's runny nose and "impassioned" behavior, you wouldn't think that.

"Cocaine News" with Donald Trump Jr. | The Daily Show:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47yFRXZqB0g

Don Jr. Swears He’s Not on Coke—He’s Just ‘Impassioned’:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trump-jr-is-tired-of-co...

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

#382

Post by jjgreen »

hinkley wrote: post #360
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…

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.

... can be counted on my middle finger

Fabulous, I'll be stealing that ...

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

#383

Post by cranium »

Try talking to students and you'll get a different answer. I asked a room of a dozen eighteen years-old if anyone did not use it regularly, and no-one raised their hand. They use it as a better Google to get understandable answers, write prose/code for them, and sometimes even as coach to bounce ideas.

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

#384

Post by plutonorm »

wefarrell wrote: post #318
bigger_inside wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I teach college, and in the beginning days, everyone was screaming about "the students will have chatGPT write papers now". Well, apart from the fact that chatGPT is really incapable of developing a thought, and also apart from the fact that half will fail to delete sentences like "I'm a language model, so I can't..." (insert gist of question here), it's painfully obvious if something is LLM generated. The moment a s…

GPT-4 is capable of fairly complex reasoning and it's possible to mitigate the obvious giveaways by prompting it to write in the style of a particular author. Students who pay the $20 a month for it and are aware of its limitations will absolutely use it and it won't be obvious.

Agree. hacker news is in hard cope mode.

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

#385

Post by healthyusa »

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…

GPT-4 writes 100% of my code now. Staring at a monitor, hunched over, tapping on a keyboard?

Stone ages. That’s not 5 years from now. That’s today.

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

#387

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

deadlast2 wrote: post #177
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #141

anyone who believes that "AI" (meaning current, ChatGPT level tech and the next iteration of it) is a bigger threat to humanity than climate change, because of some "Skynet, rise of the machines" scenario nonsense, is 100% inside an AI echo chamber.

Maybe there are multiple echo chambers, left, right climate change, ai doom, crypto... we tend to gravitate towards these because we like to get opinions that closely match our current one.

To an extent, yes.

But. The suggestion that "all echo chambers are as bad as each other" isn't warranted, this is the "bothsidesism" fallacy (1)

That's why you'd look at if their predictions are grounded in reality, or are spinning wild "what if" scenarios, or are concentrating on culture war alarmism about not-particularly salient threats, or promoting a scheme that makes them money. Finally, look at the track record of the people making the claims. How did their previous claims work out?

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance

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

#388

Post by rmorey »

bigger_inside wrote: post #300
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…

I teach college, and in the beginning days, everyone was screaming about "the students will have chatGPT write papers now". Well, apart from the fact that chatGPT is really incapable of developing a thought, and also apart from the fact that half will fail to delete sentences like "I'm a language model, so I can't..." (insert gist of question here), it's painfully obvious if something is LLM generated. The moment a s…

Don't you have to believe there could be GPT submissions still flying under your radar? The obvious ones are obvious, and with subtle giveaways you probably catch most. But how could you know you aren't missing any?

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

#389

Post by EricMausler »

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?

1) they know it's not a 5 minute thing

2) everything is still moving fast. Unless they plan to keep up with it, they may be planning to look into it later after the dust settles a bit

3) their time is already budgeted and it isn't clear what they should skip / cancel to look into it

4) they aren't sure exactly where to start and so they procrastinate. No trusted source has sent them a link to try, they don't want to sift through search results and potential scams, they don't want to make an account, etc

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

#390

Post by davewritescode »

jacquesm wrote: post #371

If the jump between ChatGPT '5' and 4 is as big as between 3.5 and 4 then we're not in an echo chamber, we're in trouble. If the gap is smaller then they are running out of steam and we'll be fine.

I don’t think it will be if history is any precedent. Look at self driving in the mid late 2010s, the rate of advancement lead some otherwise smart people to make big bets that autonomous cars were right around the corner and we were going to be driven around by robots any by 2022.

We’re at the early phase of AI, it demos well but seems to break down in ways that seem obvious in the real world. We’re at the limit of how big the models we can train now. GPT4 has been described as 8 GPTs in a trench coat by George Hotz which was later confirmed by the founder of PyTorch. I’m not saying we have nothing to worry about, just that the hype seems to overtake reality early in the adoption cycle.

GPT4 is like an unreliable but brilliant employee.

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