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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?

#41

Post by dragonwriter »

p-e-w wrote: post #37

No. Quite the opposite. Everyone else is in an echo chamber telling them that AI is a cool fad, a toy that will never fully replace people, etc., when in reality AI is the most disruptive technology since the Internet, and the most dangerous technology since the atomic bomb. I can't stop shaking my head whenever I read any article on AI written by non-tech journalists (and even many by tech journalists). AI is vastly…

> AI is vastly more dangerous and more urgent than climate change, than Russia and China, than literally any other hot topic today

No, it's not. And most (not quite all, there are some genuine nutballs) of the people selling that idea are selling it to push a political agenda attached to their financial interest (mostly, in AI: either by pushing AI danger to advance competition-limiting regulatiom or by pushing the kind of AI danger that is not actually imminent with hyperbolic language to distract from the real and present issues with AI, and sometimes both.)

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

#42

Post by p-e-w »

jpgvm wrote: post #38
p-e-w wrote: post #37

No. Quite the opposite. Everyone else is in an echo chamber telling them that AI is a cool fad, a toy that will never fully replace people, etc., when in reality AI is the most disruptive technology since the Internet, and the most dangerous technology since the atomic bomb. I can't stop shaking my head whenever I read any article on AI written by non-tech journalists (and even many by tech journalists). AI is vastly…

Not really. AI -might- kill us if there is some quantum leap that makes it sentient. Climate change -will- kill us if we do nothing. For now one is simply not like the other, it may change but there is no guarantee we every breach that barrier.

> Climate change -will- kill us if we do nothing.

Horseshit. There is not a single scientific model that predicts human extinction from climate change. Parts of humanity, yes. All of humanity, no chance.

There a plenty of models that predict human extinction from AGI.

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

#43

Post by amanzi »

In my circle of friends, I'm the only one working in technology. But ChatGPT is something that everyone has tried and has been amazed by. For my non-tech friends, it's been mostly used for playing around, generating poems, etc - not really for productivity purposes.

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

#44

Post by sp332 »

electrondood wrote: post #28
Eji1700 wrote: post #10

Yes. There's still a lot of people who aren't that aware of this stuff, and frankly, its because it still doesn't have much practical use. Its making headlines left and right, and businesses are all trying to figure out what this stuff does, but if you're not watching much news and not in the tech side of business you probably don't know or care?

It has unbelievable practical use. ChatGPT is a personal tutor on any subject you can think of. It's more that 90% of people can't even be bothered to google the answer to a question they have, despite having a personal computer and oracle in their front pocket. I'm using an LLM to teach me interactively how LLMs work and how to integrate LLMs into our products. It's replaced 90% of my googling/stack overflow. Every…

How can it replace 90% of your Googling if you have to go check everything it tells you afterward?

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

#45

Post by mercer »

ern wrote: post #15

I know a lot of people who are using ChatGPT who aren't in tech. My spouse works in early childhood education and they use ChatpGPT routinely for low-value boilerplate stuff (social media posts that no one reads, etc). A relative is in commercial real-estate management, and they also use ChatGPT routinely (in fact they started using it before I did). So I don't think it's an echo chamber.

I've found that any non-techie I know who uses ChatGPT uses it in a similar way, and for quite a bit of stuff. The ones that don't usually haven't really used it much, if at all.

But I still feel most of them are in the 'google but nicer' stage.

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

#46

Post by InvertedRhodium »

samuellevy wrote: post #31

There's definitely a few echo chambers around AI, but it's definitely not something that "just techies" are onto. ChatGPT made some waves at the end of last year. My in-laws were wanting to talk to (at) me about it at Christmas. There's plenty of awareness outside of the tech circles, but most of the discussion (both out and in of the tech world) seems to miss what LLMs actually _are_. The reason why ChatGPT was impr…

In your opinion, how does the "hallucination" issue differ from the same behaviour we see in humans?

I don't claim or believe that any LLM is actually intelligent. It just seems that we (at least on an individual basis) can also meet the criteria outlined above. I know plenty of people who are confidently incorrect and appear unwilling to learn or accept their own limitations, myself included.

In my opinion, even if we did have AGI it would still exhibit a lot of our foibles given that we'd be the only ones teaching it.

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

#47

Post by ImAnAmateur »

sp332 wrote: post #44
electrondood wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has unbelievable practical use. ChatGPT is a personal tutor on any subject you can think of. It's more that 90% of people can't even be bothered to google the answer to a question they have, despite having a personal computer and oracle in their front pocket. I'm using an LLM to teach me interactively how LLMs work and how to integrate LLMs into our products. It's replaced 90% of my googling/stack overflow. Every…

How can it replace 90% of your Googling if you have to go check everything it tells you afterward?

Our blind spot in vetting information is kind of like our blind spot when looking for something we have lost. We don't double check what we are sure of. To me, that is the most serious challenge when trying to learn using LLMs.

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

#48

Post by dmarchand90 »

InvertedRhodium wrote: post #46
samuellevy wrote: post #31

There's definitely a few echo chambers around AI, but it's definitely not something that "just techies" are onto. ChatGPT made some waves at the end of last year. My in-laws were wanting to talk to (at) me about it at Christmas. There's plenty of awareness outside of the tech circles, but most of the discussion (both out and in of the tech world) seems to miss what LLMs actually _are_. The reason why ChatGPT was impr…

In your opinion, how does the "hallucination" issue differ from the same behaviour we see in humans? I don't claim or believe that any LLM is actually intelligent. It just seems that we (at least on an individual basis) can also meet the criteria outlined above. I know plenty of people who are confidently incorrect and appear unwilling to learn or accept their own limitations, myself included. In my opinion, even if…

Yeah I've never gotten this argument at all. "Humans aren't actually intelligent they're just machines designed to optimize their probability of reproducing "

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

#49

Post by Eji1700 »

electrondood wrote: post #28
Eji1700 wrote: post #10

Yes. There's still a lot of people who aren't that aware of this stuff, and frankly, its because it still doesn't have much practical use. Its making headlines left and right, and businesses are all trying to figure out what this stuff does, but if you're not watching much news and not in the tech side of business you probably don't know or care?

It has unbelievable practical use. ChatGPT is a personal tutor on any subject you can think of. It's more that 90% of people can't even be bothered to google the answer to a question they have, despite having a personal computer and oracle in their front pocket. I'm using an LLM to teach me interactively how LLMs work and how to integrate LLMs into our products. It's replaced 90% of my googling/stack overflow. Every…

I have yet to see someone apply ChatGPT or other LLM in this way and not regret it or ditch it later.

Honestly i'm more worried about the ones who will use it this way and assume it's always correct. It is too often incorrect for anything I've ever done with it.

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

#50

Post by solardev »

HKH2 wrote: post #33
jhugo wrote: post #4

> maybe AI mainstream adoption will take longer than we anticipate I mean, I'm in "tech", and I don't anticipate it happening soon. People want something they can trust, and current solutions are nowhere near that.

Students want someone to do writing for them, and they only have to do a trivial amount of vetting. Now you can hand Lorem Ipsum in for homework!

That probably speaks more to the quality of our homework assignments than the quality of the student.

In this day and age, why is our education still based on rote regurgitation?

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